Chpt 11: Language (PSY311) Flashcards
Def: language
Language: a system of communication that uses sounds and/or symbols that enables us to fully get the extent of our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and our experiences.
Animal communication is more _____ than ours.
rigid
Our language provides a way to arrange a sequence of various _______ - even nonverbal cues which include ASL
signals
Def: Hierarchical nature of language
it consists of a series of small components to make up larger and much more unique ones.
Def: Rule-based nature of language
these components can be moved around in different ways while also abiding by our syntax rules
Our need to communicate is powerful to the point that when deaf kids find themselves in an environment where no one understands ASL, they start to _______ sign language themselves to get messages across to others.
invent
We all have normal _______ to develop a language and learn complex rules, even if they aren’t aware of those rules.
But, many ppl find learning ________ really hard but they can still use the same language everyday.
capacities, grammar
Language is ________ and there are SO many languages in the world.
universal
Kids start learning a language at ____________ Even more so when they reach 2 years of age.
7mon old.
Even if almost all languages are diff, they are still unique bc they still utilize diff _______ and diff rules for _______________; they all have verbs, nouns, etc.
sounds, sentence structure
Difference between Broca’s and Wernicke’s area?
Broca’s study of patients with brain damage has led to the proposal that an area in our frontal lobe (which is the Broca’s area) is for our production of a language.
Wernicke’s area is responsible for understanding a language; it’s located in our temporal lobe.
What was B.F Skinner’s theory on how we learn language?
B.F Skinner in his book, he claimed that language is learned thru reinforcement.
Kids learn appropriate behavior by being rewarded and punished for wrong answers.
What was Chomosky’s theory of how we learn language?
Chomosky published a book in which he proposed that human language is coded in the genesis.
Humans are genetically programmed to walk, to acquire and to effectively use language.
Concluded that even tho we have lots of languages, the underlying basis of all of them are similar.
Chomsky saw studying language as a way to study the properties of the mind & therefore disagreed with the behaviorists idea of how our mind isn’t a valid topic of studying.
Def: Psycholinguistics
a field of psychology that’s concerned with language.
The goal is to discover psychological processes by how we acquire & process language.
4 major goals for psycholinguistics:
Comprehension - how do we understand spoken & written language?
Representation - How do we represent language in our minds?
Speech production - How do we know how to produce language? What are the physical & mental processes of which speech production is formed?
Acquisition - How do we learn language? How do we learn additional languages later in life?
Def: Semantics
the meaning of language as a whole.
This is important bc words can have multiple meanings.
Def: Lexical semantics
the meaning of separate words
Def: Word frequencies
how often a word appears in a language
High - often seen
Low - not often seen
Def: Word frequency effect
refers to the fact that we respond faster to high frequency words more than low frequency ones.
This is important bc it affects how we process the word.
Def: Lexical decision task
the task is to decide as fast a s possible whether strings of letters are words or made up words.
Def: Speech segmentation
the perception of individual words even tho there are often no pauses in between them.
Our ability to hear & understand spoken words is affected by:
How often we have encountered that one word in the past.
The context in which the words appeared
Our prev knowledge of statistical regularities of our language.
Our knowledge of word meanings
Def: Lexical priming
priming that involves the individual meaning of words. Occurs when a word is followed by another with a similar meaning.
Doesn’t happen if the word is presented before a word that has a meaning that has nothing to do with the word before it
Tanenhaus & Co measured lexical priming by 2 conditions:
The noun-noun condition: a word is presented as a noun followed by another.
The verb-noun condition: a word is presented as a verb followed by a noun.
Def: Meaning dominance
the relative frequency of the meanings of ambiguous words.
Def: Biased dominance
when one word meaning occurs more often than the other.
Def: Balanced dominance
when both meanings of a word are equally likely to occur.
Understanding how sentences create context makes it plausible to:
Deal with lots of word pronunciations
Perceive each word in a continuous stream of speech instead of one word at a time.
Allows us to determine the meaning of ambiguous words
Def: Syntax
the sentence structure of a language.
The study of syntax involves ___________ cues that languages can provide and allows us to _________ how each word relates to one another in one sentence.
discovering, analyze
Speech ______ over time
unfolds
Def: Parsing
a process of determining how a group of words create its meaning and how the meaning is created by grouping these words together into meaningful sentences.
Def: Garden path sentence
begins to appear to mean one thing but ends up meaning something different
Def: Temporary ambiguity
one organization is adopted & then once the error is seen, the person starts to change the sentence to fit the organization.
Garden Path Model of Parsing was created by who?
Frazier
Def: Garden Path Model of Parsing
a model that states that while we’re reading a sentence, we start to group these words together to make meaningful phrases that are done by lots of processes.
When we have a sentence that turns out to be a Garden Path, we have to reconsider the initial parse & make the corrections.
Not only do we have rules for parsing, but they are based on our syntax.
Abides by Heuristics
Def: Heuristics
the processes that are responsible for generating those words into phrases in the Model. This is a rule that can be done quickly to make a fast decision that is involved in parsing in which the decisions abt the sentence structures as they unfold.
Heuristics, processes that happen at ____ words per min.
200
Def: Late closure
states that when we encounter a new word, we start parsing due to the assumption that the word is part of the current phrase, so each new word is added to the current phrase for as long as it can.
Def: The Constraint-based Approach to Parsing
Constraint-based approach to parsing: processing that occurs when we read or hear a sentence.
________ of a sentence is influenced not only by the context provided by stories but also by the _________ provided by scenes.
Parsing, context
Def: Visual world paradigm
involves determining how info in a scene can influence how a scene is processed.
Done by Tanenhaus & co.
Def: Subject-relative construction
a sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is also the subject in the embedded.
Def: Object relative construction
a sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is the object in the embedded cause.
One reason _______-relative construction is more difficult to understand is bc it demands more of the reader’s memory. Also bc in order to understand this makes it more complicated due to the senator also being the _______ in both the main & the embedded clause.
object, subject
Correct __________ aid us when dealing with the rapid pace of language.
predictions
Predictions become even more important when language is ____________.
degraded
Predictions also play an important role in ______________ stories & having _________.
understanding, convos
Def: Inferences
determining what the text means by using our knowledge to go beyond the info that is already provided.
Def: Narrative
refers to texts in which there is a story that progresses from one event to another
Def: Coherence
the representation of the text in a person’s mind that creates clear relations between parts of the text & between parts of the text & the main topic of the story.
Can be created by a number of diff types of inference
Def: Anaphoric inference
an inference that connects an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another.
__________ inferences are difficult bc of the way info is presented in sentences & our ability to make use of ____________ we bring to the situation.
Anaphoric, knowledge
Def: Instrument inference
an inference abt tools or methods that occur while reading text or listening to speech.
Def: Causal inference
inferring that the events described in one clause were caused by events that happened in a prev clause.
Inference creates ___________ that are necessary for creating _____________ in text, & making these inferences can uncle creativity by the reader.
connections, coherence
Def: Situation model
simulates the perceptual & motor characteristic of the objects & actions inside a story.
The idea that many things associated with a specific scenario are activated is connected with the idea that we create a __________ model while we’re reading.
situation
Another aspect of the situation model approach is the idea that a reader or listener ____________ the motor characteristics of objects in a story.
simulates
Understanding stories involves understanding sentences by determining how words are ____________ into phrases; then determining the relationships between each sentence, often using inference to _____ sentences into a single part of the story, and lastly; creating a mental ____________ or simulation that involve both perceptual & _______ properties of objects & events in the story.
organized, link ,representation, motor
Conversations, or dialogues, provide another example of a _________ skill that looks simple but it is actually complex.
cognitive
Def: The Given-new contract
states that a speaker should construct sentences so that they include 2 kinds of info; info that the listeners know & info that listeners might not know yet.
Def: Common ground
the mental knowledge & beliefs shared among conversational parties.
Def: Referential communication task
a way to study how common ground is established - this is a task in which at least 2 ppl are exchanging info in a convo and when this info involves reference.
Def: Entrainment
a result of the process of creating common ground - synchronization between the 2 partners.
Conversational partners can establish similar ________, speaking rate, body positions, & even _____________ sometimes.
gestures, pronunciation
Def: Syntactic coordination
an effect caused by conversational partners that end up coordinating their grammatical construction.
Def: Syntactic priming
Syntactic priming: hearing a statement with a specific syntactic convo increases the chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction.
Is important bc it can lead us to coordinate the grammatical form of their statements while holding up a convo.
On the __________ side of convos, ppl’s knowledge is taken into account & helps __________ common ground if necessary.
semantic, establish
On the ________ side of convos, ppl coordinate or align the syntactic form of their statements; which makes speaking easier & uses less ___________ to deal with the task of alternating between understanding & producing messages.
syntactic, resources
Def: Theory of mind
the ability to understand what others feel, think, or believe and also is the ability to interpret & react to one’s gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, & other things we can use for cues
Rayner & Duffy (‘86)
Notes that we fixate & look at low frequency words for longer bc it’s less accessible knowledge, more time determining meaning.
Altmann & Kamid (‘99)
Participants were looking at an image.
Participants’ eye movements were tracked.
Since the cake in the pic is the only edible object in the pic, participants could predict correctly, before hearing the word cake when they heard the word eat.
Stanfield & Zwaan (2001)
Participants were given a sentence.
Then were shown a pic & asked to respond yes or no when asked if it was an object mentioned in the sentence that was provided.
If shown a matching image, participants responded faster than when shown a non matching image. The info was more readily available to them, primed.
This results shows that our situation model includes info abt the objects involves
