CHAPTER 9 LANGUAGE Flashcards
the use of an organized means of
combining words to communicate with those
around us.
Language
exchange of thoughts and feelings.
communication
2 Aspects of Communication:
verbal cummunication
non verbal communictaion
such as gestures or facial expressions, can be used to embellish or to indicate.
non verbal communictaion
the psychology of our language as it interacts with the human mind. It considers both production and comprehension of language.
psycholinguistics
Four areas of study that contributed greatly to an understanding of Psycholinguistics:
- Linguistics - the study of language structure and change
- Neurolinguistics - the study of the relationships among the brain,
cognition, and language - Sociolinguistics - the study of the relationship between social behavior
and language - Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics - the study of language
via computational methods
Four areas of study that contributed greatly to an understanding of Psycholinguistics:
- Linguistics
- Neurolinguistics
- Sociolinguistics
- Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics
the study of language structure and change
linguistics
the study of language structure and change
linguistics
the study of the relationships among the brain, cognition, and language
neurolinguistics
the study of the relationships among the brain, cognition, and language
neurolinguistics
the study of the relationship between social behavior and language
sociolinguistics
the study of language via computational methods
computational linguistics and psycholinguistics
properties of language
Communicative
Arbitrarily symbolic
Regularly structured
Structured at multiple levels
Generative, productive
dynamic
language permits us to communicate with
one or more people who share our language.
communicative
language permits us to communicate with
one or more people who share our language.
communicative
language creates an arbitrary relationship
between a symbol and what it represents - an idea, a thing, a process, a relationship, or a description.
arbitarily symbolic
The thing or concept
in the real world that a word refers to is called
referent
2 Principles underlying word meanings:
conventionality and contrast
simply states that meanings of words are determined by conventions— they have a meaning upon which people agree.
principle of conventionality
different words have differentmeanings.
principle of contrast
language has a structure; only
particularly patterned arrangements of symbols have meaning, and different arrangements yield different meanings.
Regularly structured
the structure of language can
be analyzed at more than one level (e.g., in sounds, meaning units, words, and phrases).
Structured at multiple levels
Levels of Language that Psycholinguistics studies:
Sounds
Words
Sentences
Larger units of language
such as p and t
sounds
such as pat, tap, pot, top, pit, and tip
words
such as “Pat said to tap the top of the pot, then tip it into the pit”
sentences
such as this paragraph or even this
book
Larger units of language
within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances - the possibilities for creating new utterances are virtually limitless.
Generative, productive
within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances - the possibilities for creating new utterances are virtually limitless.
Generative, productive
languages constantly evolve.
dynamic
main purpose of language
to construct a mental representation of a situation that enables
us to understand the situation.
communicate about it
Basic Components of Words and Sentences
phoneme
morpheme
lexicon
syntax
is the smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance from another. The study of the particular phonemes of a language is called phonemics.
Phoneme
the smallest unit of meaning within a particular language.
morpheme
is the entire set of morphemes in a given language or in a given person’s linguistic repertoire.
lexicon
refers to the way we put words together to
form sentences. It plays a major role in our
understanding of language.
syntax
genius lay in his creation of
new words by combining existing morphemes. He is alleged to have coined
more than 1,700 words—8.5% of his written vocabulary—and countless
expressions—including the word countless itself, but also other words like
inauspicious, pander, and dauntless (Lederer, 1991).
William Shakespeare’s
2 parts of a sentence:
Noun phrase
Verb phrase (predicate)
- which contains at least one noun (like “man”) and includes all the relevant descriptors of the noun (like “big”
or “fast”).
Noun phrase
- which contains at least one verb and whatever the verb acts on (like “runs”), if anything.
Verb phrase (predicate)
Process of Language Comprehension:
- Perceive and recognize the words being said.
- Assign meaning to the words.
- Make sense of the sentences we hear.
Understanding Words
Speech perception is fundamental to language use in our everyday lives.
Understanding speech is crucial to human communication.
We can perceive as many as fifty phonemes per second in a language in which we are fluent.
When confronted with nonspeech sounds, we can perceive less than one sound per second.
how we pronounce more than one sound at the same time; viewed as necessary for the effective transmission of speech
information.
Coarticulation:
: process of trying to separate the
continuous sound stream into distinct words.
speech segmentation
suggests that there are different stages of neural processing:
One stage, speech sounds are analyzed into their components.
In another stage, these components are analyzed for patterns and matched to a prototype or template.
involves integrating what we know with what we hear when we perceive speech.
Phonemic-Restoration Effect:
suggests that speech-perception processes differ from the processes we use when we hear other sounds:
Categorical Perception and motor theory of speech perception.
one phenomenon in speech
perception that led to the notion of specialization; discontinuous categories of speech sounds.
Categorical Perception:
When we hear one sound but see the mouth of the speaker articulating a different sound, we are likely to perceive a compromise sound; how we integrate what we hear with what we see.
McGurk Effect:
the study of meaning in a language; concerned with how words and sentences express meaning.
SEMANTICS:
strict dictionary definition of a word.
Denotation:
word’s emotional overtones, presuppositions, and other nonexplicit meanings; vary between people.
Connotation:
Having a word for something helps us to add new information to our existing information about that concept.
First, it facilitates the ease of understanding and remembering a text passage.
Second, it enhances subjects’ recall of the shape of a droodle (doodle puzzle)
Third, it affects the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Having words as concepts for things helps us in our everyday
nonverbal interactions.
that are made by humans are mostly distinguished by means of their function.
Objects
, in contrary, are mainly distinguished by means of their looks.
Living things
used more often (ex. Foot as a body part)
Dominant Meaning:
: (ex. Foot as bottom part of the hill)
Subordinate Meaning
the systematic way in which words can be combined and sequenced to make meaningful phrases and sentences;
focuses on the study of the grammar of phrases and sentences.
Syntax:
the study of language in terms of noticing regular patterns; patterns relate to the functions and relationships of
words in a sentence.
Grammar:
kind of grammar prescribes the
“correct” ways in which to structure the use of writ[1]ten and spoken language.
Prescriptive Grammar:
: in which an attempt is made to
describe the structures, functions, and relationships of words in language.
Descriptive Grammar
we spontaneously tend to use syntactical structures and read sentences faster that parallel the structures of sentences we have just heard.
Syntactical Priming:
Example of syntactical priming
Sentence Priming:
Even when we accidentally switch the placement of two words in a sentence, we still form grammatical, if meaningless or nonsensical, sentences.
Speech Errors:
extreme difficulties in both
comprehending and producing language, preserve syntactical categories in their speech errors.
Agrammatic Aphasics:
analyze the structure of phrases
as they are used.
humans have some mental mechanism for classifying words according to syntactical categories (Parts of Speech)
Phrase-structure Grammar:
rules governing the sequences of
words.
Phrase-Structure Rules:
revolutionized the study of syntax. He
suggested that to understand syntax, we must not only observe the interrelationships among phrases within sentences but also consider the syntactical relationships
between sentences.
Noam Chomsky
suggested a way to supplement the study of phrase structures:
Chomsky (1957)
: involves transformational rules. These
rules guide the ways in which an underlying proposition can be arranged
into a sentence.
Transformational Grammar
refers to an underlying syntactical structure that links various phrase structures through various transformation rules.
Deep Structure:
refers to any of the various phrase structures that may result from such transformations.
Surface Structure:
(1965, cited in Wasow, 1989) also addressed
how syntactical structures may interact with words (lexical structures)
Chomsky
is a complex process that involves, at
minimum, perception, language, memory, thinking,and intelligence.
Reading
Three different process that contribute to our ability to read:
Perceptual
Lexical Processes
Comprehension processes
a basic but important step in reading is the
activation of our ability to recognize letters.
Perceptual -
ability to identify pattern of specific letters as words leading to word recognition.
Orthographic-
, playwright and lover of the English language, observed the illogicality of English spellings. He suggested that, in English, it would be perfectly reasonable to pronounce ghoti as fish. You would pronounce the gh as in rough, the o as in women, and the ti as in nation.
George Bernard Shaw
are used to identify letters and words.
They also activate relevant information in memory about these words.
Lexical processes
are used to make sense of the
text as a whole.
Comprehension processes
__________________ - our eyes move in saccades—rapid sequential movements—as they fixate on successive
clumps of text. The last word of a sentence also seems toreceive an extra long fixation time. This can be called
_________________
Fixation and Reading Speed
“sentence wrap-up time.”
- the identification of a word that allows us to retrieve the meaning of the word from memory. . It combines information of
different kinds, such as the features of letters, the letters themselves,
and the words comprising the letters.
Lexical Access
suggesting that activation of particular lexical elements occurs at multiple levels. Moreover, activity at each of the levels is interactive.
Interactive-activation model of David Rumelhart and James McClelland
Direction of Process of Interactive-activation model
First, it is bottom-up, starting with sensory data and working up to higher levels of cognitive processing.
Second, it is top-down, starting with high-level cognition operating on prior knowledge and experiences related to a given context
Three Levels of processing following visual input in interactive-activation model:
- Feature level
- Letter level
- Word level
- involving discrete levels of processing comes from studies of cerebral processing. Studies that map brain metabolism via PET and fMRI (see Chapter 2) indicate that different regions of the brain become activated during passive visual processing of word forms, as opposed to semantic analysis of words or even spoken pronunciation of the words.
Word-recognition model
-letters are read more easily when they are embedded in words than when they are presented either in isolation or with letters that do not form words.
Word-superiority effect
People take substantially longer to read unrelated letters than to read letters that form a word (Cattell, 1886). This effect is sometimes called the ____________, named for two researchers who did early investigations of this effect.
Reicher-Wheeler effect
People take about twice as long to read unrelated words as to read words in a sentence.
sentence-superiority
Approaches to teach children how to read:
1.Phonics approach
2. Whole-word approach
3. Whole-language approach
- children are taught how the letters
of the alphabet sound and then progressively put them together to read two letters together, then three, and so on. In the beginning, only regular words are used that
are pronounced as they are spelled.
Phonics approach
teaches children to recognize
whole words, without the analysis of the sounds that make up the word. Proponents of this approach consider it more
interesting for young children than learning about phonics
Whole-word approach
- argues that words are pieces
of sentences and reading should therefore be taught in connection with entire sentences.
Whole-language approach
difficulty in deciphering, reading, and comprehending text—can suffer greatly in a society that puts a high premium on fluent reading.
Dyslexia
Several different processes may be impaired in dyslexia:
- Phonological awareness
- Phonological reading
- Phonological coding in working memory
- Lexical access
- which refers to awareness of the sound
structure of spoken language (recognizing the different sounds that make up a word).
Phonological awareness
- which entails reading words in isolation.
Individuals with dyslexia often have more trouble recognizing the words in isolation than in context.
Phonological reading
- when people have difficulty storing phonemes in working memory and tend to confuse them more often, reading becomes increasingly difficult.
Phonological coding in working memory
- which entails one’s ability to retrieve phonemes from long-term memory.
Lexical access
Types of Dyslexias
1.Developmental Dyslexia
2.Acquired Dyslexia
- which starts in childhood and is believed to have both biological and environmental causes.
Developmental Dyslexia
- which is the result of a traumatic
brain injury.
Acquired Dyslexia
- involves units of language larger than
individual sentences—in conversations, lectures, stories, essays, and even textbooks.
Discourse
example of?
Rita gave Thomas a book about problem solving. He thanked her for the book. She asked, “Is it what you wanted?” He answered enthusiastically, “Yes, definitely.” Rita asked, “Should I get you the companion volume on
decision making?” He responded, “Please do.”
Deciphering Text
- the process by which we
translate sensory information (i.e., the written words we see) into a meaningful representation.
Semantic encoding
we identify words based on letter combinations.
lexical access
, we take the next step and gain access to the meaning of the word stored in memory.
semantic encoding
Using __________ to formulate the meaning
based on the existing information stored in
memory.
context cues
__________ has developed a model of text
comprehension based on his observations.
Walter Kintsch
the briefest unit of language that can be independently found to be true or false.
propositions
- thematically crucial propositions
macropropositions
- overarching thematic structure of a passage of text
macrostructure
What we remember from a given passage of text often depends on our point of view.
Comprehending Text Based on Context
and Point of View
Once words are semantically encoded or their meaning is derived from the use of context, the reader still must create a mental
model of the text that is being read.
Representing Text in Mental Models
- may be viewed as a sort of internal working
model of the situation described in the text, as the reader understands it.
Mental model
To form mental models, you must make at least tentative ___________ (preliminary conclusions or judgments) about what is
meant but not said.
inferences
- an inference a reader or listener makes when a sentence seems not to follow directly from the sentence preceding it.
bridging inference
Our comprehension of what we read depends on several abilities:
1.gaining access
2.deriving
3.extracting the key information
4.forming mental models
to the meanings of words, either from
memory or on the basis of context.
gaining access
deriving meaning from the key ideas in what we read.
deriving
from the text, based on the
contexts surrounding what we read and on the ways in which we intend to use what we read.
extracting the key information
that simulate the situations about which we read.
forming mental models
