Language Psychology Flashcards
1
Q
Why should we study language?
A
Language is universal
Defining feature of humans
No language free culture
Intertwined with cognition and culture
2
Q
What are shared characteristics across languages (including sign language)?
A
Nouns vs Verbs
Negation
Questions
Biological underpinning
Similar developmental trajectory across cultures
Deaf communities and children start to produce a language without instruction
Critical window of when we’re exposed to language, if this is missed, acquisition is harder
3
Q
What are the key features of language?
A
combinatorial, universal, symbolic, discrete, productive,
4
Q
What is the definition of language?
A
A system for expressing or communicating thoughts and feelings through speech sounds or written symbols.
Can be classed as a tool or a skill
Symbols and rules allowing for communication
Words and sentences
Waggle dance of bees - Tells other bees where to find the best nectar
Alarm calls of Vervet monkeys
Pheromones from ants
5
Q
What are some examples of Hockett’s 16 features of language?
A
Vocal-auditory channel
Broadcast transmission
6
Q
What is symbolic language vs iconic language?
A
Symbolic - Element bearing no intrinsic resemblance to its referent (symbol for reference)
Human language is symbolic
Links between form and meaning are arbitrary
Abstraction and flexibility
Requires social interaction to learn
Iconic - Bears resemblance to its referent (e.g. Duck looks like it goes quack)
Iconicity is rare
Onomatopoeia
Bouba or KiKi
Some BSL signs
7
Q
What is meant by language being discrete?
A
Finite numbers of individual elements
Morphemes (Bedroom → Bed + Room)
Phonemes - Finite number of sounds
Grammatical rules
8
Q
What is meant by language being combinatorial?
A
Ability to use rule to generate potentially infinite number of messages
Sounds combine to make words
Words combine to make new meaning
A few dozen phonemes can produce over 500,000 words = Nearly infinite sentences & infinite narratives
9
Q
What is persuasive ambiguity (as a combinatorial feature of language)?
A
Different ways of perceiving the same word
(e.g. different ways to perceive ‘doggy bag’)
10
Q
What is meant by human language being productive?
A
Can express an infinite number of ideas
Productive <> generative <> creative
Combining existing elements in novel ways
Generates new elements
Recursion - We can just keep adding, there is no limit
11
Q
What occurs in language when combining combinatorial + discrete features?
A
Discrete combinatorial systems preserve lower-level structure within larger units
Most known combinatorial systems used blending > properties of discrete elements are lost
E.g. Red + Yellow = Orange - Can’t see red or yellow, they disappear
12
Q
What is recursion?
A
The repetition of a rule or hierarchical structure in some way
E.g. Repark and Re-Re park (when referring to parking a car)
13
Q
Do non-human animals have language?
A
Probably not by what we understand of language. But animals do have a rich communicative system that allows them to communicate with each other
Teach parrots to mimic human speech, as in other animals too like crows and ravens.
Chimps and gorillas have been taught some sign language. Sign language because they don’t have the same articulatory apparatus that we do so speech would be physically impossible
14
Q
What studies have been done into primates and language?
A
Washoe:
Brought up as a human child
Taught ASL; learnt 150-200 signs
Sensitivity to word order (you tickle me vs I tickle you)
Could combine two signs to create a word she didn’t know
Nim Chimpsky:
Learnt 125 ASL signs
Regularity of word order for two word utterances
Longer utterances became repetitive (banana me eat banana eat) - Less evidence of underlying structure
Communication in animals does not equal language
15
Q
How do apes and children differ in language?
A
Apes - lack of syntactic structure vs clear syntactic structure and consistency
little comprehension of syntactic structure
16
Q
How do animals and humans vary in motivation to share psychological states?
A
Hare,Call & Tomasello (2001) - Subordinate chimp will take food if it knows dominant chimp won’t see - Shows knowledge of some mental state
Lack awareness of intent to share mental state (e.g. via pointing) whereas children understand pointing (Tomasello et al, 1991)
17
Q
What is the structure of language? (Producing & understanding language)
A
Language is hierarchical (e.g. phonetics is first)
Incredibly complex process
Producing
Choose an idea to convey
Planning how to say it
Controlling articulatory apparatus
Understanding
Segmenting sound / decoding squiggles/ mapping hand movements
Mapping sounds/shapes onto meaning
18
Q
What is the basic concept of speech production?
A
Conceptualise a message (pre-linguistic) → Formulate the message into linguistic material → Articulate the linguistic signal
19
Q
How do you investigate speech production?
A
Investigate it by looking at speech - Speech is error prone and can be disfluent & slips of the tongue can occur
20
Q
What is lexicalisation and the two step interactive model of word production?
A
Lexicalisation - Process by which new words are added to a language
Two step model :
semantics<->words
^ ^
input phonology -> output phonology
(look at notes for better diagram)
21
Q
What is meant by spreading activation in speech production?
A
Priming = Related words can facilitate recognition and production
Semantic would occur first and then phonological
22
Q
What is meant by sentence planning in speech production?
A
Main question - Do we plan what we’re going to say before we say it
Production latencies
~ 600ms (picture naming, Indefrey and Levelt, 2004)
~ 740-800 ms (2 nouns), ~ 900 ms (3 nouns) (Schnur et al, 2006)
~ 1500ms (sentences Gleitman et al, 2007)
Turn taking in conversation
~ 200ms (Stivers et al., 2009)
Sometimes turns overlap (Sellen, 1995)
23
Q
What are two parts of speech planning?
A
Predictability → Bögels, Magyari, and Levinson (2015)
Which character, also called 007, appears in the famous movies?
Which character from the famous movies is also called 007?
Slower to react when key information at the end
Incremental planning → Brown-Schmidt & Konopka, 2014
Error of when looking at image with small star and large star or just saying star when haven’t looked at image long enough - error less likely to occur in spanish
24
Q
What is meant by syntax?
A
Rules for word categories
25
Why is the structure of language important?
Have limited capacity in mind - structure of language is important to help us
26
What are the different rules for a sentence, noun phrase and verb phrase?
Rule for a sentence:
Noun phrase + verb phrase
Rule for a noun phrase:
Determiner + adjectives + noun
Rule for verb phrase:
Verb (noun phrase)
27
What is competence vs performance?
What the system can do versus what it does
Nobody says infinitely long sentences
Our utterances are often incomplete
Linguistic competence:
Linguistic knowledge, rules and structure
What you know when you know a language
Linguistic performance:
How we produce and comprehend language
Describes processes
Involves cognitive functions: memory, attention, emotions, reasoning, theory of mind
In comprehension - Knowledge of what is grammatically correct versus what we can interpret if we have to
28
What is meant by syntactic ambiguity? (three types)
NP = noun phrase, VP = Verb phrase & PP = prepositional phrase
Ambiguity in language
How do we decide the correct grouping of words - language involves massive ambiguity
Lexical/semantic
I buried money in the bank – river or money? - Have top-down knowledge
Structural/syntactic
I shot an elephant in my pyjamas – who was wearing them?
Referential
Jane told Mary that she was really jealous – who is she?
29
What is meant by sentence parsing?
Determining the syntactic structure of a sentence
Grouping words/phrase
Deciding what is the subject, object etc.
Parsing is an important part of determining the meaning of an utterance
How does parsing operate?
Principles?
30
What is the syntax first view on sentence parsing?
Frazier, 1987:
Principle of late closure -Assume that each new word is part of the current phrase you’re building (structural principle)
Principal of minimal attachment → Build the simplest syntactic structure you can (fewest nodes)
Garden path sentences → Reanalysing based on preferred meaning
E.g. Because John always jogs a mile seems like a short distance - when you read the word seems, it feels grammatically wrong so it has to be reevaluated by us to make sense
31
What is the interactionist account of sentence parsing?
Multiple sources of information
Frequency, semantics/plausibility, Prosody, Context
Verb constraints
The ghost read the book during the plane journey
The ghost read the book had been burned
Need that included for it to make more sense
Context
Using context to inform sentence meaning
Garden-path → Listeners try to interpret on the towel as the final location (=minimal [simplest attachment])
No garden path → listeners immediately use context to interpret on the towel as specifying which apple
32
What did Van Gompel, Pickering and Traxler (2000) find about sentence parsing?
The hunter killed only the poacher with the rifle not long after sunset (ambiguous)
The hunter killed only the leopard with the rifle not long after sunset (VP)
The hunter killed only the leopard with the scars not long after sunset (NP)
Where it attaches changes based on the unfolding context
Interactionist approach - believes 2 & 3 should be faster to read because of the context with it
Unrestricted race model - sentence 1 is fastest because syntactic and semantic information are both available and no competing parses
33
What is the unrestricted race model hybrid explanation of sentence parsing?
Combination of interactionist and syntax-first (Van Gompel, Pickering & Traxler)
All sources of information are used to select among syntactic structures
Structures are constructed in parallel and “race”
The winner is the analysis constructed fastest and this is the interpretation adopted
If the analysis is incorrect, it gets reprocessed
34
Why don't people wait until the end of an utterance before starting to comprehend it?
Waiting
Heavy working memory burden
Slow and unresponsive
Incrementally
Lower working memory burden
Fast and responsive
Error Prone
Granularity of increments (word? → minimal phrase? → maximal phrase?)
Need an online measure of comprehension
35
What are the different methods that we can use to measure how sentences are understood/comprehended? (Strengths and Limitations)
Self-paced reading
Measures the time someone takes to make the next word appear
Time spent on a chunk indicates processing time (Just & Carpenter, 1982)
Adv → Simple & cheap
Disadv → Unnatural reading, slowing down doesn’t explain why, effects downstream
Eye tracking during reading
Records how people read, how long they fixate on an area and how many times they re-read
Adv → More natural reading behaviour & high temporal resolution
Disadv → More complicated to set up and slow down doesn’t explain why
Visual world eye-tracking
Where we look in a scene - e.g. if we say a man has drunk, we look at the empty glass first
Adv → More interactive, spoken language, high temporal resolution
Disadv → More complicated set up & can induce strategies
Event-related potentials
Electrical brain activity recorded with scalp electrodes
Adv → High temporal resolution, multi-dimensional data, can inform about processes
Disadv → Resource intensive, Difficult to combine with natural reading but not impossible
36
What is meant by comprehension being incremental?
Processing occurs bit by bit as the input becomes available - don’t wait until we’ve heard all relevant information
Which phrase the word belongs to
Garden path sentences
E.g. Because John always jogs a mile seems like a short distance
Who/what the word refers to
E.g. Mary hated David because he was annoying
‘implicit causality’ – expectations about the implicit cause of the first clause (Garvey, Caramazza, & Yates,1974).
What the spoken word is
I take coffee with s … (predict that it’s going
37
What type of processing does comprehension require?
Requires bottom-up and top-down processing
Bottom up (data driven) processing: relies strictly on the input - e.g. syntax first
Top down processing: uses information from higher levels when processing lower levels
Word superiority effect
Faster to recognise a letter when it is part of a word than a non-word or pseudo word
Bad vs bna
Context aiding parsing
I ate the sandwich in my bag
Sentence N400 effect - no contextual support (e.g. reading a peanut is in love causes suprise/conflict)
Discourse N400 effect - contextual support (e.g. if talking like the peanut is a person, love is more accepted than salted in a sentence)
Shows top-down factors are influencing comprehension
38
What is the situation model of comprehension?
Situation model influence our interpretation of an unfolding sentence and our subsequent memory of it
Builds our representation of what is going on
Representation of the state of affairs described in a text or discourse
39
What is meant by lexical semantic ambiguity?
e.g. Straw (to drink) & Straw (for feed) - Same word but different meaning
40
How are words stored?
One to one mapping
One form one meaning
One to many meaning
One form many meaning
Bark (part of a tree or sound a dog makes)
One to many mapping
One form many senses (Twist → Coil, Spiral, Misconstrue)
41
What is lexical access?
Act of retrieval
Structural priming
Priming - Experienced a linguistic term & more likely to experience it again as that system is primed for that term
Speech errors
Prediction in language
42
How do we resolve lexical ambiguity?
Selective access (Glucksberg, Kreuz & Rho, 1986)
Context restricts access so only relevant is selected
Ordered access (Hogaboam & Perfetti, 1975)
All senses of a word are accessed in order of their frequency
Parallel access (Swinney, 1979)
All senses activated and appropriate one selected based on
context
43
How did Swinney (1987) investigate cross-modal priming?
Compares visual and auditory priming. So priming from reading vs hearing.
Task was looking at what happens as soon as we encounter the ambiguous word.
Methods of online processing are important.
In the task participants have to do a lexical decision task (decide if the word they are shown is a real word or a fake word) while listening to a story. In this story bugs is the ambiguous word but participants saw the phrase “spiders, roaches and other” which strongly biases you towards a particular sense of the word; insect.help us understand how we process language
Place ‘bugs’ at different time point - originally think in terms of ant and spy then use context to narrow down
44
What is reordered access model?
Access of meanings for an ambiguous word is exhaustive but in which the order of access is influenced by prior disambiguating context
Meaning frequency
Equally frequent - equibiased
Not equally frequent - non-equi biased
Prior context can boost appropriate sense - e.g. When she finally served it to her guests, the port had a strange flavour
45
What is meant by inference and what are the types of inference?
Inference = any piece of information that is a part of our situation model (mental representation of a situation) that is not explicitly stated
Logical inferences:
Logically implied by the meaning of words
Rowan has a spouse - > Rowan is married
Bridging (backward) inferences:
Relating new information to old information
Helps to maintain coherence
Anaphoric/referential inference → The king had only one son. The prince spent his days staring into space
Infer that past sentence refers to next sentence
Predictions about what is coming next
Instrumental inference → The worker swept the floor. The broom was old.
Causal inference → Charlie took an aspirin. Their headache went away
Elaborative (forward) inferences:
Using world knowledge to extend what has been said
Not required for coherence
46
What is the cooperative principle?
"…make [your] conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged" (Grice, 1989, pp.41).
Quality - Tell the truth
Quantity - be informative
Relation - Be relevant
Manner - Be clear
47
Why do semantic illusions occur?
Occur due to failure that of linguistic input
Cooperative speakers? (Grice, Sperber)
Expect conversational partners to be cooperative
Not expecting to be tricked
Limit on attention
Like attentional blindness
Perception without awareness - looking but not seeing
Shallow processing
48
What are limits on attention?
Attentional blindness
Perception without awareness
Focus signals what is important in the discourse → e.g. Acoustic, visual & linguistic structure
E.g. It was MOses who put two of each animal on the ark. True or false?
49
What did Sanford (2011) find about limits on attention and child abuse?
“Child abuse cases are being reported much more frequently these days. In a recent trial, a 10-year {sentence/care order} was given to the victim, but this was subsequently appealed.”
63% detection (= 37% failure to detect!)
No N400 effect for semantic illusion sentences
N400 indexes semantic violations
50
What is meant by depth of processing?
How do we process language
Aim of comprehension → Building a coherent representation
Comprehension is fast
Short cuts? Heuristics?
51
What is shallow processing?
Goal of comprehension
Coherent representation
Efficient and fast
Achieve through shortcuts and heuristics?
Cutting corners, good enough job
Partial analysis of the input (not all features of the word)
Superficial coherence = Heuristic processing
Consistent with ERPs
Speed accuracy trade off - favour being quick and tolerate there may be speed errors
52
How are there individual differences in processing?
Reading skill and working memory reasoning determine ability and speed of comprehension
53
How is bilingualism defined?
Bloomfield 1933 - Someone who speaks two languages perfectly, with equal fluency?
Someone who can comprehend or produce utterances in more than one language
Common definition = Grosjean, 1982 → Bilingualism is the use of two (or more) languages in one's everyday life
54
What are the different types of bilingualism?
Simultaneous bilingualism
L1 and l2 from early childhood (before c, 8-12 years)
Early sequential bilingualism
L1 first, then L2, from early childhood
Late bilingualism
L1 first, l2 later in life
Methodological issue: Lack of homogeneity
Great variation in people’s language experiences
55
What is meant by the puzzle of language acquisition?
Does not involve explicit instruction
Spontaneous from exposure to linguistic input
Mainly based on positive evidence
Exposed to acceptable sentences
It’s fast
Universal
56
What is preverbal development?
What is needed before we can speak
0-2 months - Distinguish natural sounds (lose it by 6 months - not using, lose it)
2-5 months - Cooing and laughter
6-8 months - Vocal play - Deaf children will babble in their hands
6-18 months - Babbling
Deaf children babble (but later)
Learn native speech sounds
Word segmentation
Control articulation
57
What are precursors that support language learning?
Imitation
Turn-taking
Joint attention
Pointing
Reaching
Head shaking
58
What is a brief overview of linguistic development?
Linguistic development
12-19 months early one word stage
14-24 months late one word stage
20-30 months two word stage
28-42 months three word stage
34-60 months multi word phrases
Vocabulary explosion at about 20 months
59
What is used to see whether children can understand grammar?
Preferential looking paradigm
Seeing which screen 18 month olds will look at
Children would look at the correct image described by a sentence presented - understand grammar presented in a simple sentence
60
How are sounds learnt?
Sensitivity to native speech sounds
High amplitude sucking paradigm
Baseline sucking rate - When something exciting happens they suck more
Habituation- repeat same sound
Testing- expose to new sound
Meheler et al. (1988)
French and Russian speaker babies sucking rate decreased with exposure to russian sounds
Monolinguals - More increased sucking rate at new language sounds
Babies are sensitive to the language they hear when in utero
61
What is word segmentation?
Silences between words
Involves combining multiple probabilistic cues
Identifying word boundaries (lexical segmentation)
Phonotactic regularities - what sounds can and cannot go together based on language (transitional probabilities - that we’ll change to something else)
Stress patterns
Saffran et al. (1996)
Mini language
3 syllable words
10 starting syllables (prob=0.1)
3 second syllable (prob=0.3)
One final syllable (prob=1)
Showed words after syllables to test if they knew if something was a word or not - even 8 month olds had an understanding
62
How are words learnt (e.g. through bias)?
Which sounds go with which meanings?
Which part of my environment?
Indeterminacy of language
What’s Rabbit? - e.g. would a child know what is the rabbit
Biases in language learning:
Whole object constraint - assume what we’re referring to is the whole object
Taxonomic constraint
Label extends to other similar things - e.g. believe dog is a mammal with 4 legs so may call a cat a dog
Mutual exclusivity
1 label 1 item
Fast mapping - can link a word to an object after one experience
Basic level
Labrador < Dog > animal
63
What are two competing theories of language development?
Empiricist (e.g. behaviourists)
Knowledge from experience
Imitation & reinforcement
Criticism -
Poverty of stimulus
Little explicit grammatical teaching
Nativists (e.g Chomsky)
Fundamental knowledge is innate
Innate biological capacity
Language acquisition device
Criticism
Overgeneralization errors
U-shaped development
64
What is the critical period in language learning?
Certain biological events can only happen in an early critical period
Certain linguistic events must happen in this period
Brain lateralization
Second language acquisition
Linguistic deprivation
Feral children - e.g. Genie didn’t have the same language capacity
65
What are some bilingual milestones?
6 to 12 month - Babbling in syllables
By 12 months - comprehension of many words and phrases in each of two languages
66
What is the monolingual view of bilingualism and its consequences?
A bilingual is two monolinguals in one
Someone who is equally and fully fluent in both languages
two separate and isolable language systems
Consequences:
Based on monolingual standards
Focus on influences on development and cognition
Little focus on bilingual competence
Insecurity about language abilities
67
What is the bilingual view of bilingualism?
Sum is more than the parts’
Coexistence and constant interaction of languages produces a new linguistic entity
Bilingual ≠ Monolingual + Monolingual
Rarely equally and completely fluent
Language mode:
The two languages can be used separately or together for different purposes/ domains/ people
Code-switching (alternation between languages)
Je ne suis pas prête, and at the rate I’m going, je vais être en retard
I’m not ready, and at the rate I’m going, I’ll be late
Word borrowing
Wǒmen dǒu chī cake
We all eat cake’
68
How does language acquisition differ in bilinguals?
Quantitative difference from monolinguals
Reduced exposure for each language
Qualitative difference from monolinguals
Need to be able to detect different languages
69
What is meant by language discrimination?
Byers-Heinlein, Burns, & Walker, 2010
High amplitude sucking paradigm
English & Taglog sentences
Newborns (0-5 days old)
Bilinguals equally interested in languages whereas monolingual only interested in their own language
Infants habituated to English or Tagalog sentences
At test hear two novel sentences from new speaker in the other language
Have some awareness of the distinct languages
70
How does word segmentation occur in bilinguals?
Bilingual infants use transitional probability cues to segment words
Exposure to more frequent language mixing means more successful at segmenting
From 6-9 months onwards, bilingual infants are sensitive to what is or isn’t allowed in their dominant language
May be delayed in non-dominant language
71
What is mutual exclusivity and is it relevant in bilinguals?
Within language, most objects only have one name - no true synonym
Is mutual exclusivity relevant in bilinguals - more than one word - not present
Houston-Price et al., 2010
Bilinguals couldn’t map word to object like monolinguals
72
How does vocabulary size and fluency vary in bilingualism?
Same amount of word learning takes place
Bilinguals know fewer words per language
Though the same number of words in total (when both languages are combined)
Bilinguals have lower verbal fluency
Slower to name objects than monolinguals
Not two monolinguals - joint activation occurs - words activated in both language for a concept
73
What is the impact of bilingualism on cognition?
Dis:
Confusing
Size of vocabulary
Access-speed
Adv:
Cognitive control
Executive function
Brain plasticity
Grammaticality detection in children
Apples growed on trees - Same accuracy as monoling
Apples grow on noses – Higher accuracy than monoling
Bilingual advantage in selection and inhibition
Cognitive benefits also seen in EF tasks - e.g. in the simon task (Białystok et al. 2004)
Better EF in bilinguals
74
Why does bilingualism delay onset of Alzheimer's disease?
Dementia occurs later in bilinguals
Why
Cognitive reserve
The protection against cognitive decline that comes from active engagement in stimulating intellectual, social, and physical activities
75
What are the costs of bilingualism?
Lower vocabulary within a language even when fluent, appearing at all age
Poorer performance on tasks that require world access and retrieval
76
What is the biological basis for language?
Language is usually left-lateralized to regions around Sylvian fissure
Four main landmarks
Audition: Posterior, superior temporal lobe, Heschl’s gyrus
Action and motor control: inferior frontal and parietal
Planning, cognitive control: frontal
Visual object recognition: Inferior temporal
Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area involved in aphasia
77
What does the Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind model show about the language brain link?
Damage in each area impairs associated language function
Broca’s area - phonology and grammar
Wernicke’s = Semantics
KQ
Localisation of function - which parts of the brain control different sorts of behaviour
What’s the mapping between complex behaviours and information flow through brain structures
78
What is Aphasia? (Biological basis and types)
Language impairment due to brain damage
Affects language but not intellect
Classification based on primary symptoms
Biological basis
Broca’s area - Role in speech production
Wernicke’s area - Role in language comprehension
Types of aphasia
Clustering of symptoms characterised in terms of expressive (production) vs receptive (comprehension) deficits
Also repetition which involves both
79
What is Broca's (production/motor aphasia)?
Comprehension intact, production non-fluent, repetition impaired
Paul Broca (1861)
Patient could only say tan, although he could understand language
Impaired production
Simplified speech - omission of functional morphemes (e.g. nouns & verbs)
Agrammatic speech - Can’t produce grammatically correct sentences
80
What is Wernicke's aphasia?
Wernicke (1870s)
Comprehension impaired, production fluent
Patients who could speak but whose sentences didn’t make sense, and who had difficulty understanding language
Impaired comprehension (Lesser & Milroy, 1993)
Paraphasia → Wrong (combination of) words and morphemes
Neologisms → Making up new words
81
What is conduction aphasia?
Comprehension intact, production fluent - damage to fibres connecting areas so semantic information isn’t connected to production information
Damage to arcuate fasciculus
Selective deficit in word repetition
Reproduction conduction – poor phonological encoding
Short-term-memory (STM) conduction – impaired STM
E.g. Wash pronounced Fosh
82
What areas of the brain does the Geschwind model say are responsible for the auditory cortex (pronouncing word after hearing it) and the visual cortex?
Auditory:
Broca's, primary auditory cortex, Wernicke's area, arcuate fasciciulus, motor cortex
Visual:
Broca's, primary visual cortex, Wernicke's area, arcuate fasciciulus, motor cortex
83
What is anomia?
Word-finding difficulty - common in all aphasia
Non-focal - not caused by obvious damage to particular area
Can be seen in all types of aphasia
Can be seen in more general disorders of the brain
Lexical Semantic anomia → inability to use semantic representation to select the correct lemma
Phonological anomia → like tip-of the-tongue
84
What can aphasia tell us about language?
Caramazza & Zurif (1976) - Competence vs Performance
Heuristic processing
Based on semantic information, real world knowledge
Algorithmic (rule-based) processing
Based on syntactic analysis
Requires correct syntactic analysis
85
Can aphasics use algorithmic procedures in language comprehension?
Wernicke’s aphasia - comprehension deficit?
comprehension problems across the board?
or possibly problems centred on heuristic processing?
(relies on semantics)
Broca’s aphasia - intact comprehension?
So no comprehension problems?
But they behave abnormally in metalinguistic tasks that involve grammatical structure
Sentence picture matching task - Caramazza & Zurif (1976)
Semantic constraints
Apple that the boy is eating is red
Apples can’t eat boys (but boys can eat apples)
Reversible
The cow that the monkey is scaring is brown
Cows can scare monkeys (also vise versa)
Improbable
Lion that the baby is scaring is yellow
Lions usually scare babies (though babies can’t scare lions)
86
What is the Wernicke-Geschwind model?
Broca-expression’ & ‘Wernicke-reception’
Clinically useful but oversimplification
Visual & auditory perceptions of words go via modality-specific pathways
Language is in both the left and right hemisphere & involves cortical & subcortical regions - contradicting previous beliefs
Language uses the entire brain
If brain damage occurs earlier, the brain can sometimes compensate - can’t generalise impact of brain damage
87
What are the conflicting beliefs about where Broca's are is? What are the differing approaches?
People can’t agree where Broca and Wernicke’s area are ^ = Little consensus
Lesion approach
Common areas of injury
Compare behaviour with control group
Behaviour approach
Group based on language behaviour
Examine lesion overlap
88
What is Voxel-based Lesion-symptom mapping? (Bates et al. 2003)
Studying brain patterns while completing a task in scanner
Spatial information: continuous lesion information
Resolution: voxel =1 mm by 1mm MRI scan of the brain
Linguistic information: continuous behaviour information
Western Aphasia Battery subtests:
Fluency, Auditory Comprehension
Fluency most affected by anterior lesion
Auditory comprehension by posterior lesion
89
What is the monolingual and bilingual view of aphasia?
Monolingual view
Each language should show different level of impairment
Restoration may vary across languages
Bilingual view
Aphasic symptoms should be present across all languages
Similar to recovery among languages
90
What is bilingual aphasia and what are potential recovery patterns?
Shows complex patterns
Sometimes asymmetric symptoms - either L1 or L2 is affected
Sometimes shared deficits across L1 and L2
Cannot predict recovery on basis of:
Lesion type/site
Context or frequency of use
Type of aphasia
Potential recovery patterns in bilinguals
Parallel → both recovered together
Differential → one language recovers better
Blended → pathological mixing/switching
Selective → only one is impaired
Successive → one the the other
91
What did Fabbro (2001) discover about learning another language and its impact on aphasia?
Different representation based on age of acquisition, proficiency
Simultaneous or early sequential learning
Procedural memory systems
Late bilingual
Declarative memory systems
92
What are the different types of aphasia treatment?
Impairment based
Reduce impairment
Communication based
Help to communicate as best as possible
Alternative ways of communicating
- Verbal therapies
- Multimodal therapies (improve verbal or total communication)
93
Where do we store words vs rules in the brain?
Regular past tense: walk → walked
Irregular past tense: Run → ran
Irregular we store the words themselves but for regular verbs we use rules
Pinker & Ullman (2002)
Lexicon is a subdivision of memory
Grammar is a productive system of rules
Irregular forms are words
Irregular inflections: applies to 180 verbs in unpredictable ways
Runned, Feeled, Breaked
Explanation: Irregular forms are stored in memory but regular forms are generated by rules (+ed)
94
What predictions are there about using words and rules?
Prediction 1: Damage to the neural substrate of lexical memory will cause problems with the irregular form
Prediction 2: Damage to neural substrate for grammatical combination will cause problem with using the regular form
Anomia - impairment in word finding
Agrammatism - impairment in fluent grammatical sequences
95
What types of inflection were agrammatic and anomic patients found to have?
Agrammatic patient had impaired regular inflection
Anomic patient had impaired irregular inflection
96
How do words vs rules work in degenerative diseases? (Alzheimers, Parkinson's and Huntington's)
Alzheimer’s disease
Especially atrophy in the temporal lobe
= declarative memory
Loss of lexical/conceptual knowledge
Grammatical processing relatively intact
More problems with irregular than regular
Unpaired suffixing
Parkinson’s disease
Basal ganglia degeneration
= procedural memory
Loss of motor skills (and grammatical skills)
Relatively intact use of words and facts
More problems with regular than irregular
Impairded suffixing fro novel words
Don’t produce overregularization errors
Huntington’s disease
Degeneration of various basal ganglia structures
= procedural memory
Disinhibition of frontal areas > unsuppressable movements
Produce xtra suffixes
No analogous errors with irregular inflection
Unsuppressed regular suffixation
97
What is meant by using language?
How do we mean what we say and how do we say what we mean
What we communicate is not inherent in the words we use - make inferences both when saying and when interpreting languages
98
What are pragmatics?
How we understand language in context (can have literal meanings and pragmatic meanings - how they are intended to be used)
E.g. Can I go to the toilet?
99
What are Searle (1975) five speech acts?
Use language to perform particular actions
- Representative - Speaker is asserting a fact and conveying his or her belief that a statement is true
- Directive - The speaker is trying to get the listener to do something
- Commissive - The speaker commits him or herself to some future course of action
- Expressive - The speaker wishes to reveal his or her psychological state
- Declarative - Speaker brings about a new state of affairs
100
What is Grice's cooperative principle?
Conversation is cooperative
Quality → Expect people to tell the truth
Quantity → Be informative
Make contribution as informative as required
Do not make contribution more informative than is required
E.g. Did you meet her parents? - I met her mother - tells us she didn’t meet her father (underinformative)
Relation → Be relevant
E.g. Inference based to understand - I am out of petrol + There is a garage around the corner
Manner → Be clear
Be perspicuous
Avoid obscure expression
Avoid ambiguity
Be orderly
E.g. John was driving and caused the car to stop
101
What is collaboration in conversation and dialogue?
Speakers and listeners can taken another person’s point of view
For speakers this involves audience design
E.g. Teviot building - Describing to another Edinburgh student - say Teviot but describe differently to different people
Audience design → Speakers tailor their utterances to suit their addresses' needs
Depends on what they know, their language abilities, what they are interested in
102
How is common ground also used to collaborate in conversation and dialogue?
When we speak and listen we make reference to the common ground we share with our partners
Can occur by
Physical co-presence (being in the same physical environment)
Community membership (members of particular communities that share specific knowledge)
Linguistic co-presence (how the thing has been referred to before in the presence of the other person)
Brennan & Clark (1996) → Conceptual pact - if called dog a labrador in context with one person, will continue to refer to it in the same way but with another person - dog
Conversational partners can also sue common ground to conceal their meaning from other people
Information that is known to the partners - but not to overhearers
E.g. using a foreign language the overhearer doesn’t speak or using technological language
Addressees also use common ground when interpreting a speaker’s utterances
103
What are pragmatic impairments, how can they be acquired and what are there implications?
People generally process pragmatic pretty effortlessly
Some groups experience persistent difficulties with pragmatic language
Pragmatic impairments
Can be acquired impairments following injury - e.g. stroke patients with right hemispheric damage
Impaired comprehension of non-literal language - sarcasm, idiom, humour & metaphor
E.g. that exam was murder - the exam was hard
Can be hard to understand in different languages.cultures etc.
Brownwell et al. (1983)
Right hemisphere deficient stroke patients were worse at selecting correct punchline - picked incoherent endings
104
What are developmental pragmatic impairments?
Autism
Pragmatic language disorder (social/pragmatic communication disorder)
Comprehension - Fail to understand why certain things are funny or not
Production
Conversational implicature
May fail to understand conversational implications
E.g. Can you tell me about your birthday party? - A - Yes
Non-literal language - failure to understand - e.g. keep your eye on the ball
Failure to take prior context into account
105
How is theory of mind related to pragmatics?
Pragmatic involves reasoning about speaker knowledge so requires theory of mind
Understanding that different people have different knowledge and beliefs
Perspective-taking → Modelling a partner’s mental states as distinct from one’s own
106
What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
Grammatical and more verbal structure of a person's language influences how they perceive the world
