Language Psychology Flashcards
Why should we study language?
Language is universal
Defining feature of humans
No language free culture
Intertwined with cognition and culture
What are shared characteristics across languages (including sign language)?
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
What are the key features of language?
combinatorial, universal, symbolic, discrete, productive,
What is the definition of language?
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
What are some examples of Hockett’s 16 features of language?
Vocal-auditory channel
Broadcast transmission
What is symbolic language vs iconic language?
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
What is meant by language being discrete?
Finite numbers of individual elements
Morphemes (Bedroom → Bed + Room)
Phonemes - Finite number of sounds
Grammatical rules
What is meant by language being combinatorial?
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
What is persuasive ambiguity (as a combinatorial feature of language)?
Different ways of perceiving the same word
(e.g. different ways to perceive ‘doggy bag’)
What is meant by human language being productive?
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
What occurs in language when combining combinatorial + discrete features?
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
What is recursion?
The repetition of a rule or hierarchical structure in some way
E.g. Repark and Re-Re park (when referring to parking a car)
Do non-human animals have language?
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
What studies have been done into primates and language?
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
How do apes and children differ in language?
Apes - lack of syntactic structure vs clear syntactic structure and consistency
little comprehension of syntactic structure
How do animals and humans vary in motivation to share psychological states?
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)
What is the structure of language? (Producing & understanding language)
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
What is the basic concept of speech production?
Conceptualise a message (pre-linguistic) → Formulate the message into linguistic material → Articulate the linguistic signal
How do you investigate speech production?
Investigate it by looking at speech - Speech is error prone and can be disfluent & slips of the tongue can occur
What is lexicalisation and the two step interactive model of word production?
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)
What is meant by spreading activation in speech production?
Priming = Related words can facilitate recognition and production
Semantic would occur first and then phonological
What is meant by sentence planning in speech production?
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)
What are two parts of speech planning?
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
What is meant by syntax?
Rules for word categories
Why is the structure of language important?
Have limited capacity in mind - structure of language is important to help us
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)
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
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?
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
What is meant by lexical semantic ambiguity?
e.g. Straw (to drink) & Straw (for feed) - Same word but different meaning
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)
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
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
