Chapter 9 Language 1 Flashcards
What is language
-occurs on an impressively fast time scale Each speaker produces the sounds of
-the same language in different ways.
Psycholinguistics
an interdisciplinary field that examines how people use language to communicate ideas
Phoneme
The basic unit of spoken languages, such as the sounds a, k, and th
Morpheme
The basic unit of meaning
RUN
RERUN
morphology
The study of morphemes
Syntax
The grammatical rules that govern how we organize words into sentences
Grammar
Morphology + Syntax
Semantics
The area of psycholinguistics that examines the meaning of words and sentences
Pragmatics
Our knowledge of the social rules that underline language use
Basic facts about human language
-Productivity of language is unlimited.
-Language skills are complex and
impressive.
-There are currently over as 7,000 spoken
languages
Languages differ in terms of
Phonemes
Morphemes
the meaning of changes in pitch
use of passive voice
whether nouns have grammatical gender
Chomsky’s Approach
Knowledge of grammar can exits independently of semantic knowledge
People are born with grammar knowledge
Children do not need to learn the basic generalizable concepts of languages
Surface structure vs. deep structure
The actual words written on the page/in the sentence vs. the underlining more abstract meaning of the sentence
Ambiguous sentences
Sentences may have identical surface structures but very different deep structures
Transformational rules
The rules we use to convert deep structures into surface structure that we can actually speak and write
Cognitive-Functional Approach
The function of human language in
everyday life is to communicate meaning to other individuals.
Cognitive processes are intertwined with language comprehension and production.
Children use flexible strategies to create increasingly complex language.
Adults use language strategically.
People can use language creatively.
Demonstration 9.2: Different perspectives on the same event
Clark and Chase (1972)
Negative statements require more processing time than affirmative statements.
Affirmative statements produce fewer errors.
Multiple negatives decrease performance.
Incremental Interpretation
We do not wait until the end of the sentence before making judgements about what it means
This can make certain sentence structures difficult to understand
“On-line” language processing measures
designed to gauge the amount of difficulty
one experiences as the linguistic signal unfolds unit-by-unit over time
Self-paced reading task
Participants see a series of dashes on a
screen masking each word of a sentence. pressing spacebar reveals new words. reaction times (RTs) measured
Explanations for difficulty processing complex grammatical structures:
more demanding on an individual’s memory resources
very infrequent in language
Lexical ambiguity
The fact that a single word can have multiple meanings
People pause longer when they are processing an ambiguous word
Lexical Ambiguity
People are likely to choose one particular meaning:
if that meaning is more common than the alternate meaning
if the rest of the sentence is consistent with that meaning
Syntactic ambiguity
When a sentence has an ambiguous structure, sometime without punctuation
Difficult when initial interpretation is confirmed