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.
