Lecture 7 - Language Flashcards
What is hyperscanning?
when we measure brain signals of 2 or more people simultaneously (with EEG or MRI) to relate them to each other
What is language?
System of communication using sounds or symbols to express feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.
Hierarchical system
Components that can be combined to form larger units.
Governed by rules, specific ways components can be arranged.
Inherently social & communicative, connected to social cognition
What are the similarities between human language and animal communication?
Dialects & syntax
Signal modalities
Complex species specific systems (e.g. birdsong, bee dance)
Regulating social structures
Genes that are linked with communication ability
What are the differences between human language and animal communication?
Animals can only communicate ‘here and now’
Humans can communicate past, future, ideas, and hypothetical scenarios
Animal systems are not ‘productive’ (limited signs & ways of expression, no new symbols)
Creation of new patterns of signs in humans: We can understand and create an indefinitely large number of utterances
Describe the universality of language
Language is critical for human quality of life
Drive for communication is innate
Language ability is universal across cultures.
Language development is similar across cultures.
Describe skinners verbal behaviour?
Children learn language through operant conditioning
imitate speech that they hear, and repeat correct speech because it is rewarded.
language is learned through reinforcement.
Why did Chomsky oppose skinner?
The ability for verbal behaviour is innate
children say sentences that have never been uttered or rewarded by parents (“I hate you, Mum”)
Children go through incorrect grammar stages, despite incorrect grammar not being reinforced
What is Chomskys universal grammar?
Human language coded in the genes.
Underlying basis of all language is similar.
Children produce sentences they have never heard and that have never been reinforced (challenges conditioning hypothesis)
Heavily focused on syntax (hierarchical structure in language)
What is comprehension?
forming a semantic representation
What does comprehension require?
Decoding phonemes: classifying sounds that distinguish words
Accessing the mental lexicon: contains all words a person understands.
Lexical semantics: The meaning of words. Each word has one or more meanings.
Syntactic processing: understanding relations between words
Semantics: Understanding the meaning of language signal.
Discourse integration: Relating & embedding meaning in context, understanding relations of sentences to each other
What are the levels of processing? How do these relate to levels of representation?
Sound - phonemes - words - sentences
Sound processing (phonetic)
Classifying relevant language sounds (phonological)
Retrieving word meaning from mental lexicon (semantic)
Combinatorial & hierarchical processing
(syntactic)
What is the triangle model of the lexicon?
Orthographic (spellings of a language), Phonological and Semantic
You can read + understand a word without (silently) voicing it.
Tip-of-the- tongue phenomenon (when you know what you want to say but can’t remember the phonological structure automatically)
You can say or hear a word without processing its meaning (but able to recognise it)
What is the phonemic restoration effect?
Phonemes are perceived in speech even when the sound of the phoneme is covered up by an extraneous noise (cough)
Affected by contextual processing: Top down completion of missing sounds
What is brocas aphasia?
Speech is slow & laboured
Jumbled sentence structure
Difficulty understanding syntactic variations (e.g. passive sentences
What is the role of prediction in language?
Word probability is based on lexical frequency & contextual expectations
This helps resolving:
Ambiguity
Words can have multiple meanings (some can be more dominant than others)
Interpolation in difficult conditions (distraction, noise)
Deciding on best candidate meaning
Frequent words are processed faster & more efficiently
What is wernickes aphasia?
Speech is random & meaningless
Inability to comprehend speech & writing
General impairment in understanding meaning (semantics).
What is the lexical decision task?
Decide whether a given word is a real word or not.
Frequent words have faster reaction times
Words predicted by context are recognized faster (e.g. if several fruit words in a row makes following fruit words easier to recognize)
What is eyetracking?
Use of eye movement data
Less predictable words lead to longer fixation times and more regressions (=looking back at previous words)
What is coherence?
Representation of the text in one’s mind that creates clear relations between parts of the text and between parts of the text and the story’s main topic.
What are situation models?
Situation models are representations of connected events that are linked on the following dimensions:
Space
Time
Agents
Causality
Motivation/goal
What is an anaphoric inference?
The assumption that characters in a story are coherent. Personal pronouns refer to previously mentioned characters
What is an instrument inference?
We use knowledge about tools and actions to infer instruments, e.g. if someone is being stabbed, you infer a knife being used
What is a causal inference?
There is a causal connection between the events in a narrative
What is the theory of mind? (ToM)
the understanding that another person has beliefs, thoughts, feelings, perspectives, knowledge, and other mental states that are different from your own
the ability to infer relevant mental states of others to communicate & interact with them
What is a conversation?
dynamic and rapid exchanges between 2 or more people.
Speakers construct messages so they include:
Given information
New information
Common ground
What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
The nature of a culture’s language influences the way people think
Describe Berlin and Kays basic colour terms
Languages differ in how many basic colour terms they have
basic means no compound words (e.g. sky blue), no words referring to objects (orange, lilac) and no words borrowed from another language (turquoise)
What is parsing?
resolve (a sentence) into its component parts and describe their syntactic roles
What is speech segmentation?
the process by which the brain determines where one meaningful unit (e.g., word or morpheme) ends and the next begins in continuous speech
