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Psychology > Language and Communication > Flashcards

Language and Communication Flashcards

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1
Q

Define communication

A

“When one organism (the transmitter) encodes information into a signal which passes to another organism (the receiver) which decodes the signal and is capable of responding appropriately”

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2
Q

Compare verbal and non-verbal communication

A

Verbal - Spoken/written transmission of a message
Non-verbal - non-linguistic aspects (e.g. body language, gestures, emoticons)
- Language also has non-verbal elements (e.g. tone, rhythm, stress)

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3
Q

Define language

A
  • A type of communication
  • A structured system of symbols (“words”) and the rules (“grammar”) by which they are combined
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4
Q

How many languages are there?

A

Between 3,000 and 8,000

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5
Q

How often to languages die out?

A

At a rate of 1 every 2 weeks

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6
Q

All European languages together =

A

3% of total

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7
Q

What are the most common languages?

A

Chinese, Spanish, English

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8
Q

L1 + L2 =

A

English (20% of population)

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9
Q

What are the design features of a language?

A
  • A system to communicate thoughts, feelings, information, etc. of arbitrary signs (words) that refer to things in the world, have meaning (e.g. not just onomatopoeia) to combine these signs (syntax)
  • Limited number of words and rules combine to form unlimited number of expressions that allows us to go beyond the here and now that is used by a group of people
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10
Q

Does communication = language?

A

No

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11
Q

Define semanticity

A

Words are symbols/signs that express meaning

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12
Q

Define artbitrariness

A

No intrinsic relation between (most) words and their meaning (but onomatopoeia)

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13
Q

Define displacement

A

Not tied to here and now, can talk about past, future, somewhere else, hypotheticals, etc.

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14
Q

Define productivity/generativity

A
  • New language can be generated
  • A finite collection of sounds and words allows an infinite number of messages
  • As long as we obey the rules of the language, any message can be understood by the other language users
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15
Q

Define prevarication

A

We can lie

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16
Q

Define reflexiveness

A

We can use language to talk about language

17
Q

Define sound sybolism

A

Individual sounds or clusters of sound can convey meaning
- Kiki - pointy shape
- Bouba - round shape
- “gl” - words for shiny things -> glisten, gleam, glint, glare, glam, glimmer, glaze, glass, glitz, gloss, glory, glow, glitter

18
Q

What makes a language (animal language)?

A

Animals certainly can communicate
- Bee dance -> novel messages, but only about food
- Dolphins -> can communicate there is something new in the water; no evidence of syntax use
- Songbirds -> overlap with human language acquisition; babbling, critical period, left-hemisphere specialisation

19
Q

Fact about apes

A
  • Very rich communication systems (95%-98.5% genetic overlap, highly social, approx. IQ of 3 year old)
    -Similar brain asymmetries as humans
  • Teaching them to speak is near impossible
20
Q

Research of chimps

A

GUA Kellog & Kellog - chimp learned to understand a few words, but never produced any
VIKY Keith & Kathy Hayes - after 6 years -> could understand words and some word combinations; learned to articulate a few words, but with difficulty
WASHOE Garner & Garner - taught ASL, after 4 years -> had acquired 85 signs (you, me, listen, gimme), also sign combinations (you drink); some sensitivity to word order + some new combinations (water bird); taught signs to adopted son

21
Q

Explain Nim Chimpsky

A
  • Terrace et al.
  • Learned 125 AASL signs and made sign combinations (play me) (longer combinations heavily redundant - give orange me give eat orange…)
  • 40% simple repetitions; rarely signed spontaneously; no novel combinations (unlike children)
22
Q

Make comparisons between chimps and children

A

Chimps
- Huge amounts of explicit training
- Rarely signed spontaneously
Little evidence of syntax
Mainly stimulus controlled (eating + sleeping)
- All topics about here + now (no questions)
- Very repetitive
- Output was mainly non-creative

Children
- Require no special training
- Lots of spontaneous production
- Clear syntactic structure
Utterances involve temporal displacement
- Ask questions (and lots of them)
- Less imitation (some children rarely imitate)
- Utterances quickly become more creative

23
Q

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

A
  • Language shapes our thoughts
  • LInguistic determinism (strong version): thoughts are limited, constrained by language; language determines our thinking - people with a different language think differently
  • Linguistic relativism (weak version): people who speak a different language perceive and experience the world differently
24
Q

Egocentric versus allocentric (language affects encoding in space)

A
  • Egocentric: left, right, in front/back, next to - relative frame of reference
  • Allocentric: north, south - absolute frame of reference
25
Q

Language affects encoding in time

A
  • English - think of time horizontally (“The best is ahead/behind us”)
  • Mandarin - think of time vertically (e.g. next month = “down” month, previous month = “up” month)
26
Q

Critiques of language determinism

A
  • Pinker: problem is equating language with thought
  • Thought precedes language
  • Universal “language of thought” (mentalese)
27
Q

The structure of language

A
  1. Phonetics (speech sounds)
  2. Phonology (sounds system)
  3. Morphology (word formation)
  4. Syntax (sentence structure)
  5. Semantics (meaning)
  6. Pragmatics (language in context)
28
Q

Explain phonetics

A
  • Concerned with describing and classifying the speech sounds that occur in all of the world’s languages

Articulatory: How speech sounds are produced
Auditory: How speech sounds are perceived
Acoustic: The physical properties of sounds

29
Q

Explain phonology

A
  • Concerned with the way speech sounds form systems in a given language

Phones - the inventory of phonetic segments that occur in your language; the instantiations (physical characteristics) of a phoneme
Phonemes - the sounds in your language that can distinguish between words
Minimal pairs - used to determine the phonemes of a language

(Phones are enclosed in square brackets and phonemes in slashes)

30
Q

Spoken word production

A

From thought to speech

  1. Conceptualisation; preverbal
  2. Formulation (lexicalisation, syntactic planning, phonological encoding, phonetic planning)
  3. Articulation (“the horse kicked the man”)
  4. Self-monitoring (listening?)
31
Q

What steps do we need to take to communicate our ideas? (Griffin & Ferreira)

A

Conceptualisation - WHAT to express
- Message planning
- Pre-linguistic
- Language neutral

Formulation - HOW to express it
- Word selection (lemmas)
- Sound processing (lexemes)

Articulation - expressing it
- Pronunciation

  • Most famous model = WEAVER++
    Adds a component of self-monitoring
  • Internal monitoring (of what you’re GOING to say)
  • External monitoring (during speech)
32
Q

WEAVER++ - evidence from…

A
  1. Speech errors
  2. Tip of the Tongue (ToT)
  3. Picture naming
  4. Picture-word interference
33
Q

General points about speech errors

A
  • 15 speech sounds per second (2-3 words per second, 150 words a minute)
  • Automatic - “impossible to think in the middle of a work: shall I say ‘t’ or ‘d’”
  • Less attention to speech production than comprehension
  • 1/2 errors for every 1,000 words -> 7-22 errors a day
34
Q

Types of speech error:
Shift
Exchange
Anticipation
Perseveration
Addition
Deletion
Substitution
Blend

A

Shift - decide hits instead of decides hit
Exchange - model renosed instead of nose remodelled
Anticipation - bake my bike instead of take
Perseveration - he pulled a pantrum instead of tantrum
Addition - clarefully instead of carefully
Deletion - intelligibly instead of unintelligibly
Substitution - light instead of heavy
Blend - John is quite cable instead of calm/stable

35
Q
A

Psychology (6 decks)

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