Chapter 11 textbook notes Flashcards
What is the difference between non-human animals and humans language?
Non human animals have only a limited number of sounds and signals that they can use to communicate a limited amount of things whereas humans have lots of words that can be arranged to communicate a nearly infinite ammount of messages.
What does the hierarchical nature of language mean?
it means that there are levels of language that can be made where the meaning increases as you get to higher levels ex- words - phrases- sentences - parts of a story
What does language have rules mean
Language has rules means that words can only be combined only in certain ways ex can “say I wonder what my cat is saying” but cant say “my cat saying is wonder I”
What is the evidence that language is universal?
- languages are unique but the same. Languages are unique in that they have different words for different things and they have different rules for how things can be combined. Languages are the same in that they all include nouns and verbs.
- All cultures have language
- the stages of language development even across different languages follow the same stages ex at 7 months babbling usually starts, meaningful words appear by the first birthday, and the act of saying two words together appears at their second birthday
- deaf children will create their own sign language to communicate if adults are not using sign language or mouthing words out
- everyone who follows the conventional growth will be able to speak in their language and produce sentences that follow the rules of its grammer from very young - even if they struggle with these rules in grammer class.
What was B.F skinners explanation for how language is learned?
According to B.F skinner language is learned through reinforcement just like other rules Skinner published this view in “Verbal Behavior”
What was Noam Chomsky’s explanation for how language is learned?
Why can’t we chomp in the sky (eat in the sky) because our genes do not allow us to fly, genes dictating what we do ties into chomskys explanation for how language is learned - according to chomsky what language a person speaks is dictated by their genes, just like how genes can code different expressions however these differnt expressions all have the same underlying purpose (if they are for the same trait) according to chompsky although the language produced by the genes will vary all language will be coded to have the same basic structure. Chomsky believed that the mind could be studied through language which differed from the behaivourist POV that the mind could not be seen at all so it was not worth studying.
Noam chomsky thought that skinner was chomping at sky that he did not eat - thought that skinner was wrong - evidence that he used to illustrate this was that children will produce phrases that are unlikely to get them rewarded ex (“I hate you ma”) and will sometimes say phrases that have never been modeled for them and will sometimes use incorrect grammer
What is psycholinguistics
The study of the psychological processes behind how humans gain and process language
What are the 4 main concerns of psycholinguistics?
- Comprehension - includes how people know what spoken words, phrases and sentences mean, how people understand written words, how people understand spoken or sign language and how people process sound
- Representation - how people arrange words to make sentences that actually have meaning in their minds or how they connect different information part of the same whole collection of info together
- Acquisition includes the process through which children get language and how people learn additional languages
- Speech production - how people create speech- the physical processes behind how people create sounds
What is a lexicon
our mental dictionary- all of the words that we know
What is semantics
the meaning of language
What is lexical semantics
The meanings of words
What is the word frequency effect
Demonstrates that we respond faster to high frequency words (where frequency refers to how many times per million words said a specific word is said)- ex, one experiment had participants read a list ex reviere, gravola, history, cartarity and were asked to classify which members of the list were real words and which were not, found that participants were able to classify history quicker as a real word then reviere - history has a high frequency word is used often whereas reviere is a low frequency word - it is not used often. Duffy and Rayner - judith called duffy - glasses had dslyexia so might have spent a longer time starring at words while reading them - simmilarily duffy and rayners experiment examines the time an individual spent starring at words while reading them but for a different reason (weather participants spent more time starring at high or low frequency words). Duffy and Rayner presented participants with two possible sentences ex “they danced to the slow waltz” or “they danced to the slow music” found that if the word waltz was used participants would stare at the word for 37 seconds longer while reading it and if they included the number of seconds it took for the person to look back at the word they spent 87 seconds longer on “waltz”
What does Pickett and Pollacks experiment demonstrate
Pickett like prickett running joke in modern family that Jay can not understand what gloria says so he relies on context but according to prickett and polark jay would struggle to know what even he was saying if what he said was recorded and cut to a single word. Pickett and Pollack had participants talk to eachother and recorded them while they talked then cut the recorrdings os they only contained a single word the person said and gave the recordings to the person and asked them to identify what they had said - found that participants often reported not knowing what they had said but would know if the context was present. Demonstrates that context is important for word comprehension. Why might this be? People use different ways of talking in different situations ex if relaxed more likely to merge syllables together.
How do we tell apart words in speech?
Speech is continous although we can seperate what someone says into different phrases they do not pause between words. Our understanding of which words will appear is influenced by
1. how frequently we have encountered the word in the past (ex took people less long to deterime if history was a real word then if reverie was a real word - history is used more often (a high frequency word) whereas reviere is used less often (a low frequency word) and Duffy and Rayner found that people spent 87 seonds longer staring at the word waltz then the word music - waltz is low frequency whereas music is high frequency.
2. We learn the statistical probabilites of certain sounds following each other as infants Saffran ex ffr not likely a word I would break saffrans name down to illustrates her point low proability in english that f will be followed by the sound r whereas there is a high proability that r will be followed by an) this can help us know when one word ends and another begins because lots of sounds we do not encounter paired together so even if they are said right beside each other in time we will not think that they are the same word.
3. We use context to determine what word is being used
ex: Janine’s mom said Big girls eat their vegtables
ex: the orange cat was Big Earl’s favorite thing in the world
“Big girls” and “Big Earls” sound the same however if we heard each of the following sentences we would not mistake them for each other because of the context they are used in.
4. We use our knowledge of word meanings to determine what sounds make up what words in a sentence
What is lexical priming?
When a word is presented (primer) and then another word is presented later (probe word) and the person responds to the second word quicker because they had thought of it when the first word was presented due to association - so this can reveal what words a person associates with each other. Ex if a person associaties the word rose with flower if they hear the word rose they will think of the word flower and then if they hear flower later on they will respond to it quicker because they have already thought of it.
Describe Tanenhaus’s experiment
Tan could mean tan as in from the sun or tan as in sin cos tan or tan as in tan hide according to tanenhaus’s experiment when we hear the word tan 9an ambiguous word( all of the words it could possibally mean will be activated. All conditions of Tanenhaus’s experiment involved participants reading a sentence that contained a primer or no primer and then read a word aloud as quickly as possible - so the time between when they finished reading the sentence aloud and said the probe word aloud was the reaction time
Tanenhaus conditon 1 “rose” as an objet a noun (the flower)
group one heard the sentence “she held on to the rose”
group two heard the sentence “she held on to the post”
then each group read the word flower- found that for group 1 when the participants read the word rose in the context that it was an object (a noun) they thought of the word flower and were therefore able to read the word flower faster because it was already in their mind (the “post” group had a 37 ms longer gap between when they finished the sentence and said flower then the “rose” group
condition two “rose” used as a verb
group one heard the sentence “they all rose for the national anthem”
group two heard the sentence “they all stood for the national anthem”
both groups still presented with the word flower
found that the participants who had heard “rose” as a verb still had less of a gap between finishing the sentence and reading the word flower then the group who never read “rose” in their sentence; this indicates that even though “rose” in the sentence was not used in the context of the flower they still had the associations as if it was come up. Overall this demonstrates that when we hear an ambiguous word all of its possible meanings and their subsequent associations appear in our mind. Tanenhause (tan is ambiguous slightly different because it does not have a verb meaning however tan can be used as in sun tan, tan hide or tan like sin cos tan) attemptied to see if this effect still occured if a 200 msc delay was added found that it did not illustrating that we specified context after the delay and therefore no longer were considering all of the possible word meanings. Overall shows that at first when we hear an ambiguous word we consider all of its possible meanings and there associations and then later we add context and no longer consider the ambiguous meanings that no longer make sense in the context.
In addition to what ambiguous word priming experiments have found what do we know about how the meanings of ambiguous words are determined
Dominant meaning - is a group with different categories that indicate the frequency of two of the potential meanings of an ambiguous word relative to each other.
Ex the word “tin” can refer to metal or “tin” like a small box
the meaning of metal for tin is used more often then the meaning of small box for tin so “tin” is refered to having a biased dominance (biased means not treated equally inferorizes one - so it makes sense that it refers to situations where the possible meanings for ambiguous words are not used equally as often)
the meaning of cast as in people who play characters in a play and the meaning of cast as in a way of healing a broken bone are used equally so they are referred to as having balanced dominance
experiment 2 groups both read sentences and had the their eye movements measured (indicates what word their eyes were on and how long they spent looking at that word)
group 1’s sentence: The cast worked all night long
group 2’s sentence: The cook worked all night long
group 1 looked longer on the word cast then group 2 looked at the word cook. Group 1 looked at cast for longer because they had to consider both of the possible meanings of “cast” as the word “cast” has two possible meanings which have balanced dominance and the context did not yet suggest a particular meaning so each were equally as likely and therefore both had to be considered.
other condition
group 1 sentence: the tin was bright and shiny
group 2’s sentence: the gold was bright and shiny
Found that group 1 ambiguous word spent an equal ammount of time looking at the word “tin” as group 2 spent looking at the word “gold” this is because “tin” has biased dominance so they likely just assumed that the more frequent meaning would be used and therefore did not consider both and therefore did not spend longer looking at it.
second other condtion
group 1’s sentence: The miners ate the beans from the “tin”
group 2’s sentence: The miners ate the beans from the “bowl”
found that group 1 took longer on the sentence then group 2 this is because the past context made it so that the word “tin”as in small box became elevated in probability creating a situation where the meaning of tin as small bowl became in the readers mind equally as likely as the meaning of tin as metal and therefore they had to consider the two meanings and took longer.
final condition
group 1’s sentence: The miners went under the mountain to look for “tin”
group 2’s sentence: The miners went under the mountain to look for “gold”
since the context suggests the words dominant meaning it was read just as quickly as the sentence where “gold” was used.
What are garden path sentences
A garden path might look like it goes into the woods but it is stopped by a shed simmilarily in the beggining garden path sentences sound like they are going to lead to one meaning but actually lead to another
ex. possible endings for the sentence “The piano teacher stopped playing the piano” what we might think possible endings are include
“and the audience cheered”
“and took a bow”
if we use the end “was wheeled off stage” to create the sentence “The piano teacher stopped playing the piano was wheeled off stage” it does not make sense unless we say it as [The piano teacher stopped playing] [the piano was wheeled off stage]. It is misleading to people so it takes longer for them to determine how the sentence is organized (temporal ambiguity) have to split it into chunks after reading it bc in this case we assume the piano teacher is the subject unless there is a clear seperation making the piano the subject so we take time to reorganize the sentence from how we thought it was in our brain to access the meaning
What is parsing?
Parsing like seperating and adding like together - seperating words into phrases which we think will go together
What does the garden path model of parsing state?
Lynn Frazier razier like raise her - her and razor (cuts seperates things like parsing does) if we heard this sound outloud we would have to use a raise her her like heuristic (a rapid means of making decision) about which meaning was used –> lynn frazier we use heuristics to parse (garden path model of parsing Heuristic - sounds like Her is - tic maybe the idea of time we made our decsion of whaat her is before we can say it simmilarily heuristics refer to the methods we use to quickly make decisions. In the example “After the piano teacher stopped playing the piano was wheeled off stage” illustrates how our use of heuristics (fast ways to make decisions) when we are grouping a setence into phrases.
What does the principle of late closure mean?
The principle of late closure refers to the idea that we assume for as long as possible that each word is connected to a phrase making it so that the phrase might close late - might close past when it should we misjudge when the phrase ends. Ex. “After the piano teacher stopped playing” we assume “the” “piano” and were all part of the phrase “after the piano teacher stopped playing” until we get to the word “was” and then we realize that “the piano” was a start to a new phrase.
What is the constraint approach
Holds that context and the other features of a scene not just heuristics are used during parsing
Describe how the words initially in a sentence can impact parsing
Ex. “The dog buried in the sand was hidden”
and “The treasure buried under the sand”
would take longer reading the first sentence because the phrase “The dog buried” could deliver two meanings - it could mean that the dog buried something of the dog itself was buried in something - since we have to determine which of the potential meanings is being used it will take us longer to read.
Describe Tanenhaus’s findings regarding parsing
Condition one
Had participants look at a picture where there was an apple on top of a towel, another towel across from the towel that the apple was on and a box diagonal from the apple and tracked their eye movements on the image
Had them read the sentence “move the apple on the towel to the box” found that 55% of participants first looked at the other towel when they had read “move the apple on the towel” indicating that they thought it was saying to move the apple onto the other towel and then realized once they got to “to the box” they realized “on the towel” does not mean the location they want them to move the apple to but rather a specification of where the apple they are meant to move is located.
Condition two same picture except there was also an apple on a napkin across from the apple on the towel
tracked participants eye movements and found that only 10% looked at the towel without an apple on it indicating that they thought that “on the towel” refered to the location they were to move the apple to. Since there were two options for which apple we are meant to move it makes more sense that they would specify the location of the apple we are meant to move (so we can tell which one it is) so the pictures context helps influence our understanding of the meaning.
Demonstrated that both context within the sentence and outside of the sentence impacted individuals parsing
