Chapter 11-Language Pt. 1 Flashcards
What is language?
System of communication using sounds or symbols
Express feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences
Creativity of human language
Language makes it possible to create new and unique sentences
Hierarchical system
Components that can be combined to form larger units
Letter to word to sentence to text
Language is governed by
Rules
The universality of language
- deaf children invent sign language
- humans develop a language and learn to follow its complex rules
- language is universal across cultures
- language development is similar across cultures
- languages are “unique but the same”
- different words, sounds, and rules
- all have nouns, verbs, questions, past/present tense
B.F Skinner
- 1957
- Behaviourist
- book called Verbal Behaviour
- language learned through reinforcement
Noam Chomsky
- book called Syntactic Structures
- human language coded in the genes
- underlying basis of all language is similar
- children produce sentences they have never heard and that have never been reinforced
What led to the development of psycholinguistics
Noam Chomsky’s 1959 theory
Psycholinguistics
-psychological process by which humans acquire and process language.
- Comprehension: understand spoken and written language
- Speech production: psychological processes of speech production
- Representation
- Acquisition: learning language including a second language
Lexicon
All words a person understands
The components of words include Phonemes and Morphemes
Phoneme
-the shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of the word
Bit contains the phonemes /b/ /I/ /t/
Can change to /p/ /I/ /t/
Different from letters: one letter can have two phonemes (e.g. “e” in we and wet)
Morphemes
Smallest unit of language that has meaning or grammatical function
“Table” contains a single morpheme
“Bedroom” contains two
Endings such as “s” and “ed” are morphemes
Word Superiority Effect
People perceive a letter better when the letter is in a word than when the letter is presented alone or in a non-word
Coglab: Word Superiority Effect Experiment
An isolated letter like K or a word like WORK is shown for 40 ms and then immediately replaced by a mask of X’s or O’s
The observer has to choose between whether a D or K was presented at that location
Key component: the choices at the end of WOR could create a valid word (control)
Coglab: Word Superiority Effect results
Percentage is larger for the detection of a letter in a word than in isolation
If you are guessing on each trial, then your percentages should be close to 50%
Recognizing letter within a word (Feedback Activation)
- feedback activation is sent from word units to each letter units for that word
- feedback activation does not occur when the letter is presented alone and sometimes occurs with a non word
Phonemic Restoration Effect
- “fill” in missing phonemes based on context of sentence and portion of word presented
- Warren replaced the first /s/ in “Legislatures” with the sound of a cough
- No participants can notice it even if they are informed /s/ was missing
Sentence provides context which allows you to restore the sound
Speech Segmentation
Context-participants could identify only half of the words of their own conversation when single words were presented
Understanding meaning-an unfamiliar language sounds like an unbroken string of sounds
Understanding of sound and syntactic rules
Statistical learning (can learn to separate words from other words)
Saffran and Colleagues
Learning:
- 8 month old infants heard string of 4 artificial words in random order
- Then hear pair of words “whole” (padoti) and “part” (tibida)
- Transitional probabilities of pa followed by doti is 1 but of ti followed by bida is 0.33
Test:
- listening to pairs of words “whole” and “part”
- listening time greater for part word
Word Frequency Effect
- respond faster to high-frequency words in a lexical decision task
- fixate low frequency words longer than high frequency words
Eye movement while reading
Look at low frequency words longer
Context effects
The meaning of a sentence affects our ability to access words in a sentence
Lexical ambiguity
- words have more than one meaning
- context removes ambiguity after all meanings of a word have been briefly accessed
E.g. bug could be insects or hidden listening devices
Meaning dominance
The fact that some words are used more frequently than others
Biased dominance: when words have two or more meanings with different dominance (e.g. tin)
Balanced dominance: when words have two or more meanings with about the same dominance (e.g. cast)
No prior context for accessing the meaning of ambiguous words while reading a sentence
Speed determined by dominance
For balanced dominance both meanings are activated which results in slow access
For biased dominance, only the most frequent meaning is activated which results in fast access
With prior context for accessing the meaning of ambiguous words while reading a sentence
If less biased word is indicated by context, it is activated, but so is the more dominant meaning, even though it doesn’t fit the context. This slows down access
If the more dominant meaning is indicated by the context, it is the only meaning activated, and access is fast
Swinney
Demonstrated that although the context clears the ambiguity, participants accessed both meanings right after hearing the word
Lexical priming Effect
- used by Swinney
- heard ambiguous word had priming effect for the words relevant to both meanings
E.g. listen to statement “…and other bugs..” and word ANT flashes on screen. Have to say whether it is a word or not
Should only see priming effect for ant if you only accessed one meaning for bug
However, both ant and spy are primed because both meanings of bug are activated
What did Swinney propose to vanish the lexical prime effect
He reported that the lexical prime effect (for the context impropriate word) vanished if the test word was presented two or three syllables after the presentation of the prime (people only assess one meaning)
Are components of language processed in isolation
No they are not processed in isolation. All occur simultaneously:
- phonemic restoration effect
- speech segmentation
- word Superiority Effect
- lexical ambiguity (short term) and then elimination of lexical ambiguity via context
- word frequency effect
- context provided by the sentence
Semantics and syntax
Semantics: meanings of words and sentences
Syntax: rules for combining words into sentences
Broca’s aphasia
The apple was eaten by the girl (No trouble)
The boy was pushed by the girl (trouble)
Damage to Broca’s area (frontal lobe) causes problems in syntax (creating meaning based on word order)
Wernicke’s aphasia
Produced speech that was fluent and grammatically correct but tended to be incoherent
Wernicke’s area is in the temporal lobe and is involved in semantics- understanding meaning
Wouldn’t be able to understand both sentences
What type of studies have shown syntax and semantics are associated with different mechanisms
-event related potential and brain imaging studies in novel, normal patients
The cat won’t eat versus the cat won’t bake (N400 is marker that indicates issues in meaning)
The cat won’t eat versus that cat won’t eating (P600 is marker that indicated issues in syntax)
Parsing
Mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases
Syntactic ambiguity
More than one possible structure=more than one meaning
Parsing mechanism (two proposals):
- syntax first approach
- interactionist approach
Syntax-first approach to parsing
-grammatical structure of sentence determines parsing
- late closure: parser assumes new word is part of the current phrase
- also called Garden path model
Review slide chart
