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Cognitive Psychology > Language > Flashcards

Language Flashcards

1
Q

Define language.

A

A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas and experiences.

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2
Q

Language provides a way of:

A

Arranging a sequence of signals (sounds, letters and written words for written language, and signs for sign language) to transmit, from one person to another, simple things to messages that have never been relayed in the history of the world.

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3
Q

What does language make it possible to do?

A

Create new and unique sentences, because it has a structure that is hierarchical and governed by rules.

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4
Q

What does it mean that language is hierarchical?

A

It consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units.

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5
Q

What does it mean that language is governed by rules?

A

The components can be arranged in certain ways but not others.

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6
Q

How does the hierarchical structure and rules basis of human language make it different from animals?

A

It gives humans the ability to go far beyond the fixed calls and signs of animals to communicate whatever we want to express.

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7
Q

What is language primarily used for?

A

Communication.

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8
Q

Why is language considered universal?

A

The need to communicate using language is universal because is occurs wherever there are people.

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9
Q

Give five examples of the universality of language.

A

Deaf children develop their own form of sign language to communicate, all humans develop a language and learn to follow the rules, even if they are not aware of them, language is universal across culture, language development is similar across cultures, and languages themselves are unique but the same.

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10
Q

Why are all languages unique but the same? (4)

A

All languages have words that function as nouns and verbs, and all languages include a system to make things negative, to ask questions, and to refer to the past and present.

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11
Q

What did Skinner believe language was learned through?

A

Reinforcement.

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12
Q

How did Chomsky believe humans learned language?

A

He believed it was coded into our genes, due to the wide variation of languages all having a similar, underlying basis.

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13
Q

How did Chomsky see the study of language?

A

As a way to study the properties of the mind.

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14
Q

What was Chomsky’s most persuasive argument against Skinner’s behaviourist theory of language?

A

As children learn language, they produce sentences that they have never heard and that have never been reinforced.

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15
Q

What is psycholinguistics?

A

The field concerned with the psychological study of language.

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16
Q

What is the goal of psycholinguistics?

A

To discover the psychological processes by which humans acquire and process language.

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17
Q

What are the four major concerns of psycholinguistics?

A

Comprehension, speech production, representation, and acquisition.

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18
Q

Explain comprehension as defined by psycholinguistics.

A

How humans understand spoken and written language, including how they process language sounds, how they understand words, sentences and stories expressed in writing, speech, or sign language, and how people have conversations with each other.

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19
Q

Explain speech production as defined by psycholinguistics.

A

How people produce language, including the physical processes of speech production and the mental processes that occur as a person creates speech.

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20
Q

Explain representation as defined by psycholinguistics.

A

How language is represented in the mind and the brain, including how people group words together into phrases and make connections between different parts of a story, as well as how these processes are related to the activation of the brain.

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21
Q

Explain acquisition as defined by psycholinguistics.

A

How people learn language, including how children and people learn additional languages, as children or in later life.

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22
Q

When do children produce their first words?

A

In the second year.

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23
Q

Where do we store our knowledge of words?

A

A lexicon.

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24
Q

Define lexicon.

A

A person’s knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words.

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25
Q

What are the two smallest units of language?

A

Phonemes and morphemes.

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26
Q

What do phonemes refer to?

A

Sounds.

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27
Q

What do morphemes refer to?

A

Meanings.

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28
Q

Define phoneme.

A

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

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29
Q

Define morpheme.

A

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

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30
Q

What does spoken language involve? (2)

A

Perceiving sounds and assigning meanings to them.

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31
Q

When does the phonemic restoration effect occur?

A

When phonemes in speech are covered up by an extraneous noise, but they are still perceived in speech.

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32
Q

The filling in of the missing phoneme based on context produced by the sentence and the word containing the phoneme is an example of what?

A

Top-down processing.

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33
Q

What is the influence of the phonemic restoration effect by the meaning of the words that follow the missing phoneme an example of?

A

How our knowledge of the meaning of words and the likely meanings of sentences affects speech perception, and therefore top-down processing.

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34
Q

Why are words more difficult to understand out of context and alone?

A

People’s sloppy pronunciation in conversations.

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35
Q

Define speech segmentation.

A

The ability to perceive individual words even though there are no pauses between words in the sound signal.

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36
Q

How is speech segmentation aided? (3)

A

By knowing the meaning of words and being aware of the context in which they occur, and, as we learn languages, we learn that certain sounds are more likely to follow others within words and some sounds are likely to be separated by words.

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37
Q

What is the word superiority effect?

A

The finding that letters are easier to recognise when they are contained in a word than when they appear alone or are contained in a nonword.

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38
Q

Who demonstrated the word superiority effect?

A

Reicher.

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39
Q

What is the general method of the word superiority effect?

A

A stimulus that is either a word, a single letter, or a nonword is flashed briefly and followed by a random pattern. Two letters are presented simultaneously and subjects must decide which one they saw.

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40
Q

What does the word superiority effect show?

A

Letters in words are not processed one by one but each letter is affected by the context in which it appears.

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41
Q

What is a corpus of a language?

A

A collection of a large sample of utterances or written text from a particular language, used to indicate the frequency of different words, meanings and grammatical constructions in that language.

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42
Q

What is word frequency?

A

The frequency with which a word appears in a language.

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43
Q

What is the word frequency effect?

A

The fact that we respond more rapidly to high-frequency words than low frequency ones.

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44
Q

How is the word frequency effect demonstrated?

A

Through the lexical decision task.

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45
Q

What are saccadic eye movements?

A

How people move their eyes from place to place when looking at a scene.

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46
Q

Why are eye movements considered in relation to language?

A

Because, measurement of eye movements are an important tool in the study of reading.

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47
Q

What does measuring eye movements allow?

A

Finding which words they fixate on and for how long.

48
Q

What did Rayner’s eye movement study find about word fixations?

A

Subjects looked a low-frequency words for longer than high-frequency words.

49
Q

What is lexical ambiguity?

A

The existence of multiple word meanings.

50
Q

What is meaning dominance?

A

The fact that some meanings of words occur more frequently than others

51
Q

What is biased dominance?

A

When a word has two or more meanings with different dominances.

52
Q

Why is the process of accessing the meaning of a word complicated an influenced by multiple factors? (3)

A

The frequency of a word determines how long it takes to process its meaning, and the context of the sentence determines which meaning we access if a word has more than one meaning, and our ability to access the correct meaning of a word depends on the word’s frequency and a combination of meaning dominance and context.

53
Q

What is balanced dominance?

A

A word has more than one meaning but the meanings have about the same dominance.

54
Q

What is semantics?

A

The meanings of words and sentences.

55
Q

What is syntax?

A

The rules for combining words into sentences, or, creating meaning based on word order.

56
Q

What did Broca identify?

A

An area in the frontal lobe involved in language production.

57
Q

What did Wernicke identify?

A

An area in the temporal lobe involved in language comprehension.

58
Q

What is Broca’s area linked to?

A

Syntax.

59
Q

What is Wernicke’s area linked to?

A

Semantics.

60
Q

What is Broca’s aphasia?

A

Slow, laboured, ungrammatical speech caused by damage to Broca’s area.

61
Q

What do people with Broca’s aphasia have trouble processing?

A

Connecting words.

62
Q

What is Wernicke’s aphasia?

A

Fluent and grammatically correct speech that is incoherent.

63
Q

What can people with Wernicke’s aphasia not understand?

A

Speech and writing.

64
Q

What is event-related potential (ERP)?

A

The rapid electrical response recorded with small disc electrodes placed on a person’s scalp.

65
Q

Why is the ERP ideal for investigating how people understand conversation?

A

Because it records information in fractions of a second, and conversations are rapid, generally including three words per second.

66
Q

What is parsing?

A

The grouping of words into phrases.

67
Q

What is parsing central for?

A

Determining the meaning of a sentence.

68
Q

What are garden path sentences?

A

Sentences with appear to mean one things but end up meaning another.

69
Q

What do garden path sentences illustrate?

A

Temporary ambiguity.

70
Q

Why do garden path sentences demonstrate temporary ambiguity?

A

The initial words of the sentence are ambiguous, but the meaning is made clear by the end of the sentence.

71
Q

Who proposed the syntax-first approach to parsing?

A

Frazier.

72
Q

Explain the syntax-first approach to parsing.

A

As people read a sentence, their grouping of words into phrases is governed by a number of rules that are based on syntax.

73
Q

According to the syntax-first approach to parsing, what occurs when readers realise there is something wrong their parsing?

A

They take other information into account to reinterpret the sentence.

74
Q

Explain the syntax-first approach to parsing’s principle ‘late closure’.

A

When a person encounters a new word, the person’s parsing mechanism assumes that this word is part of the current phrase, so each new word is added to the current phrase for as long as possible.

75
Q

Why is late closure useful?

A

It leads to correct parsing.

76
Q

Explain the interactionist approach to parsing.

A

Information provided by both syntax and semantics is taken into account simultaneously as we read or listen to a sentence.

77
Q

How can we demonstrate a role for semantics in parsing?

A

Show how the meaning of words in a sentence can influence parsing right from the beginning.

78
Q

Who investigated how observing particular objects in a scene can influence how we interpret a sentence?

A

Tanenhaus.

79
Q

Who developed the visual world paradigm?

A

Tanenhaus.

80
Q

What is the visual world paradigm?

A

Determining how subjects process information as they are observing a visual scene.

81
Q

How do we use the environment to make predictions about what we read or hear?

A

We use the statistics of the environment (our knowledge of what is most likely to occur) to determine meaning.

82
Q

In addition to making predictions based on knowledge about the environment, readers also make predictions based on:

A

Their knowledge of how language is constructed.

83
Q

What is the ambiguity effect?

A

The longer time it takes to read a relative clause ambiguous sentence, compared to an unambiguous relative clause sentence.

84
Q

Why, in Fine’s study of ambiguous relative clause sentences, did the ambiguity effect vanish after 10 trials?

A

As subjects gained experience in reading verbs in the relative clause construction, they adapted to the new sentence statistics.

85
Q

What do the results of Fine’s study of ambiguous relative clause sentences find?

A

The role of experience in language processing, as subjects adjusted their expectations of the RC sentences to make them easier to process.

86
Q

An important part of the process of creating a coherent story is making:

A

Inferences.

87
Q

Define inferences.

A

Determining what the text means by using our knowledge to go beyond the information provided by the text.

88
Q

Who first demonstrated inference? (2)

A

Bransford and Johnson.

89
Q

One role of inference is to create:

A

Connections between parts of a story.

90
Q

What does narrative refer to?

A

Texts in which there is a story that progresses from one event to another, although stories can also include flashbacks of events that happened earlier.

91
Q

What is an important property of any narrative?

A

Coherence.

92
Q

Define coherence.

A

The representation of the test in a person’s mind so that information in one part of the text is related to information in another part of the text.

93
Q

What are anaphoric inferences?

A

Inferences that connect an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence.

94
Q

What are instrument inferences?

A

Inferences about tools or methods.

95
Q

What are causal inferences?

A

Inferences that the events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous sentence.

96
Q

Why is reading a story a dynamic process?

A

It involves transformation of the words, sentences and sequences of sentences into a meaningful story.

97
Q

Define a situational model.

A

A mental representation of what a text is about.

98
Q

What does the situational model approach propose?

A

The mental representation people form as they read a story does not consist of information about phrases, sentences or paragraphs, but is a representation of the situation in terms of the people, objects, locations and events being described in the story.

99
Q

How do we test if mental representations of a text are simulations?

A

Having subjects read a sentence that describes a situation involving an object and then indicate as quickly as possible whether a picture shows the object mentioned in the sequence.

100
Q

How do we measure the role of accessing information in understanding stories?

A

ERP.

101
Q

Conversations go more smoothly when participants bring:

A

Shared knowledge.

102
Q

Give one way speakers take steps to guide their listeners through the conversation.

A

The given-new contract.

103
Q

What does the given-new contract state?

A

A speaker should construct sentences so that they include two kinds of information, given information and new information.

104
Q

How does Clark see collaboration?

A

Central to the understanding of language.

105
Q

How did Clark refer to language?

A

A form of joint action.

106
Q

Clark proposes that understanding this joint action involves considering both:

A

The content of a conversation, in terms of given and new information, and the process by which people share information.

107
Q

Define common ground, with reference to conversations.

A

The speaker’s mutual knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions.

108
Q

What is syntactic coordination?

A

The process by which people use similar grammatical constructions.

109
Q

What does copying of form reflect?

A

Syntactic priming.

110
Q

Define syntactic priming.

A

Hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction.

111
Q

What occurs in a syntactic priming experiment?

A

Two people engage in a conversation and the experimenter determines whether a specific grammatical construction used by one person causes the other person to use the same construction.

112
Q

Explain Branigan’s experiment investigating syntactic priming.

A

Subjects were separated by a screen from a confederate, who made a priming statement, and the subject had to find a card that matched that statement. Afterwards, the subject picked up a card and read the description to the confederate. The interest was in how the subject phrased their answer.

113
Q

Branigan found that on 78% of trials, the form of the subject’s description matched the confederates, which supports what?

A

Speakers are sensitive to the linguistic behaviour of others, and adjust their behaviours to match.

114
Q

What does the coordination of syntactic form reduce?

A

The computational load involved in creating a conversation because it is easier to copy the form of someone else’s sentence than to create your own.

115
Q

What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

A

The nature of a culture’s language can affect the way people think.

Cognitive Psychology (6 decks)

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