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PSY270 > Lecture 8: Language > Flashcards

Lecture 8: Language Flashcards

1
Q

What are Hockett’s universal characteristics of language?

A 
→ semanticity
→ arbitrariness
→ flexibilty and naming
→ duality of patterning
→ productivity (generativity)
→ displacement
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2
Q

What is semanticity in Hockett’s universal characteristics of language?

A
  • language conveys meaning
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3
Q

What is arbitrariness in Hockett’s universal characteristics of language?

A
  • signal doesn’t resemble what it represents
  • no inherent connection between the units used in a language and their meanings
    → onomatopoeia excepted
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4
Q

What is flexibility and naming in Hockett’s universal characteristics of language?

A
  • referents have labels and they can be changed
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5
Q

What is duality of patterning in Hockett’s universal characteristics of language?

A
  • signal can be broken down into smaller units
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6
Q

What is productivity/generativity in Hockett’s universal characteristics of language?

A
  • create infinite number of new meaningful utterances from a finite number of meaningful signals
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7
Q

What is displacement in Hockett’s universal characteristics of language?

A
  • can communicate about things that aren’t present
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8
Q

What are Miller’s Five Levels of Language Analysis?

A 
→ phonology
→ semantics
→ syntax
→ conceptual
→ belief
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9
Q

What is a phoneme?

A
  • the smallest unit of sound that makes a difference to meaning
  • can be consonants or vowels
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10
Q

What are the distinctive features of phonemes?

A
  • voicing
  • place of articulation
  • manner of articulation
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11
Q

What is phonological voicing?

A
  • when vocal cords vibrate when saying a phoneme it is voiced
  • when vocal cords don’t vibrate when saying a phoneme it is unvoiced
  • when vocal cords start to vibrate it is called voice onset time (VOT)
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12
Q

What is place of articulation?

A
  • where the flow of air is altered to make a speech sound
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13
Q

What are the features of manner of articulation?

A

→ stops: blocking and releasing air, /p/

→ fricative: air is forced through a narrow passage, /f/

→ nasals: air is passed through the nasal cavity, /m/

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14
Q

What is the lack of invariance problem?

A
  • phonemes are different depending on context they’re in
  • phonemes are always coarticulated, i.e. more than one at the same time
  • accent, speed, facial expression, physical differences, carefulness all affect speech stimulus
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15
Q

What is categorical perception?

A
  • all sounds falling within a set of boundaries are perceived as the same, despite physical differences
    → /ba/ and /pa/ differ only in VOT
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16
Q

What is the segmentation problem?

A
  • we hear clearly separated words, but there aren’t any clear breaks between words in the acoustic signal
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17
Q

What is the McGurk effect?

A
  • shows how we use vision to help us hear

- delayed video can change /ga/ to /da/

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18
Q

What is a morpheme?

A
  • smallest meaningful unit in language
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19
Q

What is a free morpheme?

A
  • has its own meaning
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20
Q

What is a bound morpheme?

A
  • only contributes to meaning but isn’t a word in itself

→ -ly for adverbs, -s for plurals

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21
Q

What is a polysemic word?

A
  • word that has multiple meanings

→ dominant meanings is related to frequency of usage

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22
Q

How did Warren show the phonemic restoration effect?

A
  • sentences present with a target word that is missing a letter and covered with a cough
    → most participants report that they didn’t notice anything missing
  • shows context can effect our perception of language, not just comprehension
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23
Q

What was Swinney’s lexical priming study?

A
  • Swinney’s research measured response time to different words with either similar or different meanings.
  • using ambiguous words as stimuli show that context exerts its influence after all meanings of the word have been briefly accessed.
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24
Q

What is syntax?

A
  • concerns the structure of language
    → set of rules we use in language
    → can’t just combine words randomly
  • encompasses tacit rules of a grammar
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25
Q

What are grammars?

A
  • set of implicit syntactic rules that make a language system regular and productive
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26
Q

What is prescriptive grammar?

A
  • describes what you ought to use language “correctly”
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27
Q

What is descriptive grammar?

A
  • describes language users’ tacit knowledge of the rules of language
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28
Q

What was Chomsky’s work on syntax?

A
  • realized that sentences are composed of phrases rather than isolated words
  • created phrase structure rules/rewrite rules
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29
Q

What are phrase structure rules/rewrite rules?

A
  • formal rules for describing tacit knowledge people have for creating sentences out of groups of words

→ cannot account for sentences that have different structures but same underlying meaning
→ cannot account for ambiguous sentences

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30
Q

What is surface structure?

A
  • actual phrases in the sentence
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31
Q

What is deep structure?

A
  • hypothetical word string that accurately reflects the relationship between sentence elements
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32
Q

What is Fillmore’s case grammar?

A
  • semantic analysis of sentences involves figuring out what semantic role is being played by each word or concept in the sentence and computing the sentence meaning based on those semantic roles
  • agent (subject doing the action), patient (acted upon), location
  • formed from syntactic structure, correspondence rules, and conceptual structure
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33
Q

What is parsing?

A
  • dividing sentence into phrases and groups
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34
Q

What is the immediacy principle of parsing?

A
  • listeners/readers are making decisions
    about organizing words into phrases/clauses
    before they can be sure they are correct
35
Q

What are temporary syntactic ambiguities?

A
  • sentences where a target word has an ambiguous initial meaning
    → i.e. “fires” as a noun or verb
36
Q

What is a garden-path sentence?

A
  • grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader’s most likely interpretation will be incorrect
    → reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end.
37
Q

What was Tanenhouas, Spivey-Knowlton, et al’s study on syntax?

A
  • studied the eye movements of people who were instructed to pick up a variety of objects
    → showed immediacy principle
    → though some instructions had syntactical ambiguity (i.e. “put the apple on the towel in the box” could mean either the apple should be placed in the box or on the towel in the box) people had no problem parsing
  • shows that there is some conceptually driven processing
38
Q

What is discourse in linguistics?

A
  • set of language units larger than sentences

- most often studied in the context of reading (can control what people read but not what they say)

39
Q

What is the first step for reading?

A
  • lexical access
    → orthography (graphemes)
    → phonology (phonemes)
40
Q

What is local coherence?

A
  • relates to connection between adjacent sentences
    → particularly important for textbase representations
  • simple reference is necessary
  • anaphor & antecedent
41
Q

What is global coherence?

A
  • relates to connecting all of the sentences to a theme

→ particularly important for situation models

42
Q

What is an anaphor?

A
  • term that gets its meaning from another expression
43
Q

What is an antecedent?

A
  • term to which the anaphor refers
44
Q

What is a bridging inference?

A
  • connect statements through commonly held world knowledge

- processing sentences requiring these takes more time than those with explicit antecedent

45
Q

What is an instrument inference?

A
  • involve people making inferences about which tool was used to perform an action
46
Q

What is a causal inference?

A
  • used to explain that events in one sentence were caused by events in a previous sentence
47
Q

What are situation models in global coherence?

A
  • mental representation that serves as a simulation of real/possible world as described by a text
  • contain required and explanatory inferences we make about what we read
  • contain temporal and spatial information that is not explicitly stated
48
Q

What is the event-indexing model?

A
  • proposes that people actively monitor five dimensions of a situational model and update our models when there is a change in any of the dimensions
    → space, time, characters (entity), goals, causality
  • updating is reflected by increased reading time
    → discontinuity along any of the five indices of the event-indexing model, the individual must use more processing resources to comprehend the information
49
Q

What was Zwaan’s study on global coherence?

A
  • sentence describes event but time is shifted for longer durations
    → i.e. “Mary went into her office. A minute later the phone rang.” v. “Mary went into her office. A year later the phone rang.”
  • slower response times the longer the duration
    → individual may require more processing resources to update the current situation model (and maintain local coherence) or create a new situation model
50
Q

What is psycholinguistics?

A
  • study of language as it is learned and used by people
51
Q

What is language?

A
  • shared symbolic system for communication
52
Q

What is the phonology level of language study?

A
  • analysis of the sounds of language as they are articulated and comprehended in speech
53
Q

What is the syntax level of language study?

A
  • analysis of word order and grammaticality

→ e.g. rules for forming past tense and plurals

54
Q

What is the lexical or semantic level of language study?

A
  • analysis of word meaning and the integration of word meanings within phrases and sentences
55
Q

What is the conceptual level of language study?

A
  • analysis of phrase and sentence meaning with reference to knowledge in semantic memory
56
Q

What is the belief level of language study?

A
  • analysis of sentence and discourse meaning with reference to one’s own beliefs and one’s beliefs about a speaker’s intent and motivations
57
Q

What is language competence?

A
  • internalized knowledge of language and its rules that fully fluent speakers of a language have
58
Q

What is language performance?

A
  • actual language behaviour a speaker generates

→ the string of sounds and words that the speaker utters

59
Q

What are dysfluencies?

A
  • irregularities or errors in otherwise fluent speech
60
Q

What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

A
  • linguistic relativity hypothesis
  • language you know shapes the way you think about the events of the worlds around you
    → language controls both thought and perception to a certain degree
61
Q

How many phonemes are in the English language?

A
  • 46
62
Q

What is phonemic competence?

A
  • extensive knowledge of the rules of permissible English sound combinations
63
Q

What is the motor theory of speech perception?

A
  • people perceive language in part by comparing sounds they are hearing to how they themselves would make those sounds
64
Q

What is some evidence of speech perception?

A
  • synthesized speech easier to understand with coarticulation than string of phonemes
  • cortex activation overlaps with speech production and perception
  • speech easier to comprehend when they see a person talking
65
Q

What is phrase structure grammar?

A
  • the constituents of the sentence, the word groupings, and phrases that make up the whole utterance and the relationships among these constituents
66
Q

What are transformational rules?

A
  • convert deep structure into a surface structure

- part of Chomsky’s revised transformational grammar

67
Q

What is the given-new strategy?

A
  • phrases that contain more accessible info tend to occur earlier in sentences
  • newer concepts tend to come later for extra retrieval
  • shows automatic/controlled processes
68
Q

What are semantic cases/case roles?

A
  • in case grammar, the roles played by the content words in the sentence
69
Q

Which areas of the brain are activated when learning language?

A
  • left hemisphere frontal → semantic

- left hemisphere posterior → visual characteristics/orthography

70
Q

What is aphasia?

A
  • disruption of language caused by a brain-related disorder
71
Q

What is Broca’s aphasia?

A
  • severe difficulties in producing speech
  • agrammatical, short responses
  • comprehension unimpaired
72
Q

What is Wernicke’s aphasia?

A
  • comprehension is impaired, as are repetition, naming, reading, and writing
73
Q

What is conduction aphasia?

A
  • inability to repeat what someone has just heard
74
Q

What is anomic aphasia?

A
  • impairment in the normal ability to retrieve a semantic concept and say its name
75
Q

What is an online comprehension task?

A
  • task that measures comprehension as it happens
76
Q

What is metacomprehension?

A
  • ability to monitor how well we are understanding and will remember information later on
77
Q

What is the labor-in-vain effect?

A
  • people spend large amounts of time trying to learn information that is too far beyond their current level of knowledge
78
Q

What is the region of proximal learning?

A
  • information that is just beyond a person’s current level of understanding
79
Q

What is the structure-building framework of comprehension?

A
  • comprehension is a process of building mental structures

1 - laying a foundation
2 - mapping a foundation
3 - shifting

80
Q

What is the repeated name penalty?

A
  • increase in reading times when a direct reference is used again and again compared to when a pronoun is used
81
Q

What is a speech act?

A
  • the intended consequence of someone saying something

→ “Turn the music down” = speech
→ “The music is distracting me from studying” = speech act

82
Q

What is a backward inference?

A
  • trying to understand what has already been described and how it all goes together
    → making sense of a complete passage
83
Q

What is a forward inference?

A
  • trying to predict what happens next

→ foreshadowing

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