Midterm 2 Flashcards
Memory processing stages
Encoding, storage, retrieval
Encoding
Short term transduction of a physical stimulus into a neural code. It may be a structural change in the brain that encodes a fact or an event about the world
Storage
Retains encoded memory traces that ended up there through the process of consolidation
Retrieval
Recovery of a memory through an activation of a stored memory trace by some kind of cue
What happens if Encoding, Storage or Retrieval doesn’t work?
Memory cannot function
Capacity
Amount of information a memory system can hold
Duration
How long information remains in memory
Encoding, neural basis
A memory trace is formed as a hippocampal-cortical activity pattern
Storage, neural basis
Via consolidation, a memory is transformed into stable cortical pattern
Modal model of memory
Proposed that there are three distinct memory stores: Sensory memory, Short-term and Long-term memories
Sensory memory
Stores memory encoded by sensory organs, has extremely high capacity but very low duration. Rapidly decays within 1 second
Short-term memory
Memory selected via attention from sensory memory ends up in STM. Capable of producing behavioral output has capacity of 7 +/- 2 items that may be stored for 15-30 seconds
Maintenance rehearsal
Mental repetition of information in the STM with no elaboration. Repeating it over and over again eventually allows for an encoding of this information into LTM
Elaborative rehearsal
Information encoding technique that involves elaboration on the meaning of information. Leads to a greater encoding in long term memory
Long Term Memory
Some of the rehearsed information ends up in the LTM. Information may be retrieved from LTM back to STM to aid with a task or a behavior.
Capacity is unknown, duration may last until one’s death, with some information being lost in time
Positive afterimage
Visual memory that represents a perceived image that is no longer present
Negative afterimage
Visual memory of perceived image that is no longer present. Due to the visual receptors being overstimulated
Positive and negative afterimages are an example of…
Persistence of vision
What were the two conclusions that Sperling’s (1960) experiment led to
- Sensory memory capacity is very large, however the duration is very low
- Many items are present in the sensory memory and in order to bring them to the STM and report them, people need a cue
What is the brain region that is crucial for STM
Prefrontal Cortex
What is the average duration of a STM? What happens if it’s not rehearsed?
Average duration is 20-30 seconds, if the memory’s not rehearsed, it drops to 15
What are the upper and lower capacity limits for STM?
9 is the upper limit and 5 is the lower limit
Serial position effect
Order in which one remembers the items determines how well they’ll be remembered
Primacy effect
Items presented first in a list are usually well remembered since the brain has more time for rehearsal
Recency effect
Items presented last on the list are better remembered since they are fresh in the STM
Chunking
Grouping objects together in a meaningful manner for more information to be presented at once
What are the components of the working memory model
Central executive, visuospatial sketchpad, phonological loop
Role of central exec
- Coordinating between visuospatial sketchpad and phonological loop
- Filtering irrelevant information and preventing it from going into STM
What is thought to be one of the reasons for the individual differences in STM capacity?
Central exec’s capacity to filter irrelevant information is thought to be one of the reasons for the individual differences in STM
Visual and auditory memory are processed _______ with/from one another and __________ with one another
Separate, do not interfere
_____ areas of the brain are active for v____ and v____ short term memory
Different areas of the brain are active for visual and verbal short term memory
Patient ELD
When it came to STM, ELD has issues recalling visuo-spatial items, but not verbal ones
Patient PV
When it came to STM, patient PV has issues recalling verbal information but not visuo-spatial
Phonological loop
Auditory component of working memory that allows auditory information to be repeated so it may be used or analyzed
Phonological store
A passive storage for verbal information. Also deemed “inner ear”
Articulatory control loop
Responsible for active rehearsal of verbal information. Used for transforming written language into sounds (reading)
Has an important role in language, also caller “inner voice”
Visuospatial sketchpad
Contains information and allows for active manipulation and analysis of information
Visual cache
Specialized in information about colors, form, and other visual features
Inner Scribe
Specialized in information about spatial location, movement and sequences
The Episodic Buffer
Integrates visual and verbal information with one another.
Memory decay
One of the possible causes of forgetting. As time goes by, memories simply fade.
Proactive Inference
Cases in which learned information causes one to forget something that may potentially be learned in future
Retroactive inference
Causes in which newer information causes one to forget something from the past
Articulatory suppression
Technique used in verbal memory experiments, designed to block rehearsal. Participants repeat task-irrelevent utterance out loud while trying to maintain other verbal items in memory.
What are the differences between LTM and STM in how they retain information?
LTM usually retains abstract and semantic information, whereas STM retains specific physical details about the stimulus
The forgetting curve
Curve constructed by Ebbinghaus. States that forgetting is exponential, rate of forgetting is initially very fast and slows down over time.
The spacing effect
Memory is better retained when the same amount of learning is spaced out over tme
Retrograde Amnesia
Form of amnesia where memories, formed prior to trauma or brain damage, are lost
Anterograde amnesia
Form of amnesia that blocks the ability to form memories after the trauma or brain damage
Ribot’s Law
Remote memories are less affected than ones that were formed closer to the event that caused amnesia
Dissociative Amnesia
Retrograde amnesia for episodic memories and autobiographical knowledge. Usually happens in response to psychological or physical trauma and not due to brain injury.
People with dissociative amnesia display hypometabolism (reduced activity) in the lateral PFC.
Episodic memories are not affected by the amnesia, but accessing of the events is
Alzheimer’s in its early stages
May manifest in the form of impaired short-term memory capabilities and short term memory tasks are often used as a tool in diagnosing the onset
Patient HM
Had compromised LTM and anterograde amnesia due to a removed hippocampus.
His STM was intact
Could repeat a list of words and have meaningful conversations
Could maintain information in his mind for up to 15 minutes
Could learn new skill-based skills and recall major historic events of his childhood
Patient KC
Could answer semantic questions from his past like the fact that he wrote a report at some point.
Was unable to recall specific episodes like when exactly he worked at Brampton Engineering
Patient KF
Was able to form new LTM about the encountered events
Only had STM capacity of 2-3 items
Consequence of damage to the hippocampus on STM and LTM
Difficulties recalling or encoding information into long-term memory while preserving short-term memory
Damage to cortical regions involved in short-term or working memory processing will…
Selectively damage STM processes preserving LTM functioning
Episodic memory
Responsible for specific events and episodes like dancing at the school prom
Semantic memory
Responsible for rememberting general information and facts
Children with hippocampal damage…
Have episodic memory impairment: cannot copy images after a delay
Semantic dementia
Impaired word naming and picture matching tasks, relatively spared at episodic memory tasks.
Personal Semantics
Facts we have about ourselves or general workings of autobiographical facts
Repeated events may also be considered personal semantics
Frontal and Parietal lobes for _____ memory just like Occipital and Temporal lobes for _____ memory
Semantic memory, episodic memory
Episodic and Semantic Neural Overlap
When one is engaging in semantic and episodic tasks, there is a lot of overlap in neuronal activity
Anoetic consciousness
Implicit memory
No awareness or personal engagement with information that is being acessed from memory
(tying shoes, riding a bike etc)
Noetic consciousness
Semantic memory
Awareness, but no personal engagemet
One’s accessing factual information that is not personal
Autonoetic consciousness
Episodic memory
Awareness and personal engagement
Asking people to draw bikes from memory showed that…
Semantic knowledge can affect the ability to retrieve detailed instances. When trying to draw bikes, people were accessing general knowledge of a bike, ignoring fine details.
Synaptic consolidation
Changes at the synapses between neurons that lead to long-term storage of memories
Long-term potentiation (LTP)
A form of synaptic consolidation in which a receiving neuron becomes more likely to fire in response to the stimulation of a sending neuron.
Systems consolidation
A process of making long-term memories more durable based on connections between cortical areas; thought to be orchestrated by hippocampus
Hippocampal replay
A phenomenon in which sequences of brain activity in the hippocampus that occurred during behavioral activity are repeated or “replayed” in sequence, after the event
Working memory components, neuro
Episodic buffer - Parietal lobe
Central Executive - PFC
Phonological Loop - Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas
Visuo-spatial sketchpad - Occipital lobe
Deep encoding
Meaningful encoding is best for forming lasting memories
Self-reference effect
making references to oneself makes it easier to form memories
Generation Effect
Actively making your brain complete words or sentences leads to improved formaton of memories
Memory retrieval is better when there is an overlap with _______ c_______. This phenomenon is known as ______ specificity hypothesis
Encoding context. Encoding specificity hypothesis
Daniil drank 2 cheeky lil pints of stout and started studying for Cog. In what state would he remember what he learned best: Completely sober or in a post-2-cheeky-lil-pints-of-stout state? Why?
In a post-2-cheeky-lil-pints-of-stout state, due to State Dependent learning
For some unknown reason, Abby and Laura decided to dive under water, set up a desk and study Neuro terminology. Would their retrieval abilities be better under water or on a terrace downtown Montreal? Why?
Under water, due to Context Dependent learning with environment as a context. Information encoded in a specific environment is better recalled in that environment
Using ROY G BIV to remember colors of the brainbow is an example of…..
Naming Mnemonics
Method of Loci
Associating pieces of information with a location or a visual image
Shallow processing focuses on ______ and Deep Processing focuses on ______
Structural or physical information, Meaning of the information
Familiarity Effect
Phenomenon in which people tend to rate something that they have encountered before more favorably than something completely unfamiliar
Propaganda effect
Phenomenon in which people will tend to rate statements that they have heard before as being more likely to be true than those they have not heard before
When Daniil was a lil kid, he got bitten by a Japanese Flying Squirrel (the cute ones). He has no recollection of the instance when he got bitten, but he is very scared of those little fur balls. This is an example of
Fear conditioning
In case of Daniil and squirrels, what brain area is activated when he sees a squirrel and feels threatened?
Amygdala
In case of the patient SM, bilateral amygdala damage led to….
Complete absence of the experience of fear
Laura claims that we have episodic memory traces and they are recalled the exact same way at each retrieval. She supports her claim with the observations that recurrent memories are unchanged from the original events in cases like PTSD. What hypothesis is she representing?
Reappearance hypothesis
Vivid memories of significant public events are called….
Flashbulb memories
What was the result of the studies testing the consistency of flashbulb memories?
Declaration of consistent memories decreased
Declaration of inconsisted memories increased
People consistently believed in accuracy of their flashbulb memories
In the study analyzing recollection of flashbulb memories concerning O.j. Simpson murder trial, what percentage of declared recollections changed 15 months after the initial recollection? What about 32 months after the initial recollection?
50% after 15 months, 70% after 32 months
Asking New Yorkers about their flashbulb memories of 9/11 showed that ______ plays an important role in vividness of the memories
Physical proximity to the source
One has many details about memories of different events of their life. During retrieval, hippocampus will ____ and ____ different combinations of details. Which means that one can ______ the same event with different combinations of __________ depending on when they are accessing the memory.
- Search and bind
- Remember, details
What allows us to update memories?
Retrieval. When we access long-term memory traces, they become destabilized since we have to reconstruct them from different details. That causes memories to become fragile and open for new information to come in and old information to be erased.
What was the relation between Bartlett’s The War of Ghosts experiment (1932) and the idea that schemas distort memories
When asked to recall the story about war of ghosts, participants were replacing new, learned information to match one’s schema. Instead of recalling someone hunting, they would recall them fishing, for it was more appropriate to their culture
If Daniil were to ask Abby to study bunch of classroom-related images, excluding a pen; and then gave her an auditory recognition test related to a classroom, what would be the results?
Abby would most likely declare having seen a pen when presented with the auditory recognition test. It would happen due to peple’s memories being affected by schemas about a certain settings
Deese (nuts), Roediger, McDermott (DRM)
Participants tend to falsely remember semantically related lure words (sweet) more than unrelated words (ball)
This illustrates the influence of semantic memory (expectations) on episodic memory
Misattribution effect
Retrieval of information from a wrong source.
Misinformation effect
Leading questions can cause a false memory formation. E.g., Asking people how fast two cars were going when they SMASHED into each other will produce higher speed estimates in participants than asking them about the speed of the cars upon their CONTACT with each other
What is one of the benefits of reconstructing memories?
We can take an anxiety-inducing memory and reconstruct it, associating it with something more pleasant, thus potentially helping a person.
Type of memory that is more immune to being forgotten when compared to other types
Procedural memory
Brains stucture that is important for refining motor sequences and procedures
Basal ganglia, especially striatum
Initially we rely on explicit memory; with training or exposure we start relying on implicit memory. This is the basis of
Habit formation
What needs to be done for the habit to be broken?
For a habit to be broken, inhibiting the reward is not enough, the habit behavior must be replaced
Amygdala and emotional memory
Amygdala is crucial for implicit emotional memory (as well as modulating explicit memory)
Spreading activation
Automatic activation sreads from an activated concept to other interconnected concepts. Thinking about a canary will trigger an activation in related bird concepts
What types of memory degrade every decade after the age of 40? Which types stay intact?
Episodic and Working memories get impaired, semantic and implicit memories stay intact
Domain-General cognitive aging theory
Older adults have deficits in general executive cognitive processes from frontal lobe atrophy. It is harder for them to inhibit irrelevant information and have trouble focusing on one object
The associative deficit hypothesis
Older adults have problems encoding and retrieving associations in memory due to hippocampal atrophy. They may have little to no problems with recognizing faces since it does not require hippocampus
What was the result of fMRI that scanned high performance older adults
They had a bilateral PFC activation, hinting at the evidence of neural compensation
What part of the brain was larger in London taxi drivers?
They had larger posterior, but smaller anterior hippocampi
Highly superior autobiographical memory
People have enhanced autobiographical memory, can remember every single day from their lives in detail.
What are the downsides to a detailed memory?
Higher OCD tendencies, problems with accessing general concept knowledge
According to classical Approach to categorization, categories are defined by sets of:
Defining and characteristic features
Defining features
Features that are both necessary and sufficient for category membership.
Characteristic features
Features common among many members of the category but not essential for membership
Laura thinks that a pigeon is more of a bird than an ostrich, that is an example of ____
Typicality effect
Smol Daniil is 12 months old. He is presented with a picture of a sparrow and a penguin, which one would he recognize as a bird?
He would recognize sparrow as a bird, but not a penguin. It happens due to a typicality effect, kids are able to categorize typical exemplars into a category, but not atypical ones
Abby was presented with a word “banana” and displays a faster response when seeing a word “apple” this is an example of
Semantic priming
Prototype theory of categorization
Proposes that instead of relying on defining featurtes to categorize items, we consider which features are most likely among category members
Prototype
Mental average of all category members; the most typical of a category members. Typicality depends on category
Exemplar theory
Proposes that we store actual examples of items we have encountered in the past. Compares new knowledge to the one acquired in the past
What is the downside of prototype theory?
It relies on context. Typicality of a pigeon or a parrot depends on where one lives
What is the strength of exemplar theory
Since it depends on prior encounters, it accounts for context dependence
Knowledge-based theories of categorization
Proposes that we rely on our broad knowledge base to explain the reasons for category membership. We know that something is a dog because there is something “doggy” about it.
What is one consequence of knowledge-based categorization?
It is based on psychological essentialism, which causes a risk of applying essential qualities to social categories in the same way we do to biological ones. Shoving people into categories, basically
People with higher essentialist beliefs are more likely to
Endorse in a variety of stereotypes about different groups of people
Psychological essentialism
Proposes that categories have natural underlying true nature that cannot be stated explicitly
Basic level categories
Most cognitively efficient. Animal is a basic level category
Subordinate level categories
Category level that is below the basic level, more informative but less distinctive
Superordinate level categories
Category level that is above the basic level, less informative than the basic one and more distinctive.
Semantic network organization
Semantic networks are organized semantically with superordinate categories occupying the uppermost level of network and subordinate occupying the lowest level.
Cognitive economy
Tendency to conserve cognitive effort and resources. Humans engage in it due to limited memory storage
Property inheritance
Characteristic of semantic network models in which nodes inherit the properties of the nodes higher in the hierarchy to which they are connected
Node becomes activated in response to an input from the
Environment
Hierarchy model of semantic knowledge fails to account for
Typicality effects
Spreading activation model
Semantic network model in which concepts are organized based on their semantic similarity to each other.
What is spreading activation model based on?
On the idea of semantic priming. Nodes are connected to each other via semantic relatedness instead of hierarchical structure Account for typicality effects.
Cognitive structure representing one’s knowledge about an item or a situation is called
Schemata
Connectedness model
Based on the structure of human brain with neuron-like nodes that are highly connected to each other
A property of networks in which damage to part of the network results in relatively few deficits because information is distributed across the networks and no single node contains all of the info
Graceful degradation
(knowledge) Grounded (embodied) cognition
Type of cognition achieved by grounding our knowledge interaction with our environment
We know what an apple looks, smells and tastes like because we can see, smell and touch it. This is an example of
Embodied or grounded cognition
Semantic dementia
Dementia characterized by a progressive loss of semantic memory leading to deficits in naming ability. Patients are unable to name objects because they have a deficit with the knowledge itself, not with processing input from one of other senses
According to hub and spokes model, generalized and abstract semantic knowledge is stored in a semantic memory _____ in the ____
Hub in the ATL
According to hub and spokes model, context-dependent and modality-specific detail about items is stored in _____ that are distributed across the ____
Spokes, across the cortex
Cortical region known to be involved in visually guided hand movements and corresponds to a spoke in hub-and-spoke model
IPL
When IPL is stimulated, the time it takes for people to name non-living things is _____ but there is ______ on the naming speed of living things
Increases, no effect
Stimulation of IPL has shown that naming speed only slowed for non-living things that ___________
could be manipulated with hands
When ATL is stimulated, the time it took participants to name pictures of all objects ______ supporting the role of ATL as a general semantic hub
Increased
Congenital aphantasia
A condition experienced by about 1%-3% of the population in which an individual is completely unable to form mental images in the absence of any brain injury.
Define imagery
Ability to recreate a perceptual experience in the absence of an external sensory stimulus.
Define Vividness (imagery)
Refers to how clearly we can create an image in our mind’s eye.
On what factors does vividness depend?
Varies across individuals and contexts. Familiarity may enhance vividness of mental images.
Does visual imagery depend more on visualizers or verbalizers?
Visualizers = Verbalizers
Does auditory imagery depend more on visualizers or verbalizers?
Visualizers < Verbalizers.
(imagery) The Dual-Coding theory breaks down the mental representation of events into two categories. What are they?
Verbal system (= events represented through language and its component parts) and Non-verbal system (= imagery)
What is an example of an exception of the Dual-Coding theory?
Onomatopoeias: a verbal system that represents a concept but doesn’t necessarily resemble what it represents.
What two opposing theories explain how we form mental image representations?
Kosslyn: Imagery as an analogue form of representation (depictive representation theory). Pylyshyn: Imagery as a by-product of a symbolic code (propositional theory).
Tonal languages are _____ in colder climates
Rare
Countries with gendered languages (Spanish, French) experience ______ average gender inequality
Higher
Cite three pieces of evidence (from experiments) supporting the depictive representation theory.
Evidences from mental scanning, mental rotation, mental scaling.
Broca’s aphasia
Intact language comprehension, impaired speech production and articulation. Writing is affected in analagous manner
Wernicke’s (receptive/fluent) aphasia
Impairment of language comprehension, speech production is intact, but makes no sense
Verbal paraphasia
Substituting words with something semantically related
Study: People are presented with a pure tone and are asked to imagine this tone played by a specific instrument. They are then presented with a second tone played by one of three instruments. People judge whether the second tone is the same or different from the first tone.
What was the result of that experiment?
People were faster at saying that two notes were the same when the perceived timbre was consistent with the heard timbre.
Phonemic paraphasia
Swapping or adding speech sounds (calling crab salad: salad crab)
Are similar brain areas active during auditory imagery as during auditory perception?
Yes. E.g., Visual imagery and perception tasks evoked similar activity in the primary visual cortex.
Neologisms
Using a made-up word. Mansplain
Conduction aphasia
Trouble repearing words
Damage to arcutate fasiculus leads to
Condution aphasia
Cite two pieces of evidence against depictive representations.
- Brain damage can lead to perceptual deficits without imagery deficits.
- Experiment: Participants were bad at identifying components of memorized images.
Language is lateralized in
Left hemisphere
Nurturist view
Language is acquired through the same mechanisms as skill learning
Naturist view
We are born with innate capacity to learn language
Behaviorist view on language acquisition
Language acquisition is skill or associative learning
(language) Innatedness hypothesis
We are born with principles of grammar. Grammar and syntatic structure are separate from semantic meaning
Support for innatedness hypothesis: Convergence
Children are exposed to different learning situations, yet converge on the same grammar
Support for innatedness hypothesis: Uniformity
All children acquiring language go through the same order
Based on experiments, how can imagery help in tasks requiring specialized skills? (e.g., playing piano)
Participants high on auditory imagery could compensate for the lack of feedback during the experiment. Not as much of a decrease in performance.
However, participants low on auditory imagery had difficulties compensating when sound was not available at practice. Huge decrease in performance.
What can be a negative impact of (negative) imagery?
Negative imagery seems to be linked to the severity of several psychological disorders, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Support for innatedness hypothesis: Poverty of stimulus
The linguistic environment of a child is not rich enough to learn a language via reinforcement. There must be something innate
Define Synesthesia.
Synesthesia is a sensory experience in which a stimulus in one sensory modality also invokes a response in one or more other sensory modalities.
Define Chromesthesia.
Most common experience among synesthetes. Tone linked to a color.
Define Amusia.
Deficits in musical abilities; also called tone-deafness.
Parentese (baby talking) _____ babies _____ the basic building blocks of language
Helps, learn
What finding linked amusia and imagery?
People with amusia have been shown to have deficits in visual/spatial imagery.
Parentese _____ the ability to identify sounds, syllables and sentences
Enhances
Children who are better at distinguishing the phonetic units, through parentese display ______ later.
Having better complex language skills years later
A study compared musicians, non-musicians and amusic participants at different tasks: mental rotation & animal matching. Rank their results from best to worse.
Musicians (best), non-musicians, amusic (worse). We can even correlate the degree of the tone deafness with the errors that are made in the mental rotation task.
Phonemes
The smallest linguistic units
Morphemes
Smallest meaningful units of language (words)
Syntax
Rules that govern how words are arranged in a sentence
Semantics
The meaning
Language comprehension requires resolving many types of _____ ambiguity using context and _______
Linguistic, top-down processing
Define bilingualism.
All individuals who (actively) use more than one language.
McGurk Effect
Demonstrates that we use more than just autitory input for language comprehension
(language) Constraint-based models suggests that
We use constraints such as semantic and thematic context, expectation and frequency to resolve ambiguity
Model of Reading
- We see a printed word
- We use our lexicon to understand it
- We produce it into speech
Impaired production of regular words, people with this type of dyslexia have problems matching words to their mental dictionary, reading happens letter-by-letter
Surface dyslexia
Impaired reading of non-words, reading happens by comparing whole words to mental dictionary. People have difficulty reading letter by letter
Phonological dyslexia
What do the terms “L1” and “L2” represents in the study of bilingualism?
L1 = first (native) language. L2 = second language.
Dual model of reading
When we read something we can do it by sounding it out or by whole words.
Until recently, L2 was considered fundamentally different and separate from L1. Why?
Even highly successful late L2 learners speak with an accent and appear to fail to acquire subtle aspects of L2 grammar.
-> The L1 should transfer to the L2 but not the other way around.
Nativism
Idea that states that our spoken language does not affect the way we think. Linguist universalism.
Define Parallel activation.
In bilingual language processing, the parallel activation hypothesis suggests that bilinguals activate their two languages simultaneously during language processing.
Bilinguals are not two monolinguals in one: both languages are active and competing.
Can L2 influence L1?
Yes. The bilingual’s language system is permeable in both directions.Critically, the L1 changes in the response to learning and using an L2.
Mentalese
An innate non-spoken language used to represent all conceptual content and propositions to create through. Explains why children and animals without spoken language can have thoughts
Do all bilinguals use their languages in the same way?
Not all bilinguals are the same. Bilinguals differ by where they live and the demands that are placed on them to use each language.
Do all bilinguals use their languages in the same way?
Not all bilinguals are the same. Bilinguals differ by where they live and the demands that are placed on them to use each language.
Define the term “Cognates”.
Words that share an overlap both in form and in meaning. E.g. the word “piano” means the same + has the same form, in French and English.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Suggests that language and thoughts are interdependent. Linguistic determinism: person’s thoughts are determined by language
Define the term “homographs”.
Words that share the same form but refer to different meanings across the two languages.
How does the bilingual process cognates and homographs?
Many studies have demonstrated that bilinguals recognize cognates more quickly but homographs more slowly than control words (unique words). Monolinguals do not show these effects.
What is a “picture naming task”?
E.g., “Name each picture out loud in English.”
Define the Cognate facilitation effect in the context of a picture naming task.
Faster response time at picture naming task when presented with cognate words.
A study (Libben & Titone) presents bilinguals participants with sentences. Only one word changes between the sentences. The word is easily predictable or not.
Do you have parallel activation in all conditions?
For Early stages of comprehension: Parallel activation regardless of sentence constraint.
For Late stages of comprehension: Parallel activation resolved for contexts that provide a high semantic constraint.
What is a semantic relatedness task?
E.g., Clap if the two words are semantically related.
Are ASL-English bilinguals affected by their knowledge of sign language even though ASL is not present in the experiment?
Bilinguals are faster to judge English when the ASL converges and slower when it conflicts. Monolinguals do not show these effects.
What is a Lexical Decision Task?
E.g., “Clap if you see an English word” (word vs non-word)
In a study, researchers examined cognate effects in monolinguals and L2 learners of Spanish. Would the newly acquired L2 affect the L1? (Give a response both for the behavioral and mental component)
Behaviorally: no cognate effect for either group.
Brain activity: effect detected. L1 sensitive to newly acquired language.
What is a Verbal Fluency Task?
E.g., Say as many animals as you can.
In a study, two groups learned Spanish in different conditions: one in Spain (relaxing and eating ice cream) and the other in a classroom (sad and depressed in Montreal). Both groups were then tested on a verbal fluency task (in English). What were the results?
Compared to classroom learners, immersed learners produced fewer L1 exemplars. The L1 is suppressed while living in an L2 context.
Results not permanent. Language permeable in both directions.
What is the effect (on the brain) of living in a highly linguistically diverse environment? (2)
- Higher reliance on contextual cues.
- Higher connectivity between regions implicated in (conflict) monitoring such as the anterior cingulate cortex and the putamen.
Study with codeswitchers (cooperative context) and non-codeswitchers (competitive context) bilinguals. They were presented with 3 types of sentences: 1) unilingual sentences, 2) codeswitched sentences 3) codeswitched sentences (with rare codeswitch).
How these two groups processed unilingual and codeswitched sentences?
Two groups processed the unilingual sentences the same way.
Non-codeswitchers had a processing cost when reading codeswitched sentences (regarding the sentence).
Codeswitchers had a processing cost only when reading rare codeswitched sentences.
Name three discoveries about bilingualism.
1) Parallel activation, 2) L1 changes in the response to learning and using an L2, 3) Not all bilinguals are the same.
