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WINTER 2023 > Language > Flashcards

Language Flashcards

1
Q

psycholinguistics

A

the study of how we learn, understand, and produce language

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2
Q

why does language distinguish humans from other animals?

A

animals have fixed sets of communication (humans can combine the same words to produce novel complex thoughts)
while other animals have vocal or motor capabilities to produce language, they lack the cognitive abilities to generate novel language

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3
Q

functions of language

A

sharing complex thoughts, emotions, plan the future, organize into groups, transfer information across generations

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4
Q

behaviorist view of language (nurturist view)

A

language is learned through conditioning and reinforcement (correct/incorrect feedback) and modeling, language is stimulus-dependent (external stimulus required)

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5
Q

universal grammar

A

contains basic scaffolding of syntax without details (which need to be learned), this is innate in every human

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6
Q

gene FOXP2

A

responsible for universal grammer
mutations result in developmental verbal apraxia which affects the ability to pronounce syllables and words

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7
Q

poverty of the stimulus

A

the rules of grammar are ambiguous with just examples, so language cannot be learned only using examples/conditioning

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8
Q

evidence for poverty of the stimulus

A

adults adopt a grammatically insufficient version of a language when they move elsewhere (pidgin), but their children combine the pidgin and their country’s language to form new grammar (creole) = not learned because it is a new language
deaf isolates (not exposed to traditional sign language) develop their own kind of sign language

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9
Q

evidence for a naturist view of language

A

universal grammar, poverty of the stimulus
language acquisition develops in the same way for all infants (cooing 0-3 months, babbling 4-8 months, single words 8-12 months, two word phrases 1-2 years, telegraphic speech 2-3 years, complex speech 3-4 years)

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10
Q

child-directed/infant-directed speech

A

speech directed to a child
motherese/parentese (sing-song, exaggerated vowels, repetition) helps children identify beginnings and ends of sentences and draws attention to important concepts - accelerated language learning

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11
Q

phonemes

A

smallest unit of speech (sounds) that don’t have meaning, but can change the overall meaning

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12
Q

morphemes

A

smallest unit of meaningful speech

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13
Q

resolving phonological ambiguity (identifying phonemes)

A

context (people were unable to identify a single word when taken out of context)
phonemic restoration effect: brain fills in the missing phoneme based on expectations
McGurk effect: brain uses mouth movements (visual signal) which move characteristically based on sounds

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14
Q

how to segment speech into individual morphemes?

A

statistically: we encode the frequency with which sounds occur together

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15
Q

lexical processing

A

matching speech units to meaning

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16
Q

homophones

A

words which sound the same but have different meanings

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17
Q

homographs

A

words which are spelled the same but have different meanings

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18
Q

lexical decision task (LDT) and results

A

a string of letters is presented and Ps must decide if it is a word
RT is faster when words that are related appear together
RT is faster when the words are common

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19
Q

resolving lexical ambiguity (lexical processing)

A

using context (within a certain room, environment) to decipher ambiguity of individual words that could have different meanings - we first identify meaning as the most frequent usage

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20
Q

does context prevent other meanings of individual words from being activated in lexical processing?

A

brain briefly considers all meanings before setting on the context-dependent one (RT on a LDT was faster for both context and non-context if words presented within 200ms of being primed with biased or unbiased sentences - cross-modal priming task)

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21
Q

parsing

A

breaking up a sentence into its constituent parts, can lead to ambiguity because we hear sentences incrementally

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22
Q

garden-path sentence

A

sentence that leads to incorrect parsing, to individuals take the wrong path which leads to a dead end (we have to reinterpret the clause when we get to the end)

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23
Q

clause, subject, predicate

A

clause expresses a full idea of a subject doing something which is indicated by the predicate

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24
Q

syntax-first approach to parsing

A

we parse based on syntax without considering the meaning of words beyond the type (noun or verb?)

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25
Q

late closure

A

we attach words to the sentence we’re currently processing rather than assuming a new phrase
“the man who whistles tunes pianos” - we think ‘whistles’ is the predicate so assume tunes is a noun, but we are forced to re-parse because ‘pianos’ is a noun = ‘tunes’ must become the predicate

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26
Q

evidence against syntax-first approach

A

we do take semantics into consideration: “the defendant examined by the lawyer” vs. “the evidence examined by the lawyer” - a defendant can examine something so re-parsing is needed vs. evidence cannot examine something so no re-parsing

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27
Q

what do we use to help us parse sentences?

A

visually-available stimuli (‘put the apple on the towel in the box’)
prosody (many potential layers of meaning depending on intonation, not grammar - ‘I never said she took the money’), punctuation helps indicate prosody to disambiguate sentences and prevent incorrect parsing

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28
Q

discourse processing

A

ability to understand language that is at least several sentences long
involves integration of STM and LTM
depends on anaphoric inference and causal inference, and pre-existing knowledge (inferring meanings)

29
Q

anaphoric inference

A

guess about which word in a first sentence (antecedent) is being referred to in a second sentence (like a pronoun)

30
Q

causal inference

A

assumption that something mentioned at one stage leads to something later on
depends on general knowledge of how the world works

31
Q

backward/deductive/necessary inference

A

referring to previous information to infer something that is necessary to understanding
takes processing time, so sentences which require it have longer RT - indicative of online inference

32
Q

elaborative inference

A

adding information that isn’t essential for understanding of a text - done in a way that is consistent with expectations

33
Q

online vs. offline inference

A

online: during reading or listening
offline: during consolidation or retrieval

34
Q

instrumental inference

A

tool used for a task is inferred even if it’s not required to understand the meaning
a type of elaborative inference

35
Q

does elaborative inference occur online or offline?

A

can occur online if a sentence is rich enough in information so as not to require backward inference (“leisurely pace” - implies nothing vs. “hole-in-one” - implies golf)

36
Q

neurolinguistics

A

relationship between linguistic behaviour and the brain

37
Q

arcuate fasciculus

A

bundle of fibers that connects Broca’s and Wernicke’s (it’s absent in other species, so may be important for humans’ linguistic capabilities)

38
Q

right hemisphere’s role in language

A

higher-level discourse processing, elaborative processing

39
Q

language relativity and evidence

A

the language we speak affects other areas of cognition
people are better able to distinguish between colours when their language has more than one word for that colour

40
Q

nativism

A

linguistic universalists: differences among languages are superficial and don’t affect other areas of cognition

41
Q

natural language processing (NLP)

A

subfield of AI concerned with making machines that can produce and understand language; emotional tone, making summaries, engaging in conversations with humans

42
Q

Turing test

A

human conversing with a human and a robot and must decide which is the robot

43
Q

sequence-to-sequence learning

A

taking in a string of text and produce a string of text in response - machines don’t learn the rules of syntax (ChatGPT)

44
Q

definition of language

A

shared symbolic system for purposeful communication

45
Q

how is language affected by the environment?

A

morphology (complexity) decreases with languages spoken by more people
lexical tones are determined by climate (tonal languages that use pitches as meanings less common in cold countries because they lack vocal control because of cold air)

46
Q

how are language and gender style related?

A

countries with gendered language experience more gender inequality
women tend to use “we” and more adjectives, more of a reverse accent (upspeak)

47
Q

aphasia

A

impaired language function from a brain injury (also from dementias)

48
Q

Broca’s aphasia

A

non-fluent/expressive aphasia - cannot produce speech, but can understand it
speech is halting (nouns and verbs), writing also affected, amount of tissue damaged is correlated to amount of impairment

49
Q

patient Tan

A

could only speak one syllable but tried to communicate using gestures, tone, inflection - discovery of Broca’s aphasia

50
Q

Wernicke’s aphasia

A

fluent - speech is produced but has no meaning (word salad)
uses nonwords and made-up words (paraphasias are common)

51
Q

verbal paraphasia

A

substituting a word with another semantically-related one

52
Q

phonemic paraphasia

A

swapping or adding speech sounds (sad cralad to mean crab salad)

53
Q

neologisms

A

using made-up words (mansplain)
can be culturally-shared, but in Wernicke’s they’re not, so aren’t communicating meaning

54
Q

paraphasia

A

misusing words, common in Wernicke’s

55
Q

conduction aphasia

A

damage to the arcuate fasciculus = disconnection between understanding and producing speech and cannot repeat speech
load-dependent: deficit increases the more complex the sentence is

56
Q

lateralization of language

A

left for language (not fully understood), right for broader aspects of language (prosody and pitch to convey mood, meaning, discourse segmentation, gestures)

57
Q

classic model of language

A

dorsal pathway from A1 - speech production and movements
ventral pathway from A1 - speech comprehension
may underspecify how language is represented in the brain (damage to Broca’s doesn’t always result in an aphasia and damage to other parts of the brain can result in the same deficits)

58
Q

principles of the innateness hypothesis

A

grammar and syntax are separate from meaning (since we can create grammatical sentences that don’t make sense)
language acquisition device supports principles of how to learn a language
our innate language skills are rules of grammar (universal grammar) that need to be adjusted for the specific language

59
Q

language acquisition device (LAD)

A

abstracted entity that supports language (hardwired into our brain, controls principles of learning a language)

60
Q

support for the innateness hypothesis

A

convergence (children are exposed to different learning situations, but converge on the same grammar)
uniformity: children go through the same learning stages in the same order
poverty of stimulus argument (linguistic environment is too deficient for children to learn through reinforcement - they hear a small set of infinite possibilities, doesn’t have opportunities to learn from mistakes)

61
Q

issues with the poverty of stimulus argument

A

what information is innate?
how to disprove the argument?
how to determine what linguistic information is available to a child?
adults’ reformulate speech based on grammar - children extract regularities to form rules

62
Q

types of ambiguity in language

A

phonological (within a sound)
lexical (within a word)
syntactic/parsing (within a sentence)

63
Q

constraint-based models of parsing

A

we use constraints to resolve ambiguity: semantic and thematic context, expectation, frequency (opposition to syntax-first)

64
Q

surface dyslexia

A

impaired at reading irregular words because reading happens letter-by-letter (they have to sound out, cannot compare to mental dictionary)

65
Q

phonological dyslexia

A

impaired at reading nonwords or made-up words because they have to compare words to a lexicon (cannot sound out letter-by-letter)

66
Q

dual route model of reading

A

mental dictionary (whole-word reading) and grapheme-phoneme conversion (sounding out)

67
Q

language of thought hypothesis

A

nativist view; medium of thought is an innate mentalese, not language (which is why children can think when they don’t have language) - cannot be tested

68
Q

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

A

linguistic determinism (strongest view): person’s thoughts are determined by language (people from different languages have a fundamentally different view of the world)
weaker view that thoughts are influenced by language (colour studies in which language shaped colour memory)

WINTER 2023 (14 decks)

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