Chapter 9: Language Flashcards

Question

Fundamental Problems In Speech Perception

Answer 1

Speech is continuous: rarely pauses around each sound, sounds blend into each other (pauses we perceive are illusory) Single phoneme sounds different depending on context (e.g. gender of speaker affects pitch, speaker's accent)

Answer 2

Involves top down processes Explanation that we perceive speech in the way we perceive written text is not correct Understanding speech is usually easy unless it is a foreign language or if speaker has a speech impediment

Answer 3

Visual cues affect how sounds are perceived If lips do something different than what they’re saying, you hear what their lips do If are hearing Ba, if video person looks they they’re saying Fa we hear that

Answer 4

Listeners restore missing phonemes predicted by other linguistic info during the course of perception Neighboring stimuli have a great impact upon how speech sounds are perceived Participants shadowing speech were more likely to restore distortion of word if the word was highly predictable from the context

Answer 5

Instances in which what the speaker intended to say is quite clear, but speaker makes some substitution or reorders the elements Much of data from speech error studies is observational

Answer 6

Meaning relations: using finger in place of toe, or walk instead of run -Rarely involve similarities of form Form relations: guest instead of goat, or mushroom for mustache -Rarely involve similarities of meaning Relative infrequency of word substitution errors showing both meaning and form similarities indicates the language production system processes info about meaning and info about form at different points in sentence construction

Answer 7

Observers presented with target letter strings and asked to decide if it is properly spelled word Observers are faster and more accurate when target word is preceded by another word, called a prime, that is associated in meaning Semantic priming effect

Answer 8

Fast acting automatic spread of activation Slow expectancy driven process

Answer 9

Switch instructions: when participants saw prime word building, they should expect it to be followed by a target word that named part of the body (and vice versa, part of body = part of building) When target word was presented shortly after prime word, instructions to participant did not matter No priming was observed for pairs like body-window, even though they were consistent with switch expectation Evidence for automatic spreading activation

Answer 10

When increased amount of time separating presentation of prime and target Participants were slower to respond to items that were really related (e.g. body-nose) than they were to respond to items that were completely unrelated (e.g. bird-arm) Evidence for operation of a slow acting expectancy process

Answer 11

Argues that certain perceptual and language processes are modules Processes are thought to be set apart from other cognitive processes (e.g. memory, thinking, problem solving are non modular) Operate automatically and independently of other cognitive processes like thought Domain specific

Answer 12

Domain Specific: operates specifically with certain kinds of input and not others E.g sentence parsing involves processes that are specific to division of phrases and words into constituents Informationally Encapsulated Process: operates independently of the beliefs and the other info available to the processor

Answer 13

When people are presented with an ambiguous word all possible meanings are triggered for a fraction of a second Triggering appears to be automatic and reflexive, and completely independent of other cognitive processes

Answer 14

Strong relations exist between language and other cognitive processes Language both directs and constrains thought and perception The language you grow up learning and speaking determines the way one perceives, thinks, and organizes information about the world

Answer 15

Dani culture only has words for dark and light, not colour Dani should have great difficulty perceiving or remembering colours not named in their language compared to english speakers Focal colours: best examples of basic colours (e.g. green green instead of blue green) Dani speakers performed better if initial clip showed a focal over a nonfocal colour

Answer 16

Collective deficits in language comprehension & production that result from brain damage

Answer 17

Expressive aphasia Halting, agrammatic speech Nouns and verbs okay, function words impaired Difficulty comprehending reversed sentences Damage to frontal areas of brain

Answer 18

Receptive aphasia Fluent speech without content Cannot comprehend and execute simple commands like ‘touch your knee’ Not aware that their speech makes no sense Damage to temporal lobe of left hemisphere

Answer 19

Term for specialization of function between two hemispheres Aphasic patients usually have damage on left hemisphere

Answer 20

Normal or mild atrophy of left language regions And hypometabolism by the left hemispheres

Answer 21

Not all patients with lesions in Broca’s area develop aphasia, not all patients with Broca's aphasia have damage in that area Language processes do not necessarily have a specific location, but are distributed across a region of the brain in a neural network configuration

Answer 22

Anomia: naming deficit Alexia: visual language impairment Agraphia: inability to write Alexia without agraphia: can write, but cannot read what they have written