cog psych

Question 1

Name and describe 6 of the fundamental properties of language.

Answer 1

Communicative: allows us to communicate ideas; record

Arbitrary: relationship between words and meaning is arbitrary

Allows Displacement: allow us to get out of immediate environment
-ex: talk about things that happened in the past or plans for the future

Regularly Structured: Symbols must be in the correct order (syntax, semantics)

Generative, Productive: Can produce novel utterances

Dynamic: Constantly changes with the times

Question 2

Describe the basic structure of language, distinguishing between phonemes, morphemes, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

Answer 2

phonemes: basic units of sound
-46 in English, 200 worldwide
-Ex: “bat” and “cat” differ by 1 phoneme

morphemes: smallest unit of language with meaning
-made up of word roots and suffixes/prefixes
-Content morphemes: ex: book, dog, course
-Function morphemes: ex: un-, -est, -s, -ed

syntax: rules that govern word order
-ex: In English, the order of a sentence is subject-verb-object (Alicia hunts quail)

semantics: rules that govern meaning
-ex: turtle = green animal with hard shell

pragmatics: social rules that govern language

Question 3

Describe 4 reasons why perception of phonemes is difficult.

Answer 3

1. Fast - as many as 50 phonemes a second
2. Coarticulation: pronouncing a phoneme in a way that anticipates a future phoneme (ex: pot and spot example)
3. Different people speak the same sentence differently
4. A person doesn’t speak exactly the same way all of the time

Question 4

What is the phoneme restoration effect?

Answer 4

filling in missing phonemes using context
-visual cues also help us hear phonemes
-Lip reading

Question 5

Describe Warren and Warren’s (1970) study of context and phoneme perception, focusing on their
methods and findings. How can these findings be explained?

Answer 5

Warren and Warren (1970): Ss hear sentences with a cough () spliced in to replace a phoneme
-Ss heard different phonemes depending on the context
-Ex: “…eel was on the axle” –> Ss claim they heard “wheel”
-Can be explained with the phoneme restoration effect

Question 6

How do visual cues aid in the perception of phonemes? Discuss, including in your answer a
description of the McGurk effect.

Answer 6

Visual cues also help up hear phonemes
-Lip reading

McGurk effect: refers to the influence of visual information on speech perception, when individuals must integrate both visual and auditory information
-we can fuse two sources of info

Question 7

Discuss the nature of hemispheric specialization in language.

Answer 7

Our discussion of hemispheric specialization has emphasized that the right hemisphere plays an important role in language comprehension, even though the left hemisphere receives most of the media publicity.

Question 8

Describe aphasia, distinguishing between the deficits associated with damage to Broca’s area and
Wernicke’s area. In the big picture, what is the significance of the fact that patients can have such
specific deficits?

Answer 8

The brain distinguishes between syntax and semantics
-Damage to Broca’s Area: difficulty getting words out; can’t produce
-Damage to Wernicke’s Area: difficulty with semantics; doesn’t make sense, word salad
-Our brains appear to parse form (syntax) separately from meaning (semantics)

Question 9

Do visual cues aid in the perception of words? Discuss, describing the methods and results of Jesse and
Massaro (2010).

Answer 9

-Visual information may help us perceive words

Jesse and Massaro (2010): Ss exposed to a song; there are 3 conditions
-Visual only: only see the singer performing with no sound
-Auditory only: only hear the singer performing with no visual information
-Audiovisual: receive both auditory and visual information
-Results:
> Visual only: 46%
> Auditory only: 47%
> Audiovisual: 69%

Question 10

Distinguish between the special mechanism and general mechanism approaches to speech perception.
Which approach does more recent research favor? Explain

Answer 10

Special mechanism: According to the special mechanism approach humans are born with a specialized device that allows us to decode speech stimuli. As a result, we process speech sounds more quickly and accurately than other auditory stimuli, such as instrumental music
-Follows the laws of a grandmother cell
General mechanism: The general mechanism approaches argue that we can explain speech perception without proposing any special phonetic module.
-Current research seems to favor the general mechanism approach.
-Humans exhibit categorical perception for complex nonspeech sounds.
-Other research supporting the general mechanism viewpoint uses event-related potentials (ERPs).
-This research demonstrates that adults show the same sequence of shifts in the brain’s electrical potential, whether they are listening to speech or to music.

Question 11

Discuss differences between reading text and spoken language.

Answer 11

Reading is visual and is spread out across space, whereas speech is auditory and is spread out across time.
2. Readers can control the rate of input, whereas listeners usually cannot.
3. Readers can re-scan the written input, whereas listeners must rely much more heavily on their working memory.
4. Readers usually encounter standardized, error-free input, whereas listeners often need to cope with variability, grammatical errors, sloppy pronunciation, and interfering stimuli.
5. Readers can see discrete boundaries between words, whereas listeners often encounter unclear boundaries in spoken language.
6. Readers encounter only the stimuli on a page, whereas listeners encounter both nonverbal cues and auditory cues, such as emphasized words and variations in pace. Researchers are just beginning to appreciate the importance of these additional cues
7. Children require elaborate teaching to master some written languages—such as written English—but they learn spoken languages much more easily.
8. Adult readers typically learn new words more quickly when they appear in a written form, rather than a spoken form.

Question 12

Discuss dual route models of reading, focusing on each of the mechanisms suggested and how they
accounts for both our reading of nonwords (e.g., nuft) and exception words (e.g., colonel).

Answer 12

dual route models of reading: we have 2 mechanisms for reading
-Direct look up of spelling in the lexicon (our mental dictionary) –> match written word to lexicon entry
-ex: colonel, pint –> pronunciation deviates from rules, but spelling gives access to lexicon

-Translation (indirect access) of written letters to sound to match auditory entry in lexicon
-Ex: slint, papperine –> not in lexicon, but do know rules to convert letters to sound

Question 13

Describe acquired dyslexia, distinguishing between surface dyslexia and phonological dyslexia.

Answer 13

acquired dyslexia: reading problem caused by brain damage; 2 types

1. Surface dyslexia: can read words and nonwords, but have trouble with irregular words
   -might read flood as rhyming with mood
   -have damage to spelling look-up route
2. phonological dyslexia: can read irregular words (yacht) and regular words, but can’t read non words
   -One patient could read words with 90% accuracy (satirical) but could not read any simple non words (eg: nust)
   -has damage to the letter-to-phoneme route

Question 14

Whole-word approach:

Answer 14

argues that readers can directly connect the written word— as an entire unit—with the meaning that this word represents .
-emphasizes that the correspondence between the written and spoken codes in English is notoriously complex
-argue that children should not learn to emphasize the way a word sounds. Instead, the whole-word approach encourages children to identify a word in terms of its context within a sentence.

Question 15

Phonics approach:

Answer 15

states that readers recognize words by trying to pronounce the individual letters in the word.
-“sound it out”
-argues that speech sound is a necessary intermediate step in reading. It also emphasizes developing young children’s awareness of phonemes.

Question 16

Whole-language approach:

Answer 16

reading instruction should emphasize meaning, and it should be enjoyable, to increase children’s enthusiasm about learning to read.
-Children should read interesting stories and experiment with writing before they are expert spellers.
-They also need to use reading throughout their classroom experiences

Question 17

Distinguish between deep structure and surface structure in sentences.

Answer 17

Deep structure: the underlying meaning of a sentence

Surface structure: the words used to create a sentence

Question 18

Provide an example of a sentence with the same deep structure but different surface structures.

Answer 18

We can have the same deep structures but difference surface structures
-ex: “Dan hit the ball” ; “The ball was hit by Dan”

Question 19

Provide an example of a sentence with the same surface structure but multiple deep structures.

Answer 19

Can also have same surface structure but multiple deep structures
-ex: 5th graders get to grill Lions (Detroit)

Question 20

What is a garden path sentence? What do such sentences tell us about the way we comprehend
sentences?

Answer 20

Garden path sentence: a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader’s most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning
-ex: We painted the wall with cracks

-We rely strongly on word order to interpret sentences and then revise if necessary

Question 21

Discuss how each of the following factors affect online sentence comprehension.
a. negatives

Answer 21

Negatives: If a sentence contains a negative word, such as no or not, or an implied negative (such as rejected), the sentence almost always requires more processing time than a similar, affirmative sentence

Question 22

Discuss how each of the following factors affect online sentence comprehension.
-Passive voice

Answer 22

Passive voice: Active is more basic. For example, we need to add extra words if we want to create the passive form of a sentence. As you might guess, the English language uses the active voice much more often than the passive voice. The active form is also easier to understand

Question 23

Discuss how each of the following factors affect online sentence comprehension.
-syntactic complexity

Answer 23

As discussed above, sentences with negatives and sentences worded in the passive voice cause processing difficulty. Sentences in the passive voice are indeed more grammatically complex than those in the active voice. In fact, syntactic complexity is a strong determinant of the amount of processing difficulty an individual will experience during language processing. More complex = more difficulty

Question 24

Discuss how each of the following factors affect online sentence comprehension.
-ambiguity

Answer 24

-Syntactic ambiguity: sometimes a sentence structure is ambiguous, especially if it contains no punctuation, a phenomenon often referred to as a syntactic ambiguity
-Lexical ambiguity: the fact that a single word can have multiple meanings.

Question 25

Discuss the constructionist view of inferences, describing the work of Huitema et al. (1993).

Answer 25

Constructionist view of inferences: readers usually draw inferences about the causes of events and the relationships between events
-This perspective is called a “constructionist view” because readers actively construct cohesive explanations when they integrate the current information with all the relevant information from the previous parts of the text, as well as their background knowledge.
-The constructionist view argues that people typically draw inferences, even when the related topics are separated by several irrelevant paragraphs.

Huitema et al (1993): studied brief stories like:
“1. Dick had a week’s vacation due
2. and he wanted to go to a place
3. where he could swim and sunbathe.
4. He bought a book on travel.
5. Then he looked at the ads
6. in the travel section of the Sunday newspaper.
7. He went to his local travel agent
8. and asked for a plane ticket to Alaska.
9. He paid for it with his charge card.”

Question 26

Describe several factors that encourage readers to draw inferences

Answer 26

As you might expect, people are more likely to draw inferences if they have a large working-memory capacity.
-They are likely to draw inferences if they have excellent metacomprehension skills.
These individuals are aware that they need to search for connections between two seemingly unrelated sentences
-People are also likely to draw inferences if they have expertise about the topic described in the text. In fact, expertise in an area can compensate for a relatively small working-memory capacity.
-Other research shows that people are not likely to construct inferences when they are reading scientific texts.

Question 27

What is a slip-of-the-tongue error? Describe, providing an example. As well, discuss the theory offered
by Dell to explain slip-of-the-tongue errors.

Answer 27

slips-of-the-tongue: Errors during speaking, in which sounds or entire words are rearranged between two or more different words. Slips of the tongue are informative because they reveal people’s extensive knowledge about the sounds, structure, and meaning of the language that they are speaking.
-Gary Dell and his colleagues propose that three kinds of slips-of-the-tongue are especially common in English:
1. Sound errors, which occur when sounds in nearby words are exchanged—for example, snow flurries → flow snurries.
2. Morpheme errors, which occur when morphemes (the smallest meaningful units in language, such as -ly or in-) are exchanged in nearby words—for example, self-destruct instruction → self-instruct destruction.
3. Word errors, which occur when words are exchanged—for example, writing a letter to my mother → writing a mother to my letter. Furthermore, we are likely to create a word (e.g., leading), rather than a nonword (e.g., londing) when we make a slip-of-the-tongue error.

Question 28

Distinguish between iconic, deictic, and beat gestures.

Answer 28

conic gestures: gestures with a form that represents the concept about which a speaker is talking. For example, a speaker telling her friend about a car crash that she witnessed on the way to work might vigorously push her left and right fists together as she explains the impact.

Deictic gestures: involve pointing to some object or location while speaking, and are often accompanied by words like “This” or “That.”

Beat gestures: on the other hand, are gestures that occur in a rhythm that matches the speech rate and prosodic content of speech. These gestures do not convey specific information to a listener, but may be made by a speaker to help that speaker maintain a current speech pattern.

Question 29

Describe Cook and Tanenhaus’ (2009) study of gestures.

Answer 29

Cook and Tanenhaus (2009): asked participants to solve the Tower of Hanoi puzzle by themselves.
-Participants in one condition were asked to learn how to solve the puzzle while working with a “real-life” version of it. Crucially, the discs in this “real-life” version of the task were relatively heavy given their size, such that participants had to use some arm muscle in order to lift and move the discs.
-In a second condition, a separate set of participants taught themselves how to solve the puzzle by working with it on a computer display. In this condition, however, participants were able to slide the discs across the display using the computer mouse without doing any heavy lifting.
-After learning the puzzle, participants in both conditions became teachers.
-They were asked to teach new participants (the new learners) how to solve the puzzle.
-During the teaching session, the new learners were seated in front of a computer screen displaying the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, and the teachers explained to the new learners how to solve it.
-The computer mouse-movements made by the new learners were recorded during the process.
-Four aspects of the results reported by Cook and Tanenhaus highlight the powerful role that gesture plays during communication.
-First, the teachers made gestures as they explained the puzzle to the new learners that contained information about how they themselves had originally learned the task.
-Those who had to lift heavy discs produced higher gestures while explaining the puzzle to the new learners than those who just had to slide a cursor across the screen.
-Second, new learners who received instructions from the teachers in the real-life condition made significantly higher and more arched movements while moving the discs around the computer display than did the learners who were taught by teachers in the computer condition.
-Third, the content of the speech made by teachers in either condition did not differ in any respect. Thus, no information in the speech produced by any of the teachers explicitly mentioned things like “slide” or “lift.”
-This observation means that the different movements produced by the new learners did not occur due to speech differences.
-Instead, differences in the height and shape of the gestures made by teachers in each condition were the cause of different movements in the new learners.
-When speakers gesture, they may be transmitting information that they didn’t know they were transmitting! And, the information transmitted through gesture even influenced someone else’s behavior.

Question 30

Discuss why work on gesturing reflects embodied cognition.

Answer 30

In recent years, cognitive psychologists have become increasingly interested in a concept called embodied cognition. Embodied cognition emphasizes that people use their bodies to express their knowledge.
-In other words, there is an ongoing connection between your motor system and the way we process spoken language, for example, when you make gestures or indicate some kind of motion.
-Notice that the embodied cognition approach focuses on concrete physical actions, rather than the abstract meaning of language.
-However, the recent attention to embodied cognition has convinced many psychologists that we frequently think nonverbally, and that much of our cognitive processing involves using our perceptual and motor systems in order to mentally simulate events.
-Given the emphasis on action, research on gesture is often discussed in relation to theories of embodied cognition.
-During naturalistic communication, speakers make gestures and listeners have the ability to access information contained in those gestures.
-This observation is but one example of how information not contained in a verbal linguistic signal contributes to communication.

Question 31

What is the critical period hypothesis? How is age of acquisition related to second-language
proficiency? Discuss in terms of:
a. phonology
b. vocabulary
c. grammar

Answer 31

The critical period hypothesis: your ability to acquire a second language is strictly limited to a specific period of your life. Specifically, the critical period hypothesis proposes that individuals who have already reached a specified age—perhaps early puberty—will no longer be able to acquire a new language with native-like fluency. Fortunately, however, the current research evidence does not support a clear-cut, biologically based “deadline” for learning a second language

a. Age of acquisition is not related to vocabulary in the new language.

b. Age of acquisition is related to phonology.

c. Age of acquisition is sometimes related to grammar for people whose first language is different from English; but, there may be no relationship when the first language is similar to English.

Question 32

Name at least 5 advantages enjoyed by binlingual speakers. Are there any disadvantages?

Answer 32

Bilinguals acquire more expertise in their native (first) language. For example, English-speaking Canadian children whose classes are taught in French gain greater understanding of English-language structure. Bilingual children are also more likely to realize that a word such as rainbow can be divided into two morphemes, rain and bow

2. Bilinguals are more aware that the names assigned to concepts are arbitrary. For example, many monolingual children cannot imagine that a cow could just as easily have been assigned the name dog. A number of studies have examined metalinguistics, or knowledge about the form and structure of language. On many measures of metalinguistic skill—but not all of them— bilinguals outperform monolinguals.
3. Bilingual children are better at following complicated instructions and performing tasks where the instructions change from one trial to the next. For example, Bialystok and Martin (2004) asked preschoolers to sort some cards that featured either a blue circle, a red circle, a blue square, or a red square. The researchers first instructed them to sort the cards on one dimension (e.g., shape). Later, the researchers instructed them to sort the cards on the other dimension (e.g., color). Bilingual children were much faster than monolingual children in switching to the new dimension.
4. Bilinguals perform better on concept-formation tasks and on tests of nonverbal intelligence that require reorganization of visual patterns. Bilinguals also score higher on problem-solving tasks that require them to ignore irrelevant information
5. Bilinguals excel at paying selective attention to relatively subtle aspects of a language task, while ignoring more obvious linguistic characteristics
6. Bilingual children are more sensitive to some pragmatic aspects of language. For example, English-speaking children whose classes are taught in French are more aware than monolinguals that—when you speak to a blindfolded child—you may need to supply additional information.
7. Bilingual adults who have dementia typically develop signs of dementia later than monolingual adults with dementia

The disadvantages of being bilingual are relatively minor. People who use two languages extensively may subtly alter how they pronounce some speech sounds in both languages. Bilingual individuals may also process language slightly more slowly, in comparison to monolinguals. Furthermore, bilingual children may have somewhat smaller vocabularies for words that are used in a home setting. However, these disadvantages are far outweighed by the advantages of being able to communicate effectively in two languages

Question 33

Discuss the pragmatics of language, focusing on the following:
a. common ground
b. directives

Answer 33

Pragmatics: focuses on the social rules and world knowledge that allow speakers to successfully communicate messages to other people

a. Common ground: occurs when conversationalists share the similar background knowledge, schemas, and perspectives that are necessary for mutual understanding
-For example, speakers should make certain that their listeners are paying attention and they have the appropriate background knowledge. If their listeners look puzzled, speakers need to clarify any misunderstandings. Unfortunately, however, speakers often think that they are communicating effectively, even when their listeners cannot understand their message

b. directive: a sentence that asks someone to do something.