Chapter Eleven - Language Flashcards
What is language?
-system of communication using sounds/symbols
What does language enable us to do?
- express feelings, thoughts, ideas, experiences
- provide way of arranging a sequence of signals to transmit info from one person to another
What is the hierarchical system?
-components that can be combined to form larger units
How is language governed?
- by rules
- specific ways components can be arranged
Why is language called “universal?”
-occurs wherever there are people
What does it mean that languages are “unique but the same?”
- different words, sounds, rules
- all have nouns, verbs, negatives, questions, past/present tense etc.
What are general characteristics of language?
- deaf children invent sign language that is all their own
- all humans develop a language
- language is universal across cultures
- language development is similar across cultures
What are Broca + Wernicke?
-areas in frontal + temporal lobes related to different aspects of langauge
What did BF Skinner believe about language?
-language learned through reinforcement
What did Noam Chomsky argue about language?
- human language coded in genes
- underlying basis of all language is similar
- studying language as way to study properties of the mind
What is support that language is inherent?
-children produce sentences that they have never heard/never been been reinforced
What field Noam Chomsky’s studies start?
psycholinguists
-language as bridge to properties of the mind
What are psycholinguists?
-discover psychological process by which humans acquire + process language
What is comprehension?
-how people understand spoken + written language
What is speech production?
-how do people produce language
What is representation?
-how is language represented in mind and in brain?
what is aquisition?
-how do people learn language?
What are 4 things that psycholinguisitcs are concerned about?
- comprehension
- speech production
- representation
- acquisition
What is a lexicon?
- our knowledge of words
- how they sound + what they mean
What are the 2 smallest units of language?
- phonemes
2. morphemes
What are Phonemes?
-shortest segments of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of the word
What are morphemes?
-smallest units of language that have meaning/grammatical function
When does the phonemic restoration effect occur?
-occurs when phonemes are perceived in speech when sounds of phoneme is covered up
Phonemic restoration effect
-“fill in” missing phonemes based on context of sentence/portion of word presented
What were the results of the experiment testing the phonemic restoration effect?
- subjects can’t tell when cough takes place
- able to fill in
What kind of processing is phonemic restoration effect?
top down processing
What is speech segmentation?
perceiving individual words in a sentence
What is context?
- when taken out of context, presented alone
- words become must more difficult to understand
What happens when subjects are presented with their own speech but segmented?
-they could only identify half of the words
What does it mean to understand sound and syntactic rules?
-certain sounds are more likely to be separated by space between two words
What is the Word Superiority Effect experiment?
- stimulus that is either a word, letter, or non-word is flashed briefly
- followed by a mask
- two letter are represented rapidly
- s task is to pick flashed letter that is presented
What is the result of the Word Superiority Effect experiment?
- letters are easier to recognize when they are contained in a word
- rather than when they appear alone/contained in a nonword
How are words used in a particular language?
-create a large representative sample of utterances or written text (corpus)
What is the purpose of a corpus?
-indicates frequency of:
words, different meanings, grammatical constructions
Why are corpuses useful?
- a lot of what goes on during language comprehension can be traced to prediction
- our ability to perceive written words depends on how frequently they appear in our lexicon
What is the word frequency effect?
-respond more rapidly to high-frequency words
EX: respond more rapidly to “home” vs. “hike”
What is the lexical decision task?
- read list of words and non-words silently
- say “yes” when you read a word
- faster for words that are more frequent
What happens to eye movements during reading?
-look at low-frequency words longer
What is lexical ambiguity?
-words have more than one meaning
EX: duck
-some meanings of words are more likely
How is the ambiguity of words resolved?
-context clears up ambiguity after all meanings of a word have been briefly accessed
What is meaning dominance?
some meanings of words are used more frequently than others
What is biased dominance?
-when words have two or more meanings with different dominance
What is balanced dominance?
-when words have two or meanings with about the same dominace
Why are biased and balanced dominance significant?
-influences the wya people access the meanings of words
How did the understanding words task work?
balanced dominance word = CAST, CAST
biased dominance word = TIN, tin
-no prior context, speed determined by dominance
Are components of language processed in isolation?
no
What are 2 things we must distinguish between in order to understand how words create meaning in a sentence?
- semantics
2. syntax
What are semantics?
-meanings of words and sentences
What is syntax?
rules for combining words into sentences
What are the two areas of the brain that syntax and semantics are processed?
- Broca’s area (frontal lobe)
2. Wernicke’s area (temporal lobe)
What is Broca’s aphasia?
- slow, labored, ungrammatical speech, have problem understanding some types of sentences
- problems with syntax
What is Wernicke’s aphasia?
- produce meaningless speech
- unable to understand speech + writing
- problems with semantics
What have Event-related potential studies shown about syntax + semantics?
-associated with different mechanisms
What is ERP?
- rapid response
- occurring on a time scale of a fraction of a second
- consists of a number of waves that occur at different delays after a stimulus is presented which can be linked to different functions
What is the N400 response associated with? (4)
- semantic manipulation
- meaning
- structures in temporal lobe
- damage to temporal lobe reduces N400
What is the P600 response associated with?
- syntactic manipulation
- form of a sentence
- structures in the frontal lobe
- damage to frontal lobe reduces P600
What are garden path sentences?
- sentences that begin by appearing to mean one thing
- then end up meaning something else
What is temporary ambiguity?
- when initial words are ambiguous
- meaning is made clear by the end of the sentence
What is the syntax-first approach to parsing?
- as people read a sentence, their grouping of words into phrases is governed by number of rules that are based on syntax
- if reader realizes something wrong with parsing, they take other info into account to interpret sentence
What is late closure?
-parser assumes new word is part of the current phrase
interactionist approach to parsing
-semantics + syntax both influence processing as one reads a sentence
What does semantics influence
the way we interpret the relationship between the words in a sentence
What else might our interpretation of a sentence be influenced by?
the meaning of a scene we are observing
What was Tanenhaus and coworkers’s experiment?
visual world paradigm
What is the visual word paradigm
involves determining how S processes infomation as they are observing a visual scene
What is the result of Tanenhaus and coworkers’s experiment?
- eye movements change when info suggests revision of interpretation of sentence is necessary
- syntactic + semantic information used simultaneously
Besides syntax and semantics, what else do we use to understand/make predictions about language?
-knowledge about the environment
EX: “Getting himself and his car to work on the neighboring island was time consuming. Every morning he drove for a few minutes, and then boarded the …”
What did Fine et al. study?
- investigated whether readers can learn to change their predictions based on experience with new constructions
- used moving window paradigm
What is the moving window paradigm?
- S reads one word at a time on computer screen
- pushed space bar to view next word
What is an important part of the process of creating a coherent/creative story?
-making inferences
How do we make inferences?
- determining what the text means by using our own knowledge
- unconscious inference, constructive nature of memory
What is one role of inference?
-create connections between parts of a story
What is coherence?
representation of the text in one’s mind so that info from one part can be related to info in another part
What are 3 types of inference
- anaphoric
- instrumental
- causal
anaphoric inference
connecting objects/people in one sentence to objects/people in other sentences
instrumental inferences
-inferences about tools or methods
causal inferences
events in one clause caused by events in previous sentence
What is the situation model?
- mental representation of what text is about
- represent events as if experiencing the situation
- POV of protagonist
- does not consist of info about phrases, sentences, or par.
mental representation sas simulations
we simulate the perceptual and motor characteristics of the objects/actions in a story
What does physiology have to do with simulations?
- approximately same areas of cortex activated by actual movements + by reading related action words
- activation more extensive for actual movements
What did Ross Metusalem’s experiment test?
- ERP experiments as people read short passages
- looked at amplitude of N400 response (semantic response)
What did Ross Metusalmen’s experiment result in?
-“guitar” generates smaller N400 tha barn: guitar is least slightly activated by scenario
- barn is unrelated
- guitar is related
- stage is expected
What is the most common form of language production/
conversations
What are conversations?
- 2 or more people talking to each other
- dynamic + rapid
- involves shared knowledge
- need to take into account what other person is saying
What is the given-new contract?
- speaker constructs sentences so they include:
- given info
- new info
- new can then become given
What is common ground?
- the speakers’ mutual knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions
- each person needs to understand the knowledge that the other person brings to the conversation
How is common ground established?
-back and forth exchanges in the conversation
What is syntactic coordination/
using similar grammatical constructions
What is syntactic priming?
-production of a specific grammatical construction by one person increases chances that other person will use that construction
What is the benefit of syntactic priming?
-reduces computational load in conversation
Explain syntactic priming experiments
- 2 people engage in convo about some task
- experimenter determines whether spec. grammatical construction used by one person causes another to use it
- one of the 2 S could be a conferderate to prime construct
- S picks matching card, S describes card to other person
What are the results of syntactic priming experiments?
- 78% of trials, form of S description matches for of confederate’s priming statement
- supports idea that speakers are sensitive to linguistic behavior of other speakers
What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
- language influences thought
- nature of a culture’s language can affect the way poeple think
What is the Winawer experiment?
-two cultures had differences in how particpants respnoded to blue squares based on how they were categorized
What is the Gilbert experiment?
-looked for a difference between how colors are processed in left and right hemispheres of the brain
(language processed in left)
EX: if language affects color perception, more likely to do so when colors are viewed in right visual field
