Lecture 7 - Language

Question 1

What is hyperscanning?

Answer 1

when we measure brain signals of 2 or more people simultaneously (with EEG or MRI) to relate them to each other

Question 2

What is language?

Answer 2

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

Question 3

What are the similarities between human language and animal communication?

Answer 3

Dialects & syntax
Signal modalities
Complex species specific systems (e.g. birdsong, bee dance)
Regulating social structures
Genes that are linked with communication ability

Question 4

What are the differences between human language and animal communication?

Answer 4

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

Question 5

Describe the universality of language

Answer 5

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.

Question 5

Describe skinners verbal behaviour?

Answer 5

Children learn language through operant conditioning

imitate speech that they hear, and repeat correct speech because it is rewarded.

language is learned through reinforcement.

Question 6

Why did Chomsky oppose skinner?

Answer 6

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

Question 7

What is Chomskys universal grammar?

Answer 7

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)

Question 8

What is comprehension?

Answer 8

forming a semantic representation

Question 9

What does comprehension require?

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What are the levels of processing? How do these relate to levels of representation?

Answer 10

Sound - phonemes - words - sentences

Sound processing (phonetic)
Classifying relevant language sounds (phonological)
Retrieving word meaning from mental lexicon (semantic)
Combinatorial & hierarchical processing
(syntactic)

Question 11

What is the triangle model of the lexicon?

Answer 11

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)

Question 12

What is the phonemic restoration effect?

Answer 12

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

Question 13

What is brocas aphasia?

Answer 13

Speech is slow & laboured

Jumbled sentence structure

Difficulty understanding syntactic variations (e.g. passive sentences

Question 14

What is the role of prediction in language?

Answer 14

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

Question 14

What is wernickes aphasia?

Answer 14

Speech is random & meaningless

Inability to comprehend speech & writing

General impairment in understanding meaning (semantics).

Question 15

What is the lexical decision task?

Answer 15

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)

Question 16

What is eyetracking?

Answer 16

Use of eye movement data

Less predictable words lead to longer fixation times and more regressions (=looking back at previous words)

Question 17

What is coherence?

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

What are situation models?

Answer 18

Situation models are representations of connected events that are linked on the following dimensions:
Space
Time
Agents
Causality
Motivation/goal

Question 19

What is an anaphoric inference?

Answer 19

The assumption that characters in a story are coherent. Personal pronouns refer to previously mentioned characters

Question 20

What is an instrument inference?

Answer 20

We use knowledge about tools and actions to infer instruments, e.g. if someone is being stabbed, you infer a knife being used

Question 21

What is a causal inference?

Answer 21

There is a causal connection between the events in a narrative

Question 22

What is the theory of mind? (ToM)

Answer 22

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

Question 23

What is a conversation?

Answer 23

dynamic and rapid exchanges between 2 or more people.

Question 24

Speakers construct messages so they include:

Answer 24

Given information
New information
Common ground

Question 25

What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

Answer 25

The nature of a culture’s language influences the way people think

Question 26

Describe Berlin and Kays basic colour terms

Answer 26

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)

Question 27

What is parsing?

Answer 27

resolve (a sentence) into its component parts and describe their syntactic roles

Question 28

What is speech segmentation?

Answer 28

the process by which the brain determines where one meaningful unit (e.g., word or morpheme) ends and the next begins in continuous speech