Psycholinguistics Flashcards
Exam Study
What is Syntax?
The rules of how you put words together in sentences.
What is Pragmatics?
The study of the use of particular language in particular contexts.
What is Morphology?
It is the study of the rules governing word structure and how words can be combined.
What are Phonetics and Phonology?
The study of human sounds, individual sounds within languages, and the way in which certain language combine those sounds to create meaning.
What is the difference between language and communication?
Human language has structure dependence (syntax) and creativity / productivity i.e. we have a limited number of words and rules that can be used to generate infinite ideas.
Can animals speak language?
Animals are able to communicate between themselves, but they do not have syntax, and they cannot produce infinite ideas so far as we have been able to prove.
What does it mean that language demonstrates a continuum between humans and primates?
Certain primates (in particular apes) can be taught human language to a certain degree that is greater than other animals. Apes appear more able to communicate in a manner similar to humans than other animals, but are unable to use language to process and complete more complex tasks.
Who was Kanzi?
Kanzi was a bonobo who was studied at Georgia State University and the Great Ape Trust research Centre by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues.
When was Kanzi born?
23 October 1980.
How was Kanzi’s exposure to language different from other attempts to train primates in language?
Kanzi was exposed to human caretakers from 6 months of age. Between 6 months and 2.5 years, his mother (Matata) received ‘lexigram’ training, which Kanzi attended. Kanzi was not taught this system, he was just present while it was being taught to his mother. In essence, Kanzi was raised in an environment of human language from an early age.
What was the lexigram system?
It was a series of icons (pictures / symbols) that were different colours. The colouring was designed to help the chimps distinguish between the different icons / lexigrams.
How many words could Kanzi produce and understand?
He could produce about 200 words and understand about 500 words.
What was particularly different about Kanzi?
Kanzi had not actively been taught the lexigrams. He could also comprehend spoken English words (whereas other apes could only understand the symbols).
Kanzi could produce and understand sentences. Kanzi’s outperformed a human female child aged 1.5 to 2 years of age.
What did Kanzi struggle with?
Ambiguity in syntax - i.e. go to location Y and get object X. It is not clear whether object X is at location Y or somewhere else.
Why was Kanzi’s command of ‘action precedes object’ important?
Kanzi was the first ape to demonstrate an understanding of a syntax rule - that the action must precede the object. He learned this from human caregivers. Some examples include ‘bite ball’, ‘grab head’, and ‘hide peanut’ etc.
Why did Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues anticipate that Kanzi was so much better linguistically than other apes that were studied?
Environment - during the first year of his life he was exposed to human languages.
What was Chomsky’s theory about where language comes from?
He believes it is endemic and innate to humans and only humans. This is commonly known as his theory of ‘universal grammar’.
Who was Panbanisha?
A female bonobo who was about 5.5 to 6 years of age at the time the experiment was completed. She was exposed to spoken English and lexigrams from 7 weeks of age while interacting with human caretakers and Kanzi. She was able to correctly identify 179/217 words when tested at 3.5 years and responded correctly to about 77% of spoken sentences by humans.
Who was Tamuli?
A female bonobo raised by her mother and exposed to lexigrams much later in age (from 3.5 years onwards). She did not use lexigrams to communicate and was not able to understand them. She responded correctly to just 6% of spoken sentences.
Can non-human primates acquire human-like language?
No. Although exposure to human language early in life can allow them to communicate using aspects of human language to a certain degree, current evidence suggests that apes are not able to acquire human-like syntax to express infinite ideas with a limited vocabulary.
What is Psycholinguistics?
It is the study of the psychological processes involved in using language.
What are Verbal Learning Techniques?
These are also known as ‘paired-associate learnings’ and they were used in the 50s and 60s when language weas considered a ‘behaviour’. They focused on associations between stimuli and responses and how they were learned.
What is ‘behaviourism’?
It is the idea that language is a behaviour and was learned through the environment. That humans are simply responding to stimuli from birth.
Who was B.F. Skinner?
A linguist who was a proponent of behaviourism.
Who was Chomsky?
Noam Chomsky is a famous linguist who proposed the opposite of behaviourism. He argues that language is not a ‘behaviour’, but something innate to the human mind. It is something we are born with. The term ‘Transformational Grammar’ is the term used to account for his rules about language and other facts of sentence structure.
What is the Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC)?
It emerged directly from Chomsky’s theory of Transformational Grammar. It is the idea that the more ‘transformations’ a sentence involved, the more derivational complexity it contained. If this is the case, then psychologists set out to determine whether there associated psychological complexity that follows using these sentences.
What is ‘Information Processing’?
In the context of Linguistics, this is the idea that emerged in the 70s and 80s that human brains function like computers. It is still prevalent today.
