Cognitive Psychology: Language production Flashcards
How did Genie’s language develop different from other children in general?
She had a vocab of over 200 words before she began combining them, much later than infants.The word types evident in her vocal vocabulary also deviated from the normal pattern (placed emphasis on words colours and numbers, shape and size terms and basic (dog) superordinate (animal) and subordinate (labrador) category words, she seemed to seek words that allowed her to differentiate between objects (pen, pencil) rather than overclassification (pen for pen, pencil, crayon etc)
Where did Genie suffer the most in language development?
Syntax or grammar
What is meant by the term syntax?
The rules governing the way words can be combined to create meaningful sentences
What is meant by content words?
Words that provide meaning to a sentence
What three key issues in language acquisition is highlighted in Genie’s case?
- There may be a critical or sensitive period for language acquisition, particularly for grammar
- The dissociation between the acquisition of vocabulary and the flexible use of this vocabulary to form novel sentences
- Language acquisition relies on interplay between input from the environment and biological makeup
What is meant by language production
The cognitive processes we use to translate a thought into a form of language (writing, speaking, sign language.)
What is meant by social cognition?
The ways in which people make sense of themselves and of others in order to function effectively in a social world.
WHat is meant by semantics?
The level of meaning in a language
What is meant by morphology?
The rules by which words are constructed and modifies
What is phonology?
The sound units within a language
What reason has been given for the relative lack of knowledge in speech formation as opposed to understanding?
It’s difficult to control experimental stimuli in order to study language production.while in studying comprehension we can manipulate words and sentences etc and measure it’s effects on comprehension..
give another term for speech formation being a top process?
It is conceptually driven (top down processes reflect the influence of higher order cognitive processes such as thoughts, beliefs and expectations.)
What name is given to our store of knowledge about words and their uses?
Mental lexicon
What are linguistic universals?
Features that are shared by all languages
What do all languages have according to Aitchison?
consonants and vowels,combine basic sounds into larger units, nouns, verbs, combine words in meaningful ways, can express who did what to whom, can express sentences as negatives, can express sentences as questions, are structure dependent (syntax), allow recursion (the use of a rule within itself)
What problems arise with Aitchison’s list?
Sign language doesn’t have vowels or consonants, some languages don’t reliably distinguish between nouns and verbs,
describe a type of language that may use other sounds than consonants and vowels
Tonal languages use changes in tone to alter the meaning of the word
Give examples of determinative words
a, the, every, several, this etc; describe a definiteness or quantity
Name as many of Hockett’s 16 design features for spoken language as you can
Vocal-auditory communication channel, broadcast transmission and directional reception (transmitted from the mouth and localised in space by the receiver), rapid fading, interchangeability (sender and receiver), feedback, specialisation (energy expended does not change the meaning), semanticity (has meaning), arbitrariness (except onomatopoeia), discreteness (composed of smaller units), displacement (displaced in time or space), productivity (novel sentences), cultural transmission (learned through interaction with more experienced users), duality (meaningful units through smaller meaningless), prevarication (can lie, nah lack obvious meaning), reflexiveness (can call about language) and learnability
What is meant by functional reference?
The use of animals of a specific call to stand for a specific object or threat
What is meant by the term phones in phonetics? What is phonetics?
Phones are the basic speech sounds, phonetics is the study of speech sounds
What’s the difference between a phoneme and an allophone?
Phonemes are the smallest meaningful sound units within a language, allophones are phonetic variants of the same phoneme
What is meant by phonotactic rules?
The stipulate which combinations of sounds are permitted in a language
What is a minimal pair?
Words that differ by just one phoneme
What are morphemes and morphology?
The meaning units of a language, the level of linguistic analysis concerned with morphemes and their role within words.
What is the difference between a free and bound morpheme, give an example
A free morpheme is a morpheme that can stand alone as a word (car) while a bound morpheme is a morpheme that cannot form a word on its own, but forms a word when attached to a free morpheme (the s in cars)
What is the function of derivational morphemes? give an example
Create new words with new meaning when added to a stem, they can also change the grammatical category of the word eg ify,ish,able,ment
What are words added to the beginning and end of words to alter the word called
suffixes and prefixes
What type of words do these apply to
content words
What are function words?
Provide grammatical structure that shows how contentwords relate to each other within a sentence
What morphemes attach to function words
none
What two aspects of the language system allow us to use words grammatically?
Syntax and morphology
Why is syntax used more often than grammar?
To differentiate it from prescriptive grammar which reflects conventions for sentence construction and is based on tradition and language prestige rather than actual language use
What is meant by NP and VP and what is their role in a sentence
A noun phrase is often the subject of a sentence while a verb phrase conveys the action of the sentence
What word order do languages such as english, german and french follow?
SVO (subject, verb, object)
What is meant by the object of the sentence?
word or words that receive the action, or is acted on by the subject.
What is the other most common word order?
SOV
What two word orders are most rare
OVS, OSV
What is meant by recursion?
The repeated application of a rule and, using recursion, the same rule can be applied again and again to extend sentences indefinitely by embedding phrases within sentences.
What is meant by discourse?
Multi sentence speech and includes dialogue, conversation and narrative
What is pragmatics?
The understandings of the communicative functions of language and the conventions that govern language use
Name some features of conversational turn taking
One person speaks at a time; person speaking changes; duration of a turn is not predefined; the order of turns also varies; transitions between turns are coordinated; overlap is minimized.
Briefly describe the experiment by strivers et al. regarding turn taking in conversation
Exploring whether linguistic turn taking is universal or if there is differences, 10 languages from hunter-gatherer to industrial, 2-6 per group with spontaneous conversations. Similarities emerged supporting a universal minimal gap, minimal overlap, factors that predicted response time were faster; headshake/nod= faster response, same with questions with a gaze.
What 4 conversation rules or maxims describing effective conversations were identified by Grice?
- Maxim of quantity; Provide enough information to be understood but not too much information
- Maxim of quality; The speaker should provide accurate information
- Maxim of relevance; the speaker should provide information that is relevant to the current topic of conversation
- Maxim of manner- Ambiguity and vagueness should be avoided
What are possible outcomes/ functions of violations of these 4 maxims?
Causes ore cognitive processes to determine the response, person may backtrack or repair the conversation or may be done deliberately to attempt humour (hyperbole etc)
Name some sources of Data about errors?
Examining temporary breakdowns in the systems functioning which occur from time to time under normal conditions, induced in the library when people have to articulate very quickly, study of acquired brain injury affecting speech and language processing