COG PSYC- LANGUAGE Flashcards
What are the seperate functions of language?
- communication
- thinking
- social interation
- to record information
- to express information
- to express identity in a group
to attemp to control the environment
What is language?
- system that uses sounds or symbols to enable us to express thoughts; feelings; ideas and experience.
What is Hockett (1958)
Key features of a language that differentiate it from animal communication
- semanticity
- arbitrariness
- transmisiion
- displacement
- productivity
What is semanticity?
“The quality that a linguistic system has of being able to convey meanings, in particular by reference to the world of physical reality”
What is arbitrariness?
symbols that we give to things in the world are entirely arbitrary and you can see the arbitrariness in the fact that different languages use very different words to descrive the same thing.
What is Cultural transmission?
- we acquire language from other speakers not from parental genes
- pass on knowledge/ information/ skills from person to person - social transmission
animal communication is genetically transmitted.
What is displacement?
- allows for more complex communication
- e.g tomorrow i will go to school
longer term future planning
supports memory of previous events
What is productivity?
- we can combine linguistic elements and still understand a sentence perfectly.
- rule based creativity - infinite productivity based on a limited number of principles and rules
What are the structured levels in language?
Phonology - sound within the language
morphology - study of words/ word formation
syntax - structure and order of words into sentences (grammar)
semantics - in using language, our intention is to convey meaning
pragmatics - the context in which we use language
lexicon - words contained in language
what is speech segmentation?
- is the process of identifying the boundaries between words, syllables, or phonemes in spocken language
- mis-segmentation errors sometimes occur - four candles vs fork handles
What is the role of bottom up & top doen processing in language?
BU- processing of the acoustics from speech signal
TD - our knowledge about the world or pragmatics/ semantics/ morphology/ phonetics
- ultimately languge is a combonation of both BU and TD
Speech perception is multimodal - The McGurk Effect
an auditory-visual illusion that illustrates how perceivers merge information for speech sounds across the senses
