Language Flashcards
What is language?
- A shared symbolic system for purposeful communication
- Symbolic: There are units to reference something else
- Shared: It is common among a group of people
- Purposeful: To communicate and translate thoughts
When does morphology (complexity) in language decrease?
With languages spoken by more people
What are lexical tones determined by?
- partly determines by climate
What is the difference in language between warmer and colder climates?
- Tonal languages spoken in warmer climates (meaning through differences in tone)
- colder climates have more words for snow or ice
What is aphasia?
- Impaired language function, usually from brain injury
What are the types of aphasia?
- Broca’s non fluent aphasia
- Wernicke’s fluent aphasia
- Conduction aphasia
What is Broca’s aphasia?
- Expressive aphasia
- Intact language comprehension
- Speech is halted and difficult to produce (mostly just nouns and verbs)
- Typically writing is affected in a similar manner
- problems generating all forms of language (depends on amount of damage)
- Impaired speech production and articulation
- problems expressing and producing speech
- patient Tan
Who is patient Tan?
- Broca’s aphasia
- Could only speak one syllable (Tan)
- Still tried to communicate via gestures, tone, inflection
- Large lesion in the left inferior frontal gyrus (broca’s area)
What is Wernicke’s aphasia?
- Posterior superior temporal lobe damage (typically left hemisphere)
- Written and spoken comprehension is affected
- Language content is not meaningful nor comprehensible
- speech can be produced but content has no meaning
- a symptom is the use of paraphasias
What are paraphasias?
- language errors or misuse of words
What are the types of paraphasias?
- verbal
- phonemic (literal)
- neologisms
What is verbal paraphasia?
- substituting a word with something semantically-related
- Shares meaning with intended word
- ex: Swapping term brother with sister
What is phonemic paraphasia?
- literal
- swapping or adding speech sounds
- Shares sounds with intended word
- ex: Calling Crab Salad: Sad Cralad
What are neologisms?
- using a made-up word
- ex: mansplain, situantionship
What is conduction aphasia?
- Neural pathway from between Broca’s and Wernicke’s area
- Reminds us language depends on a network of brain regions
- Speech production and comprehension intact
- Impaired repetition
- Load dependent
- amount of damage determines problems
What is the brain lateralization for language?
- Language is often considered left lateralized
- Lateralization not fully understood nor linked to handedness
- New data indicating up to 70% of left-handed people demonstrate left hemisphere language dominance
- Broader aspects of language are supported by the right hemisphere
What is the right hemisphere’s role in language?
- Prosody and pitch to convey intonation, mood, attitude, gestural communication and overall comprehension
- Right hemisphere seems to be important for higher-order non-literal language use
- Example: Speech prosody (the music of language) - the flow of how we say things
- Right-hemisphere lesions disrupt ability to interpret and express prosody of speech
- Problems understanding the emotion of a phrase
- Problems understanding sarcastic speech
A patient comes to the clinic with some language problems. You ask this person to name some common items. For example, you point to a pair of shoes for them to name and they respond “feet-houses”. What type of aphasia would you think this person has?
a. None, they are simply using a cultural neologism
b. Broca’s
c. Wernicke’s
d. Conduction aphasia
c
Are we pre-equipped with language capabilities according to the nuturist/behaviourist view?
- No. Language is acquired through the same mechanisms as skill learning.
- Language acquisition is skill or associative learning
- Explicit training of language
- ## Trial and error reinforcement as well as modelling other people shapes language
Are we pre-equipped with language capabilities according to the naturist view?
- Chomsky
- Yes. We are born with the innate capacity to learn language.
- Language is not stimulus dependent or determined by reinforcement
- Language is complex and acquired rapidly and allows us to understand and speak what we have not heard before
What is the innateness hypothesis?
- Grammar, syntactic structure, is separate from semantic meaning and cognition
- Right grammar but no meaning
- We are born with principles of grammar
- Language Acquisition Device (LAD): Entity that supports language (hardwired into brain)
- Universal Grammar: A part of the LAD that includes rules for all languages
- Children only need to learn language-specific aspects to put “on top” of Universal Grammar
What are the support for the innateness hypothesis?
- convergence
- uniformity
What is convergence?
- Children are exposed to different learning situations, yet converge on the same grammar
- suggesting pre existing set of grammatical rules
What is uniformity?
- Go through same stages, in the same order, when learning language
- 0-3 months: cooing
- 4-8 months: babbling
- 8 months-1 year: single words
- 1-2 years: two word phrases
- 2-3 years: explosion of word knowledge; 2-3 word telegraphic speech
- 3-4 years: complex multiword speech
What is the poverty of the stimulus argument?
- The linguistic environment of a child is not sufficient enough to allow that child to learn a language via a reinforcement, rules or imitation
- A child doesn’t hear enough language samples to acquire all language, doesn’t have enough opportunities to learn from mistakes
- There must be something innate about language
- Can’t be exposed enough to learn everything
What is evidence that rules are not all innate?
- the environment is not so impoverished
- Adult reformulations of children’s speech target the structure but not meaning
- Children extract regularities from experiences to form rules
A supporter of the innateness hypothesis of language would consider a behaviorist is incorrect in thinking that
language ______.
a. is learned through feedback for “correct” or “incorrect” language
b. cannot be learned through reinforcement for “correct” or “incorrect” language
c. is an innate capability
d. only developed in humans
a
What are psycholinguistics?
- The building blocks of language
- phonemes
- morphemes and words
- syntax
- semantics
What are phonemes?
- smallest linguistic unit
- d, o, g
- english has a few dozen phonemes to produce morphemes
What are morphemes?
- the smallest meaningful units of language
- dog
What is syntax?
- rules that govern how words are arranged in a sentence
- grammar
What are semantics?
- the meaning
What is language comprehension?
- Understanding the message – semantics – from language
- Resolving types of linguistic ambiguity
- Use context and top-down processing
What are the types of linguistic ambiguity?
- phonological
- lexical
- syntactic or parsing
What is phonological ambiguity?
- within sounds
- phonemes
- Determining phonemes depends on audio signal, which is often noisy
- You use context and internal knowledge of speech sounds to “hear”
- We use more than just auditory input for language comprehension
What is lexical ambiguity?
- within a word
- A single word form can refer to more than one different concept
- homophone
- > 80% of common English words have more than one dictionary entry
- Basis of puns
What are homophones?
- words that sound the same with different meanings
- The correct meaning is resolved by sentence context
What is the cross modal priming task?
- When did lexical decision SHORTLY after (short SOA) hearing the word bug: both meanings were active: Bug primes spy (context inappropriate) and ant (context related)
- When did lexical decision at a DELAY (long SOA) from hearing the word bug: only context biased meaning active: Bug primes only ant (context related)
- Both meanings initially retrieved, Contextually inappropriate meaning is quickly discarded
What is syntactic and parsing ambiguity?
- within a sentence
- Sentence parsing: dividing a sentence into words and identifying them as nouns, articles, verbs
- Ambiguity can come because we hear sentences incrementally or There is often more than one way parse a sentence (words can be nouns and verbs)
- garden path sentence
What is a garden path sentence?
- Sentences with multiple syntax structures
- Interpreting a word one way leads to faulty interpretation
What are the 2 theories of sentence parsing?
- syntax fist
- constraint based model
What is the syntax first (garden path) approach?
- We use grammatical rules to interpret a sentence as we are hear/read it
- Local or specific
- We parse with only grammar principles, in one direction, may get to the end and “oops” wrong meaning, so must go back
What are the constraint based models?
- We use non-grammatical information to help interpret sentences and resolve any ambiguity
- Global or holistic
- We use more than grammar to parse sentences
- Non-grammatical information can be used (semantic and thematic context, expectation, frequency)
What are linguistic universalists?
- Language and thought are independent
What is linguistic relativity?
- Language and thought are interconnected
- Sapir Whorf Hypothesis
- Language changes how we think and perceive
- People who speak different languages think differently
Does grammatical gender affect thoughts?
- when an object is “female” people describe it with more stereotypical words
Colours across languages
- Russian language discriminates between lighter (“goluboy”) and darker (“siniy) blues, not English
- English and Russian speakers performed a color discrimination task with blue colors
- Task with no memory or language demands
- Russian speakers faster for colors that fell into different blue categories than those from the same blue category. English speakers showed no effect
- Language affects perception
Inconsistent findings
- English Language speakers: 11 words for color
- Dani tribe in Indonesia: 2 words for color
- Test 1: Named color patches: two groups performed this differently
- Test 2: Match /categorize learned color patches, no group difference
- Suggests accessing color category without language labels does not change across language
Reading
printed word –> mental dictionary (lexicon) –> speech
What are the types of dyslexia?
- surface
- phonological
What is surface dyslexia?
- Reads letter-by-letter, sounds out words
- Difficulty matching words to a mental dictionary
- Impaired at producing irregular words (25% of English words), like ‘Comb” or “Thought”
What is phonological dyslexia?
- Reads by comparing whole words to mental dictionary (lexicon)
- Difficulty reading letter by letter, sounding out words
- Impaired at reading non-words or new words
What route does phonological dyslexia use?
printed word –> mental dictionary (lexicon) –> speech
What route does surface dyslexia use?
printed word –> grapheme-phoneme conversion (letter by letter) –> speech
Cheugy is a newer word in the English language, meaning “the opposite of trendy”. Francis encounters this word whilst scrolling through Tik Tok and has a very difficult time reading it. If Francis had dyslexia, he would likely have _____ and have problems with the ___ route to reading.
a. Surface; grapheme-phoneme
b. Surface; mental dictionary
c. Phonological; grapheme-phoneme
d. Phonological; mental dictionary
c
