Language

Question 1

What is language

Answer 1

A system of communication using sounds of symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas and experiences.
Human language allows us to be creative, go beyond simple signals that animals use to communicate needs like ‘feed me’ and ‘danger’.

Question 2

The creativity of human language

Answer 2

Hierarchical system: consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units.
Governed by rules: components can be arranged in certain ways, but not in other ways.

Question 3

Language is universal

Answer 3

The purpose of language is to communicate.

The need to communicate is strong.

Question 4

The universality of language

Answer 4

Deaf children invent sign language that is all their own.
All humans with normal capacities develop a language and learn to follow its complex rules.
Language is universal across all cultures.
Language development is similar across cultures.

Question 5

Studying language in cognitive psychology

Answer 5

B. F. Skinner: language learned through reinforcement (behavioural).
Chomsky: human language coded in genes. Underlying basis of all language is similar.
Children produce sentences they have never heard and that have never been reinforced.

Question 6

Psycholinguistics

Answer 6

Discover the psychological process by which humans acquire and process language.
4 major concerns:
Comprehension (how do we understand spoken and written language?)
Speech production (how do people produce language, both mental and physical processes)
Representation (how is language represented in the mind and brain?)
Acquisition (how do people learn a language?).

Question 7

Lexicon

Answer 7

A person’s knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words.
Adults know about 50,000 words.

Question 8

Phonemes

Answer 8

Shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word.
Eg cat = c/a/t
47 phonemes in English
We vs wet - ‘e’ makes a different sound.

Question 9

Morphemes

Answer 9

Smallest unit of a word that has a meaning of a grammatical function.
Bathroom - 2 morphemes (bath + room)
Jumping - 2 morphemes (jump + ing)

Question 10

Phonemic restoration effect

Answer 10

‘Fill in’ missing phonemes based on context of sentence and portion of word presented.
Can be influenced by the meaning of the words that follow the missing phoneme eg she *aved goodbye - interpret as waved.

Question 11

Perceiving individual words in sentences: speech segmentation

Answer 11

When people talk there are no breaks between words.

Speech segmentation: perceiving individual words from the continuous flow of speech.

Question 12

Reading: the word superiority effect

Answer 12

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 non word.

Question 13

Word frequency effect

Answer 13

We respond more rapidly to high-frequency words like home than to low-frequency words like hike.
Demonstrated through lexical decision task.

Question 14

Lexical decision task

Answer 14

Read a list of words and nonwords. Indicate quickly which are words and which are not. Easier if list contains high-frequency words.

Question 15

Lexical ambiguity

Answer 15

Some words have multiple meanings eg bank or bug.

Question 16

Meaning dominance

Answer 16

Some meanings of words occur more frequently. Eg tin (type of metal) has high dominance because it occurs more frequently than tin (metal container), which has low dominance.

Question 17

Balanced dominance

Answer 17

When a word has more than one meaning but the meanings have about the same dominance eg cast (members of a play) and cast (plaster cast).

Question 18

Semantics

Answer 18

Meanings of words

Question 19

Syntax

Answer 19

Specifics the rules for combining words into sentences.

Question 20

Understanding sentences: parsing

Answer 20

Mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases.

Question 21

Syntactic ambiguity

Answer 21

More than one possible structure or meaning in a sentence. Caused when there are multiple ways of parsing.

Question 22

Garden path sentences

Answer 22

Sentences that begin by appearing to mean one thing, but then end up meaning something else eg after the musician played the piano was wheeled off the stage

Question 23

Temporary ambiguity

Answer 23

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

Question 24

Syntax-first approach to parsing

Answer 24

Grammatical structure of a sentence determines parsing.

Late closure: parser assumes new word is part of the current phrase until it doesn’t make sense.

Question 25

Interactionist approach to parsing

Answer 25

Both syntax AND semantics are taken into account simultaneously as we read or listen to a sentence.
Eg the spy saw the man with the binoculars.

Question 26

Making inferences

Answer 26

Determining what the text means by using our knowledge to go beyond the information provided by the text.
Numerous different types of inference.

Question 27

Understanding texts and stories: Coherence

Answer 27

Representation of the text in one’s mind so that information from one part of the text can be related to information in another part of the text.

Question 28

Anaphoric inference

Answer 28

Connecting an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence.
Eg Alex is driving me crazy. He keeps messing up my room: ‘He’ is Alex.

Question 29

Instrument inference

Answer 29

Inferences about tools or methods.
Eg Shakespeare wrote Hamlet at his desk.
Infer he was probably using a quill and ink.

Question 30

Casual inference

Answer 30

Events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous sentence.
Eg Bob took some Panadol. His headache went away.
Infer the Panadol took the headache away.

Question 31

Situation model

Answer 31

A mental representation of what a text is about.
Represent events as if experiencing the situation.
Point of view of protagonist.

Question 32

The given-new contract (conversations)

Answer 32

States that a speaker should construct sentences do that they include two kinds of information: 
Given information (information the listener already knows),
New information (information that the listener is hearing for the first time). 
New information can then become given information.

Question 33

Syntactic coordination

Answer 33

Using similar grammatical constructions when conversing with another person.

Question 34

Syntactic priming

Answer 34

Production of a specific grammatical construction by one person increases chances of other person using that construction.

Question 35

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Answer 35

The nature of a culture’s language can influence the way a person thinks.

Question 36

Producing language: errors

Answer 36

2 aspects of speech errors:
Frequency of different types of errors
Pattern of errors: errors are not random, there are rules/patterns involved.

Question 37

Producing language: kinds of errors

Answer 37

Phoneme exchanges: swap a phoneme or sound
Word exchanges: swap a word
Word substitution: replace one word with a similar word possibly with the same number of syllables.