CHAPTER11 - LANGUAGE Flashcards
define language
a system of communication using sounds or symbols enabling expression of feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences
do humans or animals have a wide variety of signals to be combined in COUNTLESS ways?
humans
animals use language on for what basis?
survival
humans language is seen as more ____
creativity-based
what 2 kinds of nature allow us to create new and unique sentences?
hierarchical and rule-based
describe the hierarchical nature of language
consisting of small components that can be combined to form larger units
describe the rule-based nature of language
components in language can be arranged in certain ways but not others
why is language considered to be universal?
it occurs wherever there are people
who were the Greek philosophers that studied language?
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
Paul Broca said that damage in the _____ imapirs _____
frontal lobe; speech production
Carl Wrenkie said that damage in the _____ impairs ____
temporal lobe; speech comprehension
what did B.F Skinner propose?
language is learned through reinforcement
describe Skinner’s behaviourist view on language and children
children learn language by being rewarded for correct usage and punished for incorrect usage
who disagreed with the behaviourist theory of language?
Noam Chomsky
what did Noam Chomsky propose?
humans are preprogrammed to acquire and use language through genetics
why did Noam Chomsky propose this over Skinner’s theory?
children produce sentences that are not reinforced or taught which goes against Skinner’s theory
what is psycholinguistics?
the field concerned with the psychological study of language
what is the goal of a psycholinguistic scholar?
discover the psychological processes humans use to acquire and process language
what are the 4 concerns of psycholinguistics?
comprehension
representation
speech production
acquisition
what is comprehension in psycholinguistics?
how people understand and process words and sounds
what is representation in psycholinguistics?
how language is represented, grouped, and connected in the mind
what is speech production in psycholinguistics?
how people mentally and physically produce language
what is acquisition in psycholinguistics?
how people learn their own language and additional ones
what is a lexicon?
all the words we know
what does a lexicon serve as?
a mental dictionary
what are semantics?
the meaning of language
what are lexical semantics?
the meanings of words
what is word frequency?
the frequency with which a word appears in a language
what is the word frequency effect?
when people respond faster to high-frequency words rather than low
how does word frequency affect us in language?
influences how we process a word
how can someone demonstrate the word fluency effect?
lexical decision task
what is the lexical decision task?
deciding as quickly as possible whether a string of letters are words or nonwords
who demonstrated slower responses for low frequency words by measuring eye movements + fixation durations?
Keith Rayner and Susan Duffy
describe the task Rayner and Duffy’s participants had to do
reading a sentences with combinations of high and low frequency words
what did Rayner and Duffy observe in their experiment?
longer fixation periods for sentences containing a low frequency word
total gaze duration was also longer for a sentence with a low frequency word
what did Rayner and Duffy conclude about the frequency word effect?
people need more time to access the meaning of low frequency words
it demonstrates how past experience with words influences our ability to access their meaning
do people pronounce words the exact same? what effects are there?
no
accents, speed, slang, phonemes
what aids our ability to understand what someone is saying when they don’t talk the same way you do?
context within which a word appears
Irwin Pollack and J.M Pickett showed words are harder to understand when…
they’re taken out of context and presented alone
how did Pollack and Pickett demonstrate context influence?
presented recordings of participants’ conversations with single words taken out
what did Pollack and Pickett observe?
that participants can only identify half of the words
what did Pollack and Pickett conclude?
the ability to perceive words in a conversation is aided by the context provided by words and sentences making up the conversation
who found that infants are sensitive to statistical regularities in speech signal?
Jennifer Saffran
what are the statistical regularities that Saffran used?
how different sounds follow one another in a language and how knowing these regularities help infants achieve speech segmentation
what is speech segmentation?
perception of individual words even though there are no pauses between words
knowing that ty follows pret- in the word pretty is an example of …
speech segmentation
what aids speech segentation?
knowledge of the meanings of words
what 4 things affect our ability to understand spoken words ?
- how frequently we have encountered a word in the past
- the context in which a word appears
- our knowledge of statistical regularities of our language
- our knowledge of word meanings
what is lexical ambiguity?
when words have more meaning
what solely aids understanding a word when lexical ambiguity occurs?
context within which a word appears
who showed people briefly access multiple meanings of ambiguous words before the effect of context comes into play?
Michael Tanenhaus
what technique did Tanenhaus use in his ambiguity experiement?
lexical priming
what is lexical priming and how did Tanenhaus use it?
priming that involves the meaning of words
reading a sentence with a target word followed by a probe stimulus word with a similar meaning
what were and describe Tanenhaus’ 2 conditions in his ambiguity experiment?
the noun-noun condition: target word is a noun and probe stimulus is a noun
- verb-noun condition: target word is a verb and probe stimulus is a noun
what was the task of Tanenhaus’ experiment?
reading the probe stimulus word as fast as possible
time between the end of the sentence (w/target word) and saying the probe stimulus word was _____ in Tanenhaus’s experiment?
reaction time
In Tanenhaus’ experiment, when priming of the word occurred reaction times were..
faster
what did Tanenhaus propose occurs when priming occurs?
all the ambiguous meanings of a word are activated immediately after a word is heard
what did Tanenhaus find comes to play when there’s a delay between the target word and stimulus probe?
context influence - where meanings are accessed
what is meaning dominance?
the relative frequency of the meaning of ambiguous words
what is biased dmoninance?
when one meaning of a word occurs more often than another
what is balanced dominance?
when one meaning and another meaning are equally as likely to occur
sentences creating context enable (3).. the ability to
- deal with the variability of word pronunciations
- perceive individual words in a continuous stream of speech
- determine the meaning of ambiguous words
what does determining the meaning of a sentence require considerations of?
syntax and parsing
what is syntax?
the structure of a sentence and discovering cues that language provides showing how words in a sentence relate to one another
what is parsing?
how meaning is created by the grouping of words in phrases
what are mental pyrotechnics?
involves understanding each word as it occurs and parsing words into phrases
what are garden path sentences?
when a sentence starts appearing to mean one thing but ends up meaning something else
what is temporary ambiguity?
when the first organization is adopted/understood, error realization occurs, and shifts to the correct organization of a sentence
what is the garden path model of parsing?
states that as people read a sentence their grouping of words into phrases is governed by heuristics
what are heuristics?
a rule that can be applied rapidly when making a decision
heuristics can lead to …
the wrong decision and then reconsideration of the initial parse to make appropriate corrections
what is the principle of late closure?
states that when a person encounters a new word, the person’ s parsing mechanism assumes this word is part of the current phrase
initially assuming “the cat examined .. “ is part of the current phrase in “the cat examined by the doctor” is an example of
the principle of late closure
what is the constraint-based approach to parsing:
the idea that information in addition to syntax participates in processing when a person reads/hears a sentence
how does the constraint-based approach to parsing work?
information of words in a sentence and context within each sentence can lead to predictions about how the sentence should be parsed
what technique did Michael Tanenhaus come up with when determining how scene information can influence sentence processing ?
visual world paradigm
what is non-linguistic information?
information provided by the scene
what is subject-related construction?
when a person/thing is exposed more in a sentence and has pronouns that follow them/it with a verb
what is object-related construction?
when a person/thing is not followed by a pronoun and verb
what do object-related constructions require more of?
the reader’s memory
what are examples of pronouns that are useful and aids the idea of subject-related construction?
who, which, and that
when are predictions helpful when dealing with a rapid pace of language?
when the language is degraded by noise or poor connection
who demonstrated participants making predictions by measuring eye movements while reading sentences?
Garry Altmann and Yuki Kamide
what were participants instructed to do in Altmann and Kamide’s experiment?
indicate whether the sentence heard can be applied to the objects in pictures shown
what did Altmann and Kamide conclude?
specific words can lead to the prediction that a certain word will be next
when looking a picture of a ball and cake and presented with the phrase the boy will eat.. what picture will someone look at faster?
the cake picture
when looking a picture of a ball and cake and presented with the phrase the boy will move.. what picture will someone look at faster?
the ball picture
how does someone create an understandable story when reading?
using the relationships between sentences
what are inferences?
determining what the text means by using knowledge to go beyond the information provided
what is a narrative?
refers to texts where there is a story that progresses from one event to another
what is coherence?
the representation of the text in a person’s mind that creates clear relations between parts of the text and between text parts and main story topic
what is anaphoric inference
determining who is being pictured when reading a sentence
what is instrument inference
determining what is being pictured when reading a sentence
what is casual inference?
inferring that events in one clause were caused by events in a previous clause
what is a situation model?
stimulates the perceptual and motor characteristics of the objects and actions in a story
Robert Stanfield and Rolf Zwaan presented sentences followed by pictures and asked if the sentence matched the picture being shown, what did they measure?
yes or no reaction times
what did Stanfield and Zwaan conclude?
people create matching perceptions to what they read/hear in their head
who observed how knowledge about a situation is activated in the mind as one reads a story?
Ross Metusalem
what did Metusalem measure in a brain activity scan?
N400 waves= negative response
if a word appearing in a story is unexpected, will the N400 response be larger or smaller?
larger
how did Metusalem’s experiment demonstrate a situation model?
the N400 wave size responses show how many things associated with a particular scenario are activated
who used fMRI activity to link movement, action words and brain activity?
Olaf Hauk
what is the most common form of language production?
a conversation between 2 people
when are conversations easier?
when both sides bring equal knowledge of the conversation topic
what is the given-new contract?
states that a speaker should construct sentences including 2 kinds of information
what are the 2 kinds of information a speaker should use to construct the conversation according to the given-new contract?
given information and new information
what is given information?
what the listener already knows
what is new information?
what the listener will hear for the first time
who demonstrated the consequences of not following the given-new contract?
Susan Haviland and Herbert Clark
describe Haviland and Clark’s experiment
presdnted pairs of sentences asking participants to press a button when they understood the second sentence following the first
what did Haviland and Clark observe?
it took longer for people to comprehend the second sentence when they weren’t related
what can Clark and Haviland conclude about the consequence of not following the given-new contract?
people need to make inferences because information was not given before they were told the new information
does the pair of sentences follow the given-new contract?
they pulled the beer out of the trunk.
the beer was warm.
yes
what is common ground?
the mental knowledge and belief shared among conversational parties
when establishing common ground, what is the referential communication task?
where 2 people are exchanging information in a conversation and this information involves a reference
what is a reference?
identifying something by naming or describing it
when creating common ground, what is entrainment?
the synchronization between the 2 partners
what is syntactic coordination?
when the conversational partners can end up coordinating their grammatical constructions
what are examples of syntactic coordinations
gestures, speaking rate, body positions, pronunciation
what is syntactic priming?
hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increasing the chances that the sentence will be produced with the same construction
who demonstrated syntactic priming in a card experiment where the participants could not see each other?
Holly Barnigan
what did Holly Barnigan conclude about syntactic priming?
speakers are sensitive to linguistic behaviour of other speakers and adjust their behaviours to match
what is theory of mind?
ability to understand what others feel, think, and believe while interpreting gestures and expressions
what is turn taking?
knowing when to enter a conversation
what is music considered?
the language of emotion
how does music represent language?
creates emotion through sounds that have no meaning
in language how is emotion created?
by prosody
what is prosody?
pattern of intonation and rhythm in spoken language
what are emojis?
pictographs used to indicate emotions in written language
what is tonic?
how notes of a melody are organized around the note associated with the composition’s key
when a song ends the way it started what is that called?
return to tonic
what is a P600 wave?
a positive response wave that responds to violation of syntax
what is Broca’s aphasia?
difficulty understanding sentences with complex syntax
what is congenital amusia?
difficulty with musical perception such as discriminating between simple melodies or reorganizing simple tunes
