Language (CH 11) Flashcards
What is Language?
-Is a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas & experiences
What is the difference between animal communication & human communication?
- Animal communication is more rigid bc they use a limited amount of sounds/ gestures to communicate about limited amounts of things
- Human communication use a wide variety of signals
What is one of the properties of human language?
-Creativity bc things can be communicated in different ways
Why does language make it possible to create new & unique sentences?
-Bc it has a structure that is both hierarchical & governed by rules
What is Hierarchical Nature of Language?
-It consists of small components that can be combined to form larger units
EX words can be combined into phrases= creating sentences
What is the Rule-Based Nature of Language?
-Means that the components in the hierarchical nature of language (words) are arranged in certain ways
What are the 2 Principles of language?
- Hierarchical nature of language
- Rule-based nature of language
Why are different languages described as “unique but the same”?
- They’re unique in terms of the different sounds & words they use
- But the same in terms of having words that serve the function of nouns & verbs & that all languages include a system to make things negative, ask questions, & refer to past & present
What did B.F Skinner propose about language?
- He proposed that language is learned through reinforcement
- Children would get awarded for using correct language & punished for using incorrect language
What did Chomsky propose about language?
- He proposed that human language is coded in genes
- He saw studying language as a way to study the properties of the mind
What is Psycholinguistics?
- A field concerned w/ the psychological study of language
- The goal is to discover the psychological processes by which humans acquire & process language
What are the 4 major principles/ concerns of Psychologinguistics?
- Comprehension (how do people understand language)
- Representation (How is language represented in the mind)
- Speech Production (How do people produce language)
- Acquisition (How do people learn language)
Which 2 principles/ concerns explain how we understand language?
-Comprehension & representation
What is our Lexicon?
-It’s all the words we know= our mental dictionary
What is Semantics?
-It is the meaning of language
What is Lexical-Semantics?
-The meaning of a word (it can have multiple meanings)
What is Word-Frequency?
-The frequency of which a word appears in a language
Home occurs 547 times per million words vs Hike occuring 4 times per million words
What is the Word-Frequency effect?
-We respond more rapidly to words that occur at a higher frequency (Home) & slower to words that occur at a lower frequency (Hike)
What is the Lexical Decision Task & what did it demonstrate?
- It’s a task to quickly decide whether a string of letters are words or nonwords
- Demonstrates that lower frequency words=slow response
What is a problem that makes understanding words challenging?
-Is that not everyone pronounces words in the same way
Why is the context that the word is in important?
-It allows us to percieve & understand words in a conversation better than if the words were isolated
Are words separarated by silence?
-No due to the statistical properties of one part of a word following another
What is Speech Segmentation?
-The perception of individual words even though theres no pauses in between them
What helps Speech Segmentation?
- The statistical properties that we have that helps us infer the probability of one sound following another
- Our knowlege of the meaning of the words
What are the 4 principles that affects our ability to hear & understand words?
- How frequently we have encountered a word in the past
- The context in which the words appear
- Our knowledge of statistical regularities of our language
- Our knowledge of word meanings
What is Lexical Ambiguity?
- When words have more than one meaning
- so we must rely on context in order to determine what the word means
What is Lexical Priming?
- The procedure used by Tanenhaus & coworkers
- It occurs when a word is followed by another word of a similar meaning= presenting Rose in front of Flower= faster response
- Indicates whether 2 words have similar meaning in a person’s mind
What 2 conditions did Tanenhaus & coworkers use to measure lexical priming?
- The noun-noun condition=a word is presented as a noun followed by a noun probe stimulus (flower)
- The verb-noun condition=a word is presented as a verb followed by a noun probe stimulus (flower)
What 2 variants did Tanenhaus & coworkers use to measure lexical priming?
- The first one was when there wasn’t any delay
- The second one had a 200ms delay between the end of each sentence & the probe word
What were the conclusions drawn of the 1st variation of the Tanenhaus & coworkers lexical experiment?
- The probe word Flower is activated immediately after hearing Rose whether if it was used as a noun or verb
- Also the verb meaning of Rose is activated whether it was used as a noun or verb
- SO all of the ambiguous word’s meaning are activated immediately after the word is heard
What were the conclusions drawn from the 2nd variation of the Tenenhaus & coworkers lexical experiment?
- That 200ms after hearing the word Rose as a verb the flower meaning of Rose is gone
- SO context provided helped determined the meaning of a word & exerts influence after the 200ms delay which other words can be accessed
What is Meaning Dominance?
-Is described by the relative frequency of the meanings of ambiguous words
What is Balanced Dominance?
- When the meanings of a word are equally likely
- SO the word Cast for describing members of a play is equally likely to occur for the word Cast for wall material (plaster cast)
What is Biased Dominance?
- Words with a certain “go-to” meaning occuring more often than the other meaning
- SO using Tin to refer to the material occurs more often than Tin being used to refer to a small container
What 3 factors that determine the accessibility of the meaning of a word?
- The frequency of a word determines how long it takes to process its meaning
- Context
- Our ability to access the correct word depends on meaning frequency & for words w/ multiple meanings=a combo of meaning dominace & context
What is Syntax?
- The structure of a sentence
- The study of Syntax involves discovering cues that languags provide that show how words in a sentence relate to one another
What is Parsing?
-A process that is key to determining how strings of words create meaning by considering how meaning is created by grouping words into phrases
What are Garden Path Sentences?
-Sentences that begin to appear as meaning one thing but then end up to mean something else
(after the musician played the piano, she was wheeled off stage)
-They illustrate Temporary Ambiguity
What is Temporary Ambiguity?
-When the first organization of a sentence is adopted & then when error is realized, the person shifts to a correct organization
What is the Garden Path model of Parsing?
- Proposed by Lynn Frazier
- States that as people read a sentence, their grouping of words into phrases is governed by some processing mechs= heuristics
- Specifies that rules are involved in parsing & syntax
What are Heuristics?
- Processing mechs that groups words into phrases as people read a sentence
- Is a rule that can be applied rapidly to make decisions
What are the 2 properties if Heuristics?
- On the postitive side, they are fast= important for language which occurs 200 words/min
- On the negative side they sometimes result in the wrong decision
What is Late Closure?
-Its a principle that states when a person encounters a new word, the person’s parsing mechanism assumes that this word is part of the current phrase= each new word is added to current phrase for as long as possible
What is the Constraint-Based approach to Parsing?
-The idea that info & syntax participates in processing as a person reads/ hears a sentence
How is Parsing of a sentence influenced?
-By the context provided by stories & scenes
What is the Visual World Paradigm?
- Developed by Tanenhaus & coworkers
- Technique to determine how info in a scene can influence how a sentence is processed
- Participants heard “Place the apple on the towel in the box” so their eyes moved to current part of the sentence. when the sentance was ambiguous, participants looked at the towel (wrong place)
What is the conclusion about the Visual World Paradigm?
- The participants eye movements occur as they are reading the sentance & are influenced by the contents of the scene
- Participants take into account info provided by the syntactic structure of sentence & non-linguistic info (scene)
What is Subject-Relative construction?
-When the embedded clause is inside the main clause & both clauses have the same subject
(answers the who?)
-Accounts for 65% of relative clause constructions
What is Object-Relative construction?
-When the object is in the clause
Why is the Object-Relative construction more difficult to understand?
- It demands more of the reader’s memory= slows down processing
- It is more complicated bc the subject of the main clause is the same as the object in the related clause= more complex construction
Why is Prediction in language important?
- They help us deal w/ the rapid pace of lanuage
- And they help us piece together a convo in an environment when it’s harder to understand someone
What is making Inferences?
-Determining what the text of a story means by using our knowledge to go beyond info provided by the text
What are the roles of Inference?
- To create connection/ coherence between parts of a story
- Involves creativity from the reader
What is Narrative?
- Refers to texts in which there is a story that progress from one event to another
- The stories can include flashback events
What is an important propery of a Narrative?
-Coherence
What is Coherence?
-The representation of text in a person’s mind that creates clear relations between parts of the text & main topic of the story
What is Anaphoric Inference?
-It occurs when a word/ phrase refers to something mentioned earlier in a sentence
(she for rififi the dog)
What is Instrumental Inference?
-Refers to the tools & methods used in the text
john using a hammer to pound nails even when hammer wasn’t mentioned in the sentence
What is Casual Inference?
-When you infer that the events described inone clause/sentence were caused by events that occured in the previous sentence
What are the 3 types of inference?
- Anaphoric
- Instrumental
- Casual
What is a Situation Model?
- Approach to how we understand sentences= stimulates perceptual and motor characteristics of the objects and actions in a story
- And that the reader simulates these motor characteristics
How was the Situation Model tested?
-by having participants read a sentence that describes a situation involving an object & then indicates quickly as possible if the picture shows the object mentioned in the sentence
What was the conclusions drawn from testing the Situation Model?
-The reaction times were faster for objects that matched the orientation described the sentence
What were Metusalem and coworkers trying to test?
-They were trying to study how situations represented in the mind & how our knowledge about a situation is activated in our mind when we read a story
What was Metusalem’s experiment?
- He measured event-related potential (ERP) when participants were reading a scenario of a concert performing on stage/guitar/barn
- The ERP has a N400 component= negative response that occurs 400ms after a word was read/heard
What are the characteristics of the N400?
-It shows a larger response when a word in a sentence is unexpected
What were the results of t Metusalem’s experiment?
- That barn has higher N400 than guitar
- Our knowledge about different situations is continually being accessed as we read a story
- and the ERP results show that as we read, models of the situation are activated that includes lots of detail based on what we know about certain situations
What is the most common form of language?
-Conversation
Why is it difficult when talking to someone for the first time?
-It helps when we have some awareness of what the other person knows about the topic
What is the Given-New Contact?
- It states that the speaker can construct sentences so that they include 2 types of info= given & new
- It captures the collaborative nature of conversations
What are the 2 types of info that’s included in the Given-New Contact?
- Given info= info that the listener already knows
- New info=info that the listener is hearing for the first time
What is Common-Ground?
-It is the mental knowledge & beliefs shared among conversational parties
What is the important factor of Common-Ground?
-Is that the sharing of info allows the person to accumulate info about the topic at hand & info about what the other person knows
What are 2 ways the Common-Ground is studied?
- By analyzing the conversation transcripts
- And by the Referential communication task
What do analyzing conversations reveal?
- That people talk in fragments, not whole sentences
- And how a conversation unfolds in a orderly way as the conversation reconstructs the events that people are talking about
What is the Referential Communication task?
-It is a task where 2 people exhange info that involves reference (identifying something) in a conversation
What does the process of creating common ground result in?
-Entrainment= the synchronization between 2 partners
similar gestures, body positions, pronounciation
What is Syntactic Coordination?
-When conversational partners end up using similar grammatical constructions
What is Syntatic Priming?
-Occurs when you hear a statement w/ particular syntactic construction= increases the chances of a sentence you produce having similar construction
Why is Syntactic Priming important?
- It can lead people to coordinate the grammatical form of their statements during conversation
- It also reduces the computational load involved in creating conversation bc its easier to copy their sentence construction
What is Theory of Mind?
- The ability to understand what others think, feel believe
- Also have the ability to intrepret & react to other people’s feelings, gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, & cues that provide meaning
What is the semantic side of having a conversation?
-Taking into account other people’s knowledge & establishing common ground
What is the Syntactic side of having a conversation?
-People coordinating/ aligning the syntactic construction of their statements
What do language & music have in common?
- Emotion
- They both combine elements to create structured sequences (tones for music & speech for language)= organized into phrases governed by syntax
- They unfold over time
- Expectation to what occurs in the sequence
- Involve similar mental processes
What is Prosody?
- The pattern of intonation & rhythm in spoken language
- This creates emotion in language
How does music create emotion?
-Through sounds that in themselves have no meaning
How does language create emotion?
-Through meaningful words
What is the Tonic in music?
-The note associated with the key of a melody
What is the expectation in music?
-The return to tonic= That the song that begins with a tonic will end on the same tonic
What was Patel’s experiement in terms of the syntax of music?
- He used the ERP to measure P600= becomes larger after violations in syntax
- He used the ERP for 3 different musical targets= fits, kind fits, doesn’t fit at all
What did Patel conclude from his experiment?
-He concluded that music has syntax that influences how we react to it
How can our perception in music be influenced?
-It can be influenced by our history of listening to music
What was Patel’s experiment in terms of language & music having similar brain processes?
- He studied a group of patients that had Broca’s Aphasia
- These patients were given a language task that involved understanding syntactically complex sentences & a music task involved detecting off-key chords in a sequence of chords
What were the results from Patel’s language & music experiment?
- Patients performed poorly on the language task compared to controls
- And that patients performed more poorly on the music task
- Which means that both patients had similar deficits in the language & music tasks
What is Congenital Amusia?
-Problems w/ music perception
What are the neuropsychological cases that claim that language & music have different brain mechs?
- That patients that had Congenital Amusia had trouble recognizing simple melodies but had normal language abilities
- And that patients that had broca aphrasia was able to detect out-of-key sequences despite having trouble forming meaningful throughts
What is the underlying conclusion that music & language involve the same areas of the brain?
- Neuroimaging provdes evidence that their is an overlap of both using Brocas area
- But the two aren’t a complete overlap, just related bc it is possible that they use different neural mechs within the same area
