language - final Flashcards
power of human language
- communicated info quickly
- facilitates interactive social network
- stores knowledge outside individuals
- allows wisdom to accrue over generations
- refers to any time or place, real or imaginary
- enables creative expression due to generatively and compositionality
phonemes
- smallest unit of speech
- different in each language (tonal, clicking sounds, pronunciation)
- 10-150 per language
- language specific rules for combining (phonology)
morphemes
- smallest unit that signals meaning
- combination of phonemes
- prefixes, suffixes, roots, or entire words
- thousands per language
- language specific rules for combining (morphology)
words
- smallest stand-alone units of meaning
- combinations of one or more morphemes
- many many per language
- language specific rules for combining (syntax)
phrases
- organized grouping of one or more words
- play role in grammatical structure of a sentence
- limitless number
- syntax
sentences
- a set of words/phrases that tell a complete thought
- can express a statement, question, exclamation, request, command, suggestion
- limitless number
- can be combined to form larger linguistic units (paragraphs)
generativity of language
- we combine words in novel ways to express novel ideas
- language learning cannot be based solely on imitation, association, and reinforcement
- must learn grammar
- must be determined by an inborn biological program
grammar
rules for language structure :
- morphology : rules for combining morphemes into words
- syntax: rules for combining words into phrases into sentences
semantics
how meaning is derived from morphemes, words, phrases and sentences
phrase structure
- each word is assigned a role
- generative grammar: rules specify what orders and combinations these roles can occur in
problems with relying on phrase structure alone
- one phrase structure, two meanings : the shooting of the hunters was terrible
- two phrase structures, one meaning : the boy hit the ball, the ball was hit by the boy
surface structure
phrase structure that applies to order in which words are actually spoken
deep structure
fundamental, underlying phrase structure that conveys meaning
transformational grammar
rules that transform among surface structures having same deep structure
ambiguity
- examples of language with multiple interpretations
- like illusions for perception, ambiguity can provide insight into cognitive processing of language
lexical ambiguity
- when a word has two different meanings
- ex. he was bothered by the cold
ex. Rose rose to put rose roes on her rows of roses
syntactic ambiguity
- when same words can be grouped together into more than one phrase structure
- ex. they are cooking apples
lexical and syntactic ambiguity
- lexical but not syntactic : she noticed the part ( 1 phrase structure, 2 word meanings)
- syntactic but not lexical: i saw the man with the binoculars ( 2 phrase structures, 1 word meaning)
- syntactic and lexical: we saw her duck (2 phrase structures, 2 word meanings)
referential ambiguity
- when same word/phrase can refer to 2 different things within a sentence
- ex. john grabbed his lunch, sat on a rock, and ate IT
- ex. susan told elizabeth that SHE had to write a paper
phonemes
actual sounds : phones
perceived sounds : phonemes
-multiple phones are head as the same phoneme
- evident by 6months of age
challenges in learning morphemes/words
- detecting words in a stream of speech
- figuring out riles for combining morphemes to make words
- figuring out what words mean
past tense acquisition (3 stages)
- stage 1 : small number of irregular verbs (came, got, gave, looked, needed)
- stage 2: learns -ed rule (roll- rolled), regularization (pop- popped), and over regularization (give-giver
- stage 3 : corrects over regularization ( give - gave)
mental lexicon
- associating words together
ex. chair to table, to table leg, to human leg
ex. chair to sofa to cushion to comfy position
universal grammar
- poverty of the stimulus : children are not exposed to enough examples to learn grammar without a head start
- we have a hard-wired language acquisition device
- all languages follow same general rules, with different parameters
- learning a language requires learning parameter settings
statistical pattern recognition
- children are able to learn grammar solely from examples
- general machinery in brain for detecting patterns is sufficient to learn rules of language as we actually practice them
speech production
- fundamentally a motor act dependent on hierarchical planning
- depends on pre-frontal areas
- broca’s area : left hemisphere only
broca’s aphasia characteristics
- speech is laboured, slow and confluent with awkward articulation
- phonemic errors
- written output shows same errors as speech
- better fluency for memorized phrases
- singing may be more fluent than speech
- comprehension is relatively spared
- problems with language planning and production, not motor
broca’s aphasia speech barriers
- greatest difficulty with verbs, articles, pronouns
- no verb inflection
- responses make sense but are ungrammatical
- poor syntax comprehension
- poor at judging grammaticality
- difficulty reading and producing function words
- problems with understanding and using syntax
speech comprehension
- fundamentally a perceptual process
- depends on the ventral ‘what’ stream
- wenicke’s area: in left hemisphere only
Wernicke’s aphasia characteristics
- speech is phonetically & grammatical normal but meaningless
- generally fluent, unlabored, well articulated
- normal intonation
- words used inappropriately, or nonsense words
- meaning expressed in roundabout way
- comprehension is severely impaired
- Wernicke’s aphasia speech barriers
- problems translating auditory input into phonological forms that can then access semantics
- problems with language comprehension
- problems with understanding and using semantics
left vs right hemispheres
- left hemisphere can name objects, right cannot
handedness
- right handed : 70-90%
- left handed: ~10%
- cross-dominant/mix handed: ~20%
language lateralization
- right handed: 95% left hemisphere dominant, 5% right hemisphere dominant
- left handed: 70% left hemisphere dominant, 15% right hemisphere dominant, 15% bilateral
prosody
- right hemisphere
- intonation, tone, stress, and rhythm
- used for emotion state, form (statement, question, or command), irony or sarcasm, emphasis, contrast, focus
aprosodia
- difficulty processing prosody
productive aprosodia
monotonic, robotic speech lacking emotion, associated with damage to R hemisphere, Broca’s equivalent
receptive aprosodia
- difficulty detcting and understanding emotion tone in speech
- associated with damage to R hemisphere Wernicke’s equivalent
localization and distribution of processing
- broca’s area (syntax & planning for production)
- Wernicke’s area (word perception & semantics)
- sensory cortices ( auditory cortices for speech)
- motor cortices (motor cortex for speech)
- association cortices (semantics)
sources of information
- genes (info learned on timescale of evolution)
- past experience
- internal state (info learned on timescale of current episode)
- environmental context (info learned now)
- proximal stimulus (stimulus itself)
interactive activation theory
- model of letter and word perception
- integrates bottom-up and top-down processes
Mcgurk effect
isinterpretation due to conflicting stimuli
what is an fMRI
functional magnetic resonance imaging
- measures changes in magnetization, using electromagnetic radiation and nuclear magnetic resonance
fMRI
- good spatial resolution (mm)
- ok temporal resolution (sec)
- non-invasive
- low risk (high magnetic field, risks include flying metallic objects, shifting internal metal objects)
meaning in the brain
are relationships between concepts basic neural building blocks of meaning?
- concepts are represented by highly distributed patterns of activation across the brain
- perceptual and motor brain areas involved in representing meaning
- association btwn concepts used to predict brain activation for those concepts
