Lesson 12: Language Phonemes → Words→Sentences Flashcards
Human Language
- Creative: Hierarchical + governed by rules
- Universally used for Communication: use and development similar across culture
-Behaviorists: language learned by being rewarded - Chomsky: language never heard or rewarded for
Language of Processing
Syntax: grammar rules
Semantics: meaning
Phoneme
Sounds of speech: Smallest unit of sound that can signal meaning
- 45 phonemes
- phonemes changing can change words
Acoustic Signal (sounds coming out)
Patterns in the pressure change produced by the position and/or movement of the articulators (vocal tract changes as we make diff sounds)
Producing Phonemes
Vocal tract contracts in different ways, and different frequencies at different dBs are produced. Waveforms make of the sounds of speech that we perceive, phonemes
Sound Spectrogram
Consonants show formant transitions (rapid changes in frequency before or after they are produced)
- Vowels: see diff dark band (formats)
Perceptual Constancy for Phonemes
They sound the same even with different acoustic signals
Categorical Perception
- Voice Onset Time: time delay between when a sound starts and when voicing begins (if you cut off the beginning of ta it may sound like da)
The Phonetic Boundary
Where a range of VOTs was perceived as /ta/
- use a range to perceive phonemes
Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down
Without any top-down contributions, we would be very bad at perceiving speech
Vision
Speech perception is multimodal - it can be influenced by vision (vision of lips contribute to what we hear)
Word Superiority Effect
Written Letters easier to recognize when they occur within a real word
Perceiving Phoneme
Faster Recognition for phoneme if it’s part of a word in both
Morphemes
Smallest unit that has its own meaning (word is a morpheme but not vice versa)
- “s”
- “ed”
- “er”
- “the”
- “show”
Mental Lexicon
The brain dictionary of all the words we know
- physical form
- semantic information
- syntactic information
- lexicon must be arranged very efficiently
Mental Lexicon Facts
- Morphemes are the representational Unit
- More frequently used words more readily available
- Lexical Neighborhoods (differ by one phoneme/letter)
- Semantic Connections
Word Frequency
More frequent words = respond to them more quickly
- past experiences influence how easy a word is to access in lexicon
Segmantation
- Word pronounced differently by different people, in different situations and contexts
- Knowledge of meaning of words, knowledge of current context, prosody and where we put stress is important
Transitional Probabilities
Certain sounds are more likely to come together, others more like to have a space between them
Perceiving Words
- Normal grammatical sentences
- Anomalous Sentences
- Ungrammatical strings of words
Perceiving Words
Being grammatically correct (semantically) makes oword recognition more easy
Lexical Ambiguity
Word that fits context is activated more strongly in mental lexicon
Broca’s Area
Inferior frontal lobe of the left hemisphere (anterior of Sylvian fissure)
Broca’s Aphasia
Non-fluent, use telegraphic speech (nouns/speech), good comprehension (can count/recite lyrics, applies to written language), agrammatic
Wernicke’s Area
Posterior of Sylvian fissure
Wernicke’s Aphasia
Poor comprehension, speak fluently, anomia (issues with word selection), make paraphasias (speech error), unaware their speech is meaningless, bad comprehension but know what they’re trying to say, issue with semantics
Paraphasias
Semantic: barn → house
Phonemic: table → fable
Neologisms: galump → trebbin
ERP’s of Language Processing
Present one word at a time to know what they were reading `
N400
Elicited by a semantically anomalous words (single word that don’t make sense)
- Elicited after 400 ms
P600
Elicited by a syntactically confusing or anomalous words
- Elicited after 600 ms
Anaphoric Inferences
Connect an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence
Instrument Inference
Inferences about tools or methods
Causal Inference
Inferences that the events of described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous sentence
