Language

Question 1

State the 4 aspects of language.

Answer 1

Phonology.
Syntax.
Semantics.
Pragmatics.

Question 2

What is phonology?

Answer 2

Languages have phonemes as their basic auditory unit. This is difficult for adults to re-learn.

Question 3

What is syntax?

Answer 3

This is how utterances are made.

Word order is fairly fixed in English but more flexible in languages like German.

Question 4

Explain the Garden Path effect.

Answer 4

This is where even though a sentence is grammatically correct, the reader is still likely to get its meaning wrong. It is usually necessary to re-read the sentence and add a word.

Question 5

What are semantics?

Answer 5

Semantics is the study of meaning.

Question 6

What are pragmatics?

Answer 6

Why people say certain things.

Question 7

Name the 3 Gricean maxims of pragmatics and what each of them means.

Answer 7

Maxim of quality - making a contribution which is true.
Maxim of quantity - making a contribution which is as informative as required.
Maxim of relation - making a contribution which is relevant.
These maxims may not be consistent over countries.

Question 8

What is bottom-up?

Answer 8

Perceiving what is already out there in the world.

Question 9

What can effect the pronunciation of phonemes?

Answer 9

The context.

Question 10

What is the phonemic restoration effect (top-down effect)?

Answer 10

Although a sentence is interrupted, people still fill in the word. The brain fills in the missing phoneme. This is usually filled in correctly.

Question 11

What is the McGurk effect?

Answer 11

This effect illustrates the multimodal nature of perception.
E.g. what we hear is affected by our visual perception.

Question 12

What is the TRACE speech perception model (McClelland & Elman)?

Answer 12

This model explains the relationships among auditory features, phonemes and words.
It is an explicit connectionist model.

Question 13

Name a strength and a weakness of the TRACE speech perception model.

Answer 13

Strength: the model is very explicit.
Weakness: the model can be hard to interpret.

Question 14

Briefly explain how we read new words in English.

Answer 14

Over 90% of words in English are pronounced with the same grapheme-phoneme rules as known words.
If the new word has similar regular and irregular words this is harder to read.

Question 15

When is language first learnt?

Answer 15

In the womb.

Question 16

What is one of the first aspects of language to be learnt?

Answer 16

The language’s parameters (e.g. subject-verb-object).

Question 17

Briefly explain what the critical period vs sensitive period of a language is.

Answer 17

The critical period of a language suggests that language is learnt when a specific event/stimulus occurs in a very specific time frame.
The sensitive period of language suggests that there is a period of maximal sensitivity but we can still learn a new language past this period, although less efficiently.

Question 18

What was Noam Chomsky’s view on language?

Answer 18

Chomsky believed that children were born with a lot of knowledge (nature view). Children only need a small number of presentations to link the concept to the word.

Question 19

Define poverty of stimulus (Chomsky).

Answer 19

Language is not learnt solely through experience as children are not exposed to every feature of their language (there is not enough rich data in their linguistic environments).

Question 20

Which models show us how it is possible to learn from very little data?

Answer 20

Bayesian models (e.g. tufas example).

Question 21

Name some language characteristics which are unique to humans.

Answer 21

Vocabulary size, grammatical complexity, recurvisity, rich and systematic language that develops with the help of children from impoverished situations, transmission from one generation to the next.

Question 22

Language doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Name some concepts that build on language.

Answer 22

Auditory perceptual abilities, visual abilities, long-term memory abilities, spatial abilities, working memory abilities.

Question 23

Name at least 5 methods for studying language.

Answer 23

Mistakes humans make, brain imaging, language perception in brain damaged patients, temporarily damaging/enhancing brain areas (TMS), machine translation systems, questionnaires, cross-cultural studies, eye movement studies of reading.

Question 24

What can eye movement studies tell us about written language perception?

Answer 24

Boundary technique, moving window technique, gaze contingent technique (what the viewer experiences), computational models that predict next fixation.

Question 25

What is the moving window technique in eye movement studies?

Answer 25

This is where the current eye position activates the movement of the current window in which text is presented.

Question 26

How do new languages develop?

Answer 26

Languages develop systematically over generations due to children’s use of the language.

Question 27

What is Broca’s aphasics?

Answer 27

This is where patients have difficulty with grammar. Can use mirror neurons to study this.

Question 28

What is the definition of a mirror neuron?

Answer 28

This is where a neuron fires when an animal acts or the animal observes the same behaviour on another. The neuron ‘mirrors’ the behaviour of the other, as if the animal was acting out the behaviour himself.

Question 29

What is Wernicke’s aphasics?

Answer 29

Difficulty with semantics.

Question 30

What is surface dyslexia?

Answer 30

Difficulty reading irregular words.

Question 31

What is phonological dyslexia?

Answer 31

Difficulty reading unfamiliar words.

Question 32

What is deep dyslexia?

Answer 32

It is anything more than difficulty with irregular/unfamiliar words.

Question 33

What can studying linguistic evolution tell us?

Answer 33

This can show us the similarities between vocabularies among languages. leading to evidence for biological evolution.

Question 34

Explain the gender differences in vocabulary, memory tasks and spatial tasks.

Answer 34

Girls have a larger vocabulary.
Women perform better in memory tasks.
Men perform better in spatial tasks.
(Important to consider that variability is large between genders and there is small differences in averages).

Question 35

How do educational videos impact language development in toddlers?

Answer 35

They slow infant learning.

Question 36

Name some language aspects which we share with other species.

Answer 36

Word order, vocabulary (border collie), ability to describe where food is (honeybees), auditory systems (bats’ is better than humans!).

Question 37

What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

Answer 37

This hypothesis suggests that the structure of a language determines the speaker’s perception and categorisation of experience.
Language affects how we think!

Question 38

What is a strength of being multilingual?

Answer 38

It is neuroprotective (e.g. dementia may develop slower).