exam 3 Flashcards
what are the properties of language?
- creative: language has infinite potential meaning an infinite number of sentences that can be created
- rule governed: sentence structure, word combination, syntax
what are the structure of sentences ?
- surface structure: organization of words
- deep structure: the underlying meaning of a sentence
Sentences can have different surface structure but the same deep structure and vice versa
what are the classes of words?
- content words: describe objects, acts, properties
2. function words: show relationship among other words (the, a)
what is a morpheme?
smallest unit of meaning in a language
ex: dogs the s means its plural
sound structure: what is a phoneme?
smallest unit of sound that can change the meaning of a word
ex: mad vs bad
what is a phone?
the sound that is actually produced
/pin/ vs /nip/ different sounds of /p/
Functions of language
speech acts: the goal of an utterance that relies on what the receiver of the speech knows
includes given information: speaker assumed lister knows info and new information: speaker assumes lister doesn’t know information
language comprehension
syntactic analysis: cue word strategy
relative pronouns signal a new clause
In a study, people had a difficult time paraphrasing and understanding the sentences they heard when the sentences didn’t contain relative pronouns
*relative pronouns lead to a better understanding of information
*in English relative pronouns aren’t always necessary for sentences to be grammatically correct but they aid in understanding
language comprehension SVO strategy
SVO strategy: subject, verb, object
In English, we assume that in a sentence the first noun is the subject the first verb is the main verb and the second noun is the object
When a sentence doesn’t follow this order it is more difficult to parse
What kinds of knowledge is necessary for comprehension?
- semantic knowledge (vocabulary)
- syntactic knowledge (grammar)
- world knowledge (understanding words in the context of the world)
- conversation postulates (turn-taking, telling truth)
after we understand what do we remember?
study: took complex sentences and broke them down into 1s,2s, and 3s. participants when asked test phrases some they had heard some they hadn’t The 4 was the full sentence which everyone thinks they have heard but they hadn’t.
The study showed that we don’t “tape record” what we hear but we gather a general understanding and summary.
stages of language production
stage 1 - select a meaning to be expressed
stage 2 - select a syntactic structure for clauses in a sentence
stage 3 - insert stems of content words in syntactic structure, forms the bare bones of a sentence
stage 4 - specify morphological forms of the content words and select function words, adding things like: -ing, -s,-ed, the, a
stage 5 - specify phonemic representation for the clause, each word is assigned phonemes, at this point haven’t said anything but you have the sounds you will need
stage 6 - select the motor commands needed
stage 7 - utter the clause, then proceed to the next clause in the sentence
evidence that stage 2 is before stage 5 language production
study - analyzed when people made misordered phonemes
found that people in their sample 98/100 times people make phonemic errors within one clause
This showed evidence that syntactic structure was in place first
evidence that stage 3 is before stage 4 language production
study- participants were given a verb and told to create the noun associated with it
reaction time was longer for words that in order to change it to a noun you had to change the stem
This study showed evidence that stem words (stage 3) are added before adding morphological elements (stage 4)
selecting motor commands in language production: 2 hypotheses
motor command hypothesis: each phoneme is concerted into a particular set of motor commands and it is always the same regardless of context *no evidence for this
coarticulation effect: differences in motor commands of a phoneme depend on its context, we anticipate the vowel sounds that follow (ex: tea and too) *lots of evidence to support this
speech perception :listening 2 hypotheses
- invariance hypothesis: states there is an invariant set of acoustic cues for each phoneme, says the pattern is always the same for phonemes *a spectrogram disproves this hypothesis, also no evidence
- parallel transmission: information about phonemes is transmitted simultaneously to the ear, cues for phonemes intersect and cannot be isolated within a word
analysis by synthesis theory (words): listening
3 processes that occur
1. bottom-up processing: collecting phonemes we think we heard and performing a feature analysis, taking in what we heard from environment
2. top-down processing: person’s expectation of what word will be said: “the dog with big teeth was chasing me and…..” you would expect bit to be the next word
if you cannot understand what was said by using those two processes you resort to:
3. third track: synthesize what other sounds might be correct, take into account accents or how you might make the sound
listening: understanding sentences
study by picket and pollard
participants were asked to perceive a string of words, listened to recorded conversations and then removed and isolated a word from the sentence, the isolated word was played back
less than 50% of participants could understand the word when it was isolated
*shows the importance and reliance on context to make sense of what we hear
Lexical analysis How do we determine the meaning of an ambiguous word?
Swinney study
Participants were given a sentence with an ambiguous word that would lead them to conclude one meaning of the word. The question was if we would look up both definitions or not.
The findings were that immediately after all possible meanings of the words were activated (bottom-up processing)
After 3 seconds and the letter string being showed, only 1 meaning is activated (top-down processing and context kick in)
2 models of reading
- recording hypothesis: words are recoded from visual to speech codes, either you say it out loud or to yourself
visual->auditory-> meaning (used for harder texts or unfamiliar words), strategy early readers use - direct access hypothesis: reader goes directly from the visual to meaning (used for familiar or easy to understand texts)
visual-> meaning
