Language Flashcards
Language
A symbolic shared 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
Why is there more than one language ?
Language responds to needs
Complexity of language (morphology) decreases with …
More people speaking the language
- because more people speaking a language means it has to be easy to speak (more inclusive)
Cold climate languages have more words for _____
Snow
Words for snow in Swedish: 25
Words for snow in Scots: 421
Tonal languages (tonal contrasts) are spoken in ______ climates
Warmer
Aphasia
Impaired language function, usually from brain injury to the left hemisphere
Broca’s aphasia (non-fluent)
Expressive aphasia
* Intact language comprehension
* Impaired speed production and articulation
Broca’s aphasia in patient Tan
Could only speak one syllable (Tan)
* Still tried to communicate via hand gestures, tone, inflection : suggests these aspects of language are distinct from speech production
Brain damage that causes Broca’s aphasia
Lesion in the left inferior frontal gyrus : Broca’s area
Traits of Broca’s aphasia
Struggle to produce speech
* Halted speech
* Simple sentences
* Speaks in only nouns and verbs
* Drops words from sentences
* Writing also affected
Range of deficits :
From producing certain words → problems with all forms of language (depends on amount of damage to Broca’s area)
Cause of Wernicke’s aphasia (fluent aphasia)
Posterior superior temporal lobe damage : Wernicke’s area
Traits of Wernicke’s aphasia
Speech is fluent but incomprehensible
* Normal prosody and intonation
* interrupts others and speak rapidly
* words do not make a coherent thought, lacks meaning (word salad)
* Includes paraphasias and neologisms, or invented words, in speech
Verbal paraphasia in Wernicke’s aphasia
Substituting a word with something related
* Shares meaning with intended word
E.g. swapping term brother with sister
Phonemic (literal) paraphasia in Wernicke’s aphasia
Swapping or adding speech sounds (metathesis)
* Shares sounds with intended word
* Calling Crab Salad: Sad Cralad
Neologisms paraphasia in Wernicke’s aphasia
Invented words (that do not convey meaning in aphasia)
* Different from those shared with community like Mansplain
e.g. kiuwerold
Conduction aphasia is due to …
Damage to the arcuate fasciculus ( band of white matter tracts) that causes disconnection between Broca and Wernicke’s areas
Traits of conduction aphasia
- Can read, write, and speak
- Can usually understand spoken messages
- Word-finding difficulty
- Unable to repeat words or sentences (message cannot be sent to production area after perception)
Brain lateralization
Language is often considered left lateralized, but :
Broad aspects ((non-literal language skills) of language are supported by the right hemisphere
* Prosody and pitch to convey intonation
* Mood, attitude, gestural communication
Traits resulting from right-hemisphere lesion
- Problems understanding the emotion of a phrase
- Problems understanding sarcastic speech
Are we pre-equipped with language capabilities according to the nuturist view ?
No. Language is acquired through the same mechanisms as skill learning (behaviorist view)
Are we pre-equipped with language capabilities according to the naturist view ?
Yes. We are born with the innate capacity to learn language
Nuturist or behaviourist view
Language acquisition is skill or associative learning
* Explicit training of language
* Trial and error reinforcement as well as modelling other people shapes language
The innateness hypothesis
Grammar, syntactic structure, is separate from semantic meaning and cognition; and it is innate
Chomsky and Naturist views
Language is innate because :
* Language is not stimulus dependent or determined by reinforcement
* Language is way too complex, can be learned without punishment and acquired rapidly
* We can understand and speak what we have not heard before
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
Entity that supports language
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
Convergence : support for the naturist view
Children are exposed to different learning situations, yet converge on the same grammar
E.g. All children follow the Structure-dependent hypothesis when forming double-auxiliary questions
Uniformity : support for the naturist view
There is uniformity of developmental milestones of learning language across children
Poverty of stimulus argument
The linguistic environment of a child is not sufficient for a child to learn a language via reinforcement, rules or imitation alone
* A child doesn’t hear enough language to acquire all language
* This means they won’t have enough opportunities to learn from mistakes
* This means there must be something innate about language
Critic of the poverty of the stimulus argument
The environment is not so impoverished
* A child hears around 6,000 to 21,000 words per day!
- Evidence that rules are not all innate
* Adult reformulations of children’s speech target the structure but not meaning : as rules need to be refined, maybe the rules are not so innate in the first place
Phonological ambiguity and top-down knowledge
You use context and internal knowledge of speech sounds to “hear’
E.g. reading a word primes you to hear it (McGurk effect)
Lexical ambiguity
A single word form can refer to more than one different concept e.g. BARK
( > 80% of English words have more than one dictionary entry)
Basis of Puns
Cross-modal priming task results
- for analyzing if homophones activate both meanings in the brain
Lexical decision task
Participants heard the word bug in no context or biasing context to hear the insect meaning
With short delay :
Bias and no context→ both meanings were active
* Bug primes spy (context inappropriate) and ant (context related)
With long delay :
Only context biased meaning active
* Bug primes only ant (context related)
Conclusion :
Both meanings are initially retrieved, but contextually inappropriate meaning is quickly discarded
Sentence parsing
- dividing a sentence into words
- identifying them as nouns, articles, verbs
Syntactic mbiguity can come because ..
We hear sentences incrementally and there is often more than one way to parse a sentence (words can be nouns and verbs)
Garden path sentence
- Sentences with multiple syntax structures
- Interpreting a word one way leads you awry
Syntax First theory of sentence parsing
- We use grammatical rules to interpret a sentence as we hear or read it (one direction)
- Local or specific
- You may get to the end and “oops” wrong meaning, so must go back
The horse raced past the barn fell
Constraint based model of sentence parsing
- 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
Linguistic Relativity
Language and thought are interconnected
Linguistic Universalists
Language and thought are independent
Sapir Whorf Hypothesis
Language changes how we think and perceive
* People who speak different languages think differently
- Whorf believed Inuit people could perceive snow differently due to vast vocabulary
Colors across languages study
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 were faster to respond for colors that fell into different than from the same blue category
* English speakers showed no effect
- suggests language impacts perception
Color across languages : 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
Although they identified the colors differently, they seemed to match a remembered color patch to the right one equally well.
