Lecture 3 (Ch. 11 Language) Flashcards
Define language
Language is a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.
What are the characteristics of language?
Language is universal (all cultures use it with the same rules) but still unique.
How is language hierarchical?
- Phoneme (short useful sound)
- Morpheme (smallest meaningful unit of a language)
- Word (20K-100K in lexicon)
- Sentences/discourse
How is language rule based?
It has syntax, pragmatics, semantics. These rules (and also hierarchy) allow language to be so diverse.
What is syntax, semantics and pragmatics?
Semantics: Meaning of words, sentences, discourse
Syntax: Use of rules (Production) - Prescriptive grammar: What a language “allows” - Descriptive grammar: Basic underlying structures
Pragmatics: Importance of social rules
What are the four major concerns of psycholinguistics?
1 - Acquisition - how we learn language
2- Comprehension - how do we understand speech and writing
3- Production - how do people produce language
4- Representation - how is language represented in the mind/brain
What is the eternal debate of language acquisition?
That language is learned (Skinner) or innate (Chomsky).
What is the speech segmentation effect?
Individual words are perceived in spoken sentences
even though there are usually no breaks
between words in the speech stimulus.
Knowledge of the meanings of words in a language
and knowledge of other characteristics of speech,
such as sounds that usually go together in a word,
help create speech segmentation.
What is the phonemic restoration effect?
The phonemic restoration effect occurs when phonemes are perceived in speech when the sound of the phoneme is covered up by an extraneous noise.
What is the word superiority effect?
The word superiority effect refers to the finding that letters are easier to recognize when they are contained in a word than when they appear alone or are contained in a nonword.
What is the lexical decision task?
Decide whether a word is a word or not.
Results showed that if the word is more common the decision come faster than when the worst is not common (example of Bayesian probability) - word frequency effect
What is lexical ambiguity?
How two words can be written the same but have different meanings.
What is a garden path sentence?
A sentence which seems to mean one thing but then end up meaning something else, are called garden path sentences (from the phrase “leading a person down the garden path,” which means misleading the person.)
What is parsing?
the way one breaks up a sentence
What is the syntax-first approach to parsing?
This approach, proposed by Lynn Frazier (1979, 1987), states that as people read a sentence, their grouping of words into phrases is governed by a number of rules that are based on syntax.
