Language Flashcards
Word superiority effect
Looks at how context can affect letter perception. The finding that letter processing is better in the context of a word than in a non-word or in isolation.
Word frequency effect
Faster response time for high-frequency words than low-frequency words.
Word frequency: the relative usage of words in a particular language.
Ex; the word ‘home’ has higher frequency than ‘hike’ in the English language
The universal need to communicate with language is so important that deaf children…
invent a sign language themselves when no one else around speaks or uses sign language
Where is Broca’s area in the brain and what is it responsible for?
Frontal lobe, language production
Where is Wernicke’s area in the brain and what is it responsible for?
Temporal lobe, language comprehension
What did B.F Skinner say about language?
It is learned through reinforcements just like behaviour.
What are the five key things that Chomsky said about language?
1) Human language is coded in the genes
2) Humans are programmed to acquire and use language
3) Language is a way to study the properties of the mind
4) Underlying basis of all language is similar
5) Disagreed with behaviourism - important event in the cognitive revolution
What are the four major concerns of psycholinguistics?
1) Comprehension
2) Representation
3) Speech production
4) Acquisition
Lexicon
A person’s knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, how they are used in relation to other words.
Aka “mental dictionary”
Semantics
The meanings of words and sentences
Lexical semantics
The meaning of words
Our ability to hear and understand spoken words is affected by:
1) How frequently we have encountered a word in the past
2) The context in which words appear
3) Our knowledge of statistical regularities of our language
4) Our knowledge of word meanings
Lexical ambiguity
When a word can have more than one meaning
Accessing the meaning of ambiguous words when reading a sentence is determined by the word’s ______ and the ______ created by the sentence
dominance, context
Biased dominance
Some meanings of words occur more frequently than others.
Ex; the most frequent meaning of ‘tin’ is a type of metal. Less frequent meaning is a small metal container
Balanced dominance
When a word has more than one meaning and all meanings are equally likely
No prior context provided in the sentence:
assess meanings by dominance
Prior context provided in the sentence:
assess meanings by dominance and context
To understand how we determine the meaning of a sentence we need to consider…
syntax, the rules for combining words into sentences
Parsing
A person reads/ hears a string of words and groups these words into phrases in their mind. The way the words are grouped, indicates how the person interpreted the sentence.
Garden path sentences
a sentence in which the meaning seems to be implied at the beginning of the sentence turns out to be incorrect, based on information presented later in the sentence
Three key components of the garden path model of parsing
1) Explains parsing and garden path sentences
2) Emphasizes syntactic principles as a major determinant of parsing
3) As people read sentences their grouping of words into phrases is governed by heuristics
The constraint-based approach to parsing
Parsing of a sentence is influenced by:
1) Word meaning
2) Story context
3) Scene context
Although incorrect predictions can lead us down the garden path, most of the time our predictions can…
Help us deal with the rapid pace of language and help us understand language in times of poor connection, noisy environments, or accents.
Concept of coherence
The representation of a text in a person’s mind that creates clear relations between information in one part of the text, to information in another part of the text
How does inference help produce coherence?
Drawing inferences help us create connections that are essential for creating coherence in texts
Three types of inferences and describe them
1) Anaphoric inference: connects an object/ person in one sentence to an object/person in another sentence
2) Instrument inference: inference about the tools or methods that occurs while reading a text
3) Casual inference: results in the conclusion that events described in one sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous sentence
Situation model
Mental representation of what the text is about
Readers simulate the motor characteristics of the objects and actions in a story because…
Reading action words results in the same brain area activation as carrying out an action
Event related potential is _____ when a word is unexpected
larger
Syntactic coordination
Process by which people use similar grammatical constructions when having a conversation
How has syntactic priming been used to support syntactic coordination?
Syntactic priming states that hearing a statement with a certain syntactic construction increases the chances that a statement that follows with contain the same construction.
People are sensitive to the linguistic behaviour of other speakers and adjust their behaviours (construction) to match.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Strong version of this hypothesis is that language determines our thinking, so those who speak different languages, view the world differently. Therefore, your thoughts are limited to the categories available in your language.
Empirical evidence to support Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Russian and English colour category experiment - language affects category perception
Gilbert et al
When target square was presented in right visual field which is involved in language rather than left, it impacts how we perceive and categorize
Compare the syntax-first approach and the interactionist approach to parsing.
Syntax-first approach claims that syntax plays the main part in parsing. The garden path model of parsing is an example of a syntax first approach.
The interactionist approach states that both syntax and semantics (meaning) work together to determine the meaning of a sentence. The constraint based approach to parsing is an example of a interactionist approach.
Even though it has been shown with neuroimaging that certain brain areas are activated for both music and language,
patients who are born having problems with music perception (congenital amusia)…
often have normal language abilities. This shows that different neural networks are being activated for language and music although it may occur in similar areas of the brain.
