Lecture 8 Flashcards
Communication
-exchange of ideas between a sender and receiver
-used to satisfy needs and wants, reveal feelings and thoughts and share info
Sociolinguistic
-study of how variables like cultural identity, setting, and participants (best friend, parent , etc) influence communication
Animal communication
-animals use communications systems to aid survival and reproductive needs
—honey bee waggle dance
—vervet alarm call
Holophrases
A single vocalization or gesture that refers to entire situation and not specify objects or events
-animals and human toddlers
Features of animal communication
-lack of ability to combine symbols together to express novel ideas
- always about the here and now
-their systems have rules
—young vervets realize they can’t make warning call whenever they want
Design features of language
- rule-governed
—how sounds are combined into words and sentences - recursion
— capacity of any one component to any number of similar components - creative/productive
— languages have fixed number of symbols, but potentially infinite number of messages that can be created with these symbols - Displacement
— can refer to events not present in space and time - Arbitrary
—a symbol that bears no resemblance to what it refers to - Dynamic
—language changes across time - Socially shared
— not just words
—culture, tradition, history
Phonology
Study of the sound system of language
Phonetic inventory
-all speech sounds possible for a language
-focus in describing the sounds
Phonemes
-speech sound categories
-focus on meaning of sounds
Phonotactic rules
-how speech sounds can be used to form words
—ex. In English no more than 3 consonants allowed
Morphology
-study of morphemes and how they are used and modified in communication
Morphemes
Smaller meaningful unit of language
-free (dog) vs bound (-s)
—prefix-root-suffix
Syntax
The rules for ordering words in legal structures for a given language
Language ambiguity
Humans are very good at resolving ambiguity
-ambiguity in word structure, and sentence structure
Semantics
The meaning of language (words and phrases)
Sense vs reference
Sense vs reference
- sense is dictionary definitions
-reference are the pointers ( what the word refers to)
Mental lexicon/ lexical memory
-our mental dictionary
-a representational system for the words of our language
—we maintain a huge number of items, and access to this info is extremely fast
Introspection
-think about word meanings
-draw conclusions from subjective experience
Definition hypothesis
-word meaning = list of necessary features
—bachelor vs monk fit similar descriptions
- so of all things, what is included in dictionary definition?
Distributional semantics
-you shall know a word by the company it keeps
—ex. A bottle of tesuino is on the table
——everyone loves it , it makes you drunk , it’s made from corn
——tf, you guess it is an alcoholic beverage
- intuition: words are similar if they have similar words contexts
Associative structures of mental lexicon
-we represent info in terms of connections among units of info
A node
A unit of memory, which is then connected among units of info
—nodes may be strongly or weakly connected
Pragmatics
-how and why we use language
-social communication
—using language for different purposes
—changing language depending on situation
— following rules for conversations
Collin’s and Quillians hierarchal network model
-General thing at top, specific at bottom
- based on generalness of properties at different levels
—ex. Animals breath > birds have wings > canary’s sing
Principle of cognitive economy
List each property as infrequently as possible
Sentence verification task
Participants are asked to decide as quickly as possible if a sentence is true or false
-assumption is verification time depends on the underlying structure
—characteristics unique to item will be closely linked in associative space as opposed to characteristics shared by other items
Collin & loftus spreading activation model
-mental lexicon is organized on basis of semantic relatedness or distance
Spreading activation
Activity at one node caused activation at another node
- automatic and outside conscious control
-decreases the further it travels in the network
Priming
-subject responds faster to a target stimulus because a related stimulus appeared in the context of
—ex. Duck primes goose but not horse
Mediated priming
-limits on the total amount of activation
- prevent uncontrolled spread of activation
Concept
A mental construct that contains info associated with a specific idea
- representation of concrete objects
-they can also be abstract
Category
A mental construct referring to a set of objects or ideas that are grouped together
-tend to be more concrete
-nested structures in which level of organization is important in defining the category
Basic level of categorization
One we are most likely to invoke
-“tools” is a basic level
Subordinate level of categorization
Allows for more specific or specialized categories to be formed
-ex. Power tools
Superordinate level of categorization
Higher order categories that include general info and include many more common categories
-“human implements “
Family resemblance
-membership in a category may be defined by each items Demerol similarities in the category
—rather than by a specific list of features
Typicality effect
-verification times are faster for more typical or representative category members than atypical ones
Exemplar theory
-categories classified by maintaining large numbers of specific instances of a category
—associated with each other in semantic memory
Prototype theory
-prototypes are the most typical member of particular category
-prototypes form the central characteristics in our representation of categories
Schemas
-generalized knowledge about an events, person, or situation
Scripts
Well learned sequences of events associated with common activities
-ex. Going to a restaurant
