Language Comprehension Flashcards
What is Wernicke’s Aphasia?
Also known as fluent aphasia
Damage to Wernicke’s area meaning can’t comprehend speech or comprehend own speech
Can produce speech but quite often meaningless speech
What are homophones?
Words that sound the same
What are homographs?
Words that are spelt the same but pronounced differently
What are homonyms?
Words that are spelt the same, sound the same but have different meanings
Explain ambiguity in the speech stream
Impossible to know where one word starts and another one ends
Gaps in speech sounds don’t necessarily correspond to word boundaries
What is coarticulation?
Phoneme level ambiguity
‘Pass me the thin book’ and ‘pass me the thin carpet’
The phoneme /n/ is pronounced differently
What is categorical perception?
The idea that we can distinguish between 2 sounds very easily because we’ve evolved to do so.
Janet Werker - children aged 6-8 months discriminate english /ba/ and /da/, and also sounds in Hindi that english speaking adults cannot discriminate - but lose this ability at about 10 months.
What is phoneme restoration?
If a cough covers a sound in a sentence we can still understand it due to our mental lexicons (top down processing)
Outline lexical access
Access or activation of lexical items
Activate the words that correspond to the sound we’re hearing
Selection from lexical set and integrate into syntactic structure to understand the sentence
Lexical access will be faster for words that are short and frequent and slower for words with lots of neighbours
Outline research that looks at the impact of context on comprehension
Word monitoring task
PPs asked to monitor speech for the word ‘motorway’ and say the word whenever they heard it
e.g. ‘the car travelled down the motorway’
If the sentences made sense, PPs repeated 200 ms after word onset.
Indicates that the language system predicts which words might come up next and activates them in the mental lexicon
Describe an example of a lexical decision task with priming
PPs have to decide whether they think the word is real or made up
Combined with priming e.g. doctor (prime word) activates lexicon for nurse (target word), compared to when prime is ‘sheep’ and paired with ‘nurse’
Faster reaction time for related prime and target words
Outline Zwitserlood’s (1989) research
Used cross modal priming
Prime word was auditory ‘-capt-‘ (could be captain or captive)
Target word was visual ‘ship’ ‘slave’ or ‘wicket’ (not related) - faster reaction times for ship and slave
Looked at effect of context:
‘The men stood around for a while and watched their capt..’ - priming found for both ship and slave
‘The men had spent many years serving under their capt..’ - priming surprisingly found for both ship and slave.
Outline Marslen-Wilson and Welsh’s Revised Cohort Model
A computational model
Idea that context influences the integration of a word into a sentence not the initial activation of words (lexical selection)
Competitor effects leave one word more activated than the others
Activation of candidates that do not fit the context are not eliminated
Cohort members who fit the bottom up input are activated regardless of context.
3 processing stages
1. Access stage, during which a word cohort is activated.
2. Selection stage, during which one word is chosen from the cohort.
3. Integration stage, during which the word’s semantic and syntactic properties are integrated within the sentence.
What are some examples of methods used to assess language comprehension?
Word monitoring Lexical decision tasks Priming tasks Cross modal priming Sentence priming
