L7: Language

Question 1

What is hyperscanning?

Answer 1

Hyperscanning is when we measure brain signals of 2 or more people simultaneously (with EEG or MRI) to relate them to each other

Question 2

What is vocal learning?

Answer 2

The ability to imitate and learn vocalisations which do not belong to our innate repertoire.

Question 3

What is language?

Answer 3

System of communication using sounds or symbols to express feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.
Hierarchical system
Inherently social and communicative connected to social cognition.

Question 4

How is human language similar to animal communication?

Answer 4

• Dialects and syntax
• Signal modalities
• Complex species-specific systems
• Regulating social structures
• Genes that are linked with communication

Question 5

How is human language different from animal language?

Answer 5

• Animals can only communicate ‘here and now’.
• Humans can communicate past and future ideas and hypothetical scenarios.
• Animal systems are not ‘productive’.
• Creation of new patterns of signs in humans: we can understand and create indefinitely large number of utterances.

Question 6

Give two reasons why there is a universal need to communicate with language

Answer 6

• Language is critical for human quality of life: dead children invent sign language by themselves.
• Drive for communication is innate in typical developing children.

Question 7

What did Skinner propose about language in 1957?

Answer 7

Language is learnt through reinforcement-operant conditioning.
Children imitate speech that they hear and repeat correct speech because it is rewarded.

Question 8

What did Noam Chomsky propose about language in 1957?

Answer 8

Human language is coded in genes
Underlying basis of all language is similar
Children produce sentences that they have never heard and that have never been reinforced (challenging conditioning hypothesis).
Heavily focused on syntax (hierarchical structure in language).

Question 9

Why was Chomsky’s criticism of behaviourism important?

Answer 9

It was an important event in the cognitive revolution and began changing the focus of the young discipline of psycholinguistics, the field concerned with the psychological study of language.

Question 10

What are the four major concerns of psycholinguistics?

Answer 10

1. Comprehension
2. Speech production
3. Representation
4. Acquisition

Question 11

What are the six requirements for comprehension?

Answer 11

1. Decoding phonemes
2. Accessing the mental lexicon
3. Lexical semantics
4. Syntactic processing
5. Semantics
6. Discourse integration

Question 12

What is a phoneme?

Answer 12

The shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word.

Question 13

What are morphemes?

Answer 13

The smallest units of language that have a definable meaning or a grammatical function.

Question 14

What is phenomic restoration?

Answer 14

A phoneme in a spoken word in a sentence can be perceived even if it is obscured by noise.

Question 15

What is the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon?

Answer 15

When you know what you want to say but can’t remember the phonological structure automatically.

Question 16

What is speech segmentation?

Answer 16

Individual words are perceived in spoken sentences even though there are usually no breaks between words in the speech stimulus.

Question 17

What is word superiority?

Answer 17

Letters presented visually are easier to recognize when in a word.

Question 18

What is the difference between Broca’s and Wernicke’s area?

Answer 18

Broca - language production
Wernicke - language comprehension

Question 19

How does Broca’s aphasia happen?

Answer 19

It results from a stroke to the left inferior frontal cortex.
Makes speech slow and laboured.
Jumbled sentence structures.
Difficulty understanding syntactic variations.

Question 20

How does Wernicke’s aphasia occur?

Answer 20

Results from a stroke to the posterior left superior temporal cortex.
Speech is random and meaningless.
Inability to comprehend speech and writing.
General impairment in understanding meaning.

Question 21

What is world probability based on?

Answer 21

Lexical frequency and contextual expectations.
This helps resolving:
- ambiguity
- words can have multiple meanings.
- interpolation in difficult conditions

Question 22

What is meant by making inferences?

Answer 22

Participants infer meaning that extends beyond the wording of a sentence

Question 23

What is discourse processing?

Answer 23

Understanding text, stories and conversations

Question 24

What is coherence?

Answer 24

Representation of the text in one’s mind that creates clear relations between parts of the text and between parts of the text and the story’s main topic.

Question 25

What are situation models?

Answer 25

Representations of connected events that are linked to the following dimensions:
- space
- time
- agents
- casuality
- motivation/goal

Question 26

What have measurements of brain activity demonstrated?

Answer 26

How similar areas of the cortex are activated by reading action words and by action movements.

Question 27

What is the Theory of Mind (ToM)?

Answer 27

The understanding that another person has beliefs, thoughts, feelings, perspectives, knowledge, and other mental states that are different from your own.

Question 28

Why is the ToM important?

Answer 28

It is critical for making inferences about other’s interpretations to correctly interpret what they say

Question 29

How are conversations made easier?

Answer 29

By procedures that involve cooperation between ppts in a convo.
These procedures include the given-new contract, establishing common ground, and syntactic coordination.

Question 31

What is the sapir-whorf hypothesis?

Answer 31

The nature of a culture’s language influences the way people think (short: language influences thought).
E.g. different cultures discriminate different shades of colours.
Experiments show that these differences may occur mainly when colours are presented to the right hemisphere, so the left (language) hemisphere is activated.