Exam 4 Flashcards
Language Structure:
What is grammar?
- rules, the structure that governs language
Language Structure:
What is syntax?
- organization of a sentence
Language Structure:
What are semantics?
- the meaning of a sentence
Language Structure:
What is phonology?
- the sounds of a language
Language Structure:
What is orthography?
- the letters or script of a language
Language Development:
What is language acquisition? Where does it begin?
- learn language
- ## begins in the womb (ears start functioning and can hear sound patterns)
Language Development:
Describe DeCasper and Spence’s study
- pregnant women read to unborn child
- babies could chose to hear same story read by mother or a different story (chose based on rate of sucking pacifier)
- indicates babies knew difference between one story and another - so language learning even in babies
Language Development:
What is the critical period hypothesis? What evidence supports it?
- certain skills have to be learned at a certain point in time or they cannot be learned at all
- critical period for language development is puberty
- evidence: Genie - never taught language and at 13yrs could learn words but couldn’t put them together to form a sentence
Language Development:
What is Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device? How does it work?
- when exposed to language in the environment the “settings” for the particular language are keyed in
- we are equipped to learn language
- existing structure; we are also born with cog. concept of universal grammar
Language Development:
Describe Saffran et al’s study and their findings
- babies able to learn statistical patterns of sounds (esp. transitional probabilities which are likelihood of a particular sound following another sound)
- exposed to made up language (“bidaku, padoti, golabu, tupiro)”
- chose between hearing word or non-word: preferred nonword
- second exp chose between word and part-word: showed they understood where one word ends and next begins
Comparative Language:
What are four properties of human language that distinguish it from the communication patterns of other species?
- duality of patterning: units of meaning (words) are made up of units which are meaningless on their own (letters)
- arbitrary: words are arbitrary and are assigned meaning
- generative capacity: we can create new words whenever we want to
- recursion: take a sentence/thought & embed into another sentence (“nesting” ideas)
Comparative Language:
What have studies on animals indicated about animals’ ability to learn and use human language?
- Koko the gorilla: learned sign language but didn’t make grammatically correct sentences
- Kanzi the bonobo: understood what symbols meant
- show the animals can understand some human lang (at toddler level) but can’t further
Language Comprehension:
What is language comprehension?
- how we’re able to understand language
- know what spoken words mean and what words on a page mean
Language Comprehension:
What is the Wernicke’s area? What is Wernicke’s aphasia and its symptoms?
- left hem, temporal lobe
- area involved in lang comprehension
- Wernicke’s aphasia: “word salad” in which words come out but lack meaning, may also have difficulty understanding questions
Language Comprehension:
What is parsing?
- break input down into component words
- comprehension starts at word level
Language Comprehension:
What did Just and Carpenter (1980) find regarding word fixation? What do their findings tells us about word processing?
- measured how long eyes stayed on certain words
- longer on meaningful, unfamiliar, and first words
- also longer for words that take longer to say/read
- we don’t look at every single word but most of them, we may jump ahead but may need to backtrack
- how eye processes words while reading
Language Comprehension:
How are similar-sounding words stored in memory? What is neighborhood density?
- stored in same areas of memory
- “neighborhoods” are stores of sim. sounding words
- dense neighborhood has many words, so interference and competition in trying to figure out word (takes longer to figure out)
- when still hearing the word all the words in neighborhood become active
- as you hear more of the word some of the words in the neighborhood become inactive
Language Comprehension:
What do the results of Allopenna et al tell us about word comprehension?
- subjects focused on objects on computer screen and given sentence (request)
- where were people’s eyes looking when asked for “beaker” : equally likely to be looking at beaker or beetle
- start trying to find out what it means as we’re hearing it
Language Comprehension:
How do the results of Aaronson and Scarborough (1977) and Graf and Torrey (1966) demonstrate the importance of phrase boundaries in language comprehension?
- Aaronson and Scarborough: looked at how long people spend in between words; longer gaps between phrase boundaries
- Graf and Torrey: gave subjects sentences one line at and then tested comprehension; better comprehension when setnences broken up by phrase boundaries
- we process in terms of individual phrases not word by word
Language Comprehension:
How can a sentence like “they are cooking apples” have an ambiguous structure?
- some words can be used as verb or adjective (ex. cooking)
- inflection can give away the meaning of a sentence
Language Comprehension:
What are garden path sentences?
- as words are coming in, you are building on meaning so that initial interpretation has to be updated
- ex. the old train vs. the old train the young
Language Comprehension:
How do the results of Tyler and Marlsen-Wilson (1977) answer whether a sentence’s syntax is processed separately from its semantics?
- subjects read sentences and had to choose appropriate verb; either ambiguous sentence or unambiguous
- slower response time for unambiguous inappropriate verb, fastest for ambiguous appro.
- we use semantics to figure out what should come next w/ help of knowledge of syntax
- we work w/ syntax and semantics at the same time
Language Comprehension:
Describe Singer’s study and how it indicates that people make inference beyond info they’re provided with
- subjects told specific info and asked question
- in one condition given all info, other cond left out piece of info to see if they would infer
- RT for inference same as RT for control cond
- slower response time when more info was removed
Language Comprehension:
What is message subtext? What does it include?
- goes beyond language suing cues from the person delivering the message
- includes sarcasm, exaggeration and idioms (cultural phrases that go beyond literal meaning)
Language Production:
What is Broca’s area? What is Broca’s aphasia and its symptoms?
- frontal lobe, left hem
- language production
- Broca’s aphasia: difficulty speaking, writing, no problem with meaning but trouble getting words out
Language Production:
What are the three processes of speech production? (CFA)
- Conceptualization: figure out meaning you want to convey
- Formulation: use syntactical structure and pull in words to help convey the meaning
- Articulation: speech planning, control mouth and breath for words to come out
Language Production:
What is Garrett’s model of speech production? (FPS)
- expansion of formulation level
- functional level: figure out diff parts of speech (ex. subject, verb, object)
- positional level: figure out position/order of words
- sound level: figure out individual sounds of the words
Language Production:
What is the tip-of-the-tongue state speech error?
- functional level
- word that you know but cannot retrieve it from memory when you need it
Language Production:
What is the word substitution speech error?
- functional level
- instead of saying word we want we say a diff word that is related in meaning
Language Production:
What is the word blend speech error?
- functional level
- 2 diff words that might be appropriate in that spot in sentence but come out together/blended instead of picking one