Language Flashcards
Function of language
Communication, express of emotion, social interaction, play, control the environment, recording facts , expression and social identity
Symbolic
An element that bears no intrinsic resemblance to its reference
Iconic
An element that bears a resemblance to its reference
E.g Word icon looks a bit like a page with writing on
What is a symbol?
Something that refers to something else
What is a phoneme?
The smallest sound unit that distinguishes words
44 in English
What is productivity?
Combining existing elects in a novel way
What is recursion?
The repetition of a run or a structure in a hierarchical way
Moving words around to create a new meaning
Linguistic competence
Describes linguistic knowledge including rules and structures
What is parsing?
Determining the syntactic structure of a sentence
Important part of determining the meaning of an utterance
Studying ambiguous sentences can hel answer how parsing operates
Garden path sentences
Provide evidence for incremental comprehension of syntactic structure. They are sentences that leads to an interpretation that seems right to start with but turns out to be wrong
How do people make predictions?
Altmann and Kamine- people predict the kind of thing that will be mentioned
Prediction about conceptual category
Language comprehension may therefore involve language production
Bottom up processing
Rely strictly on the input
Top down processing
Uses information from higher levels when processing lower levels
What is an inference?
Any piece of information that is part of our situation model that is not explicit states
Logical inferences
Logically implied by meaning of words
Bridging inferences
Relate new information to old information
Elaborative inferences
Use word knowledge to extend what has been said
Types of bridging inferences
Anaphoric/referential inference
Instrumental
Causal
inference create implicit connections that make text coherent
Situation model
Mental representations of the state of affairs described as text
Not representations of the text itself
Based on our perceptual experience of the world
Situation models influence our interpretation of an unfolding sentence and our subsequent memory for it
The iconicity assumption
Readers assume that described order matches the chronological order
Semantic illusions
Failure to notice that the linguistic input simply doesn’t make sense
Semantic illusions provide evidence that incoming information may be interpreted incrementally but not always completely and accurately
Occur when people are exposed to them without warning
the role of focus
Signals what is important in the discourse
Illusions are less likely in focused elements which are more likely to be processed deeply
What is bilingualism?
The use of 2 amuses in ones everyday life
L1
First language learnt
L2
Second language someones learnt
Simultaneous bilingualism
L1 and L2 from early childhood exposed to both languages early in an overlapping ways
Easy sequential bilingualism
L1 first then L2 from early childhood
By the time reached puberty, have both in place
Late bilingualism
L1 first, L2 later in life
Aphasia
Language disorder due to brain damage - affects communicate on but not intellect
Broca
Patient who could only say tan though etc ould understand language normally
Lesion in front and on the left side of the brain
Wernicke
Patients who could speak but whose sentences didn’t make sense and who had difficulty understanding language
Lesions in temporal lobe
Rule for a noun phrase
Determiner + Objective + noun
Rule for a sentence
Noun phrase plus verb phrase
What is a morpheme?
Smallest language unit that has a definable meaning
Top down - word superiority effect
People are faster to recognise a letter when it is part of a word than a non word
The role of context
Context gives a frame for understanding
What does top down influence?
Have a profound influence on how we understand and encode language and so on memory
Enables incremental and anticipatory processing
Measure of comprehension: Eye tracking during reading
Recording how long the eyes fixate a particular word or phrase - flow down at difficult words
Good ecological vanity but complex t set up and doesn’t distinguish between types of processing problems
Method of comprehension: event related potentials
Electrical brain activity recorded with scalp electrodes
High temporal resolution
Can be informative about type of process involved
Resource intensive, not ecologically valid (have to sit really still)
Anticipatory eye movements
Evidence suggests that comprehenders do anticipate upcoming input
Define inference
Any piece of information that is part of our situation model that is not explicitly stated
Semantic illusions
Failure to notice that the linguistic input simply doesn’t make sense
Occurs when people are exposed to them without warning
Why might people fall prey to the Moses illusion?
We process the input somewhere shallowly
Why might people sometimes misinterpret sentences such as the dog was chased by the cat?
This is a passive sentence
If people rely on word order under the idea the subject comes before object, they will get confused
Situation models
reflect the ongoing events described in text, rather than the text itself
dynamic
