Lecture 13: Language Flashcards
What is language?
A shared symbolic system for purposeful communication
* Symbolic: There are units to reference (or symbolizes) something else (ex: words represent thoughts and ideas)
* Shared: It is common among a group of people
* Purposeful: To communicate and translate thoughts (Can turn your thoughts into a public message)
Is Human Language Unique?
Do other species also have language?
* Ants pass chemical signals to each other through antenna
* Bees communicate through body movements (honey bees perform the waggle dance to communicate to other beess about the distance and direction)
* Some monkeys have basic vocalization styles
* Human language can generate an infinite variety of sequences in novel ways. Our language allows us to recombine different words or phrases in an open ended manner.
Languages adapt to the evironment
- Vocabulary shaped by environment and culture
- Morphology (complexity) decreases with languages spoken by more people
- Lexical tones are partly determined by climate (link between climalte and tonal representation. Tonal languages are rare in colder climate because the dry air makes it harder to poriduce tonal sounds.
- Some places have more develop counting systems (talk a lit about quantities of things).
- Languages that are spoken by more people temd to be and less complex.
Gender style and language
- Countries with gendered languages (Spanish) experience higher average gender inequality
- Gender affects language use
- Women use more adjectives and first-person plurals than men (“We need to hurry”) and use a ‘reverse accent’ more than men (end
statements like questions - means they will infllict up. End dentences like its a question. ) - Change language to help make changes in society
- language can change with societal views
- Therefore, language can provide a lot of insight into the culture and political views at the time.
Language in the brain: aphasia
Impaired language function from brain injury
* We study aphasia to understand language in the brain.
* Aphasia: describe distrubances of language function of some sort. Typically, from brain injury.
* Aphasias can be seen other conditions. ie. symptom in dementia.
* Aphasia cases have shown us that there is a neural division betwen certain types of language and that most well know divission is between speech production and comprehehison.
Broca’s aphasia and Patient Tan
- Expressive aphasia
- Intact language comprehension,
- Impaired speed production and articulation (cannot fluently produce language and articulation)
- First described in Patient Tan. Lost the ability to speak fluently due to epilepsy
- Could only speak one syllable (Tan)
- Still tried to communicate via gestures, tone, inflection
- Large lesion in the left inferior frontal gyrus
- Broca’s area
Broca’s Aphasia
- Speech is halting and difficult to produce (very efforful for someone to produce)
- Mostly just nouns and verbs
- Typically writing is affected in an
analogous manner - Impairments range from deficits in producing certain words –> problems generating all forms of language
- Depends on damage to Broca’s area (left hemisphere, language is lateralized in the LH in 90% of right handed individuals and 50% of left handed individuals)
- How much deficit there is in speech depends on how much damage there is to broca’s area.
Wernicke’s Aphasia
- Posterior superior temporal lobe
damage, typically left hemisphere - Comprehension, both written
and spoken - Language content is not
meaningful nor comprehensible. Speech is fluid/produced but the content has no meaning. - “Word salad”
- As they are speaking, they think that they are understood. They are not because they use a lot of non words, non comprehensible. The problem is in language comprehension
Paraphasias
- Language errors or missuse of words.
1) Verbal: substituting a word with something semantically-related - Shares meaning with intended word
-
Swapping term brother with sister
2) Phonemic (literal): swapping or adding speech sounds - Shares sounds with intended word
-
Calling Crab Salad: Sad Cralad
3) Neologisms: using a made-up word - Not understood/shared by the community
- Mansplain is an example of a neologism that is understrood by the community.
These are not just in wernickes aphasia, we can also make these errors. Just way more common in Wernickes/
Conduction aphasia
- Neural pathway from between Broca’s and Wernicke’s area (communication pathway between production and comprehension areas = arcuate fasciculus)
- Production intact
- Comprehension intact
- Impaired repetition - because when they are cpmprehending something, they then can’t transmit that message to produce that language.
- Load dependent = deficits will increase wiith longer and more difficult sentences they need to repeat.
Language and lateralization
- Aphasia indicate that language is left lateralized
- Lateralization not fully understood nor linked to handedness?
- New data indicating up to 70% of left-handed people demonstrate left hemisphere language dominance
- Broader aspects of language are supported by the right
hemisphere
* Prosody (melodu of speech) and pitch to convey intonation, mood, attitude, gestural communication
will not be asked about thos model.
Updating classic model
- Gives us a basis
- Distinction between language production and comprehensiion and where they are in the brain.
- some studies showing that language function relies on a set of neural processes
- dorsal stream = speech production
- ventral stream = speech recognition
Language lessons
- Language representation in the brain
- Cases of aphasia show division in language capacities
- Language acquisition
- Language comprehension
- Dealing with phonological, lexical and syntactic ambiguity
- Language and the link to thought
Laguage acquisition
Are we pre-equipped with language capabilities?
* Nuturist view: No. Language is acquired through the same mechanisms as skill learning
* Naturist view: Yes. We are born with the innate capacity to learn language
Behaviourist view
- Language acquisition is skill or associative learning. It is learned like any other type of skill.
- Explicit training of language
- Trial and error reinforcement as well as modelling other people shapes language.
- ex: as a child is learning language, they will immitate the sounds and speech patterns of adults. They will receive either punishement or reward.
Chomsky’s chomp on behaviorism
- Language is too complex and acquire too rapidly for behaviorist view of language learning
- Language is not stimulus dependent (any word can be spoken in response to any stimuli)
- Language is not determined by
reinforcement - we can say and do things that we have not been trained to say. - We learn language rapidly
- We can understand and speak
sentences we have not heard before
–> this can only be explained by language being inate
The innateness hypothesis
- Grammar, syntactic structure, is separate from semantic meaning
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” gramatically correct but does not have a meaning. - We are born with principles of grammar
- Language Acquisition Device (LAD): abstracted entity that supports language (set of language learning skills that controls the general principele about how someone creates language)
- Universal grammar: a part of the LAD that includes rules for all languages. When someone is learning a language, they either have to add on or adjust that universal grammar with language specific aspects.
- Children only need to learn language-specific aspects to put “on top” of Universal grammar
Support for the innateness hypothesis = convergence
- Children are exposed to different learning situations, yet converge on the same grammar
Both assume a rule, but most children use (2), which is more
“grammatical” than (1)
- regardless of someones language situation most chilfdren will learn that 2 is most correct,
Support for the inatenness hypothesis = uniformity
- All children acquire a language are going through the same stages and in the same order.
- Language is not about learning it is about some sort of inborn plan.
The environment is not so impoverished
- Adult reformulations of children’s speech target the structure but
not meaning. This is suggesting that there might be something innate about these rules but they still need to be refined from the environment. - Children extract regularities from experiences to form rules
- Evidence that rules are not all innate
- can form some rules through experience and behaviour as well.
Cross modal priming task
- Participants listened to the pre-recorded sentences that contained an ambiguous word “bugs”.
- One contdition had no context and would not bias someone towards one meaning. One would bias the individual towards one meaning.
- Presented words that were contextually related to the biased context, a word that was related to the other meaning of bug and the an unrelated word.
Results:
* Bug primes spy (context inappropriate) just as much as ant (context related) at shorter SOA
* Bug primes only ant and not spy at longer SOA (longer time after hearing word bug)
* Both meanings initially retrieved, Contextually inappropriate meaning is quickly discarded
Parsing and syntactic ambuguity.
- Parsing a sentences is dividing a sentence into parts of speech and identifying them as elements
(nouns, articles, verbs) - Ambiguity
- We hear sentences incrementally, partial information. We don’t have all the information when we are making a decision.
- There is often more than one way parse a sentence
- Garden path sentence
- Grammatical sentences with multiple syntax structure show we parse incrementally
- we are trying to parse a sentence and we get lead down a garden path that can lead us to the wrong answer
Syntax first approach
- We read via grammar principles alone, in one direction
- When you read the sentence bellow you will think that the verb of the sentence is “raced” but it is “fell”. You only know that when you get to the end of the sentence.
But what about reading?
Reading is a newer form of language (5,500 years old)
* Simple model of language for how we read .
Dual route model of reading
- when we read something, we ca do it by sounding it out or by the whole word.
- First mehod involves accessing our mental lexicon to access whole words and then we use that to access speech sounds. This is spared in phonological dyslexia and impaired in surface dyslexia..
- OTher route is where we read letter by letter. We see a printed word, and we convert the grapheme (written word) to the sound. This is spared in surface dyslexia and imparied in phonological dyslexia.
Color language studies
- Experiment to see if how we label colour effects how we see it.
- Berinmo tribe in Papua New Guinea: 5 color terms
- The color boundary between English blue and green does not exist
- English speakers
- The color boundary for Berinmo words nol and wor does not exist
Color language studies: the experiment
*Berinmo Tribe members impaired at blue/green pair trials
*English speakers were impaired on the nol-wor pair trials
*Language shapes color memory
* Berinmo participants were worsse at remembering the study colours from blue and green pair and it was the opposite for english speakers. This is due to the non existent boundary in our laguage for “nol” and “wor” pair.
* Language can shape colour memory
