Slides Week 10 Flashcards
What is Language?
- The primary way people communicate
- It is universal
- Study of language teaches us about the mind
- A system of communication using sounds or symbols
- Enables us to communicate feelings, thoughts, ideas and experiences
- Do animals have language?
- What about KOKO?
Does Language Convey Meaning?
- Language goes beyond fixed single message signals
- feed me, danger, this way for food
- Facilitates combination & arrangement of sequences of signals
- Spoken word, letters, written words, gestures can be transmitted from one person to another
What does language make possible?
- Create new and unique sentences
- Has structure that is heirarchical
- Is governed by rules which are specific ways components can be arranged
- Heirarchical sysmtems have smaller components that are combined toform larger units
Language satisfies our need to Communicate
- All humans develop language and learn to follow its complex rules
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Syntax
The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language
Deaf Children in Nicaragua
Language satisfies our need to communicate
- All humans develop and learn to follow comples language rules
- Is universal, all cultures have language
- Language development is similar across cultures
- children begin to babble around 7 months
- First meaningful words start around 1 year
- Multi word sentences at around 2 years.
- Levelt 2001
Language Studies - Verbal Behaviourism
- Language is learned through reinforcement
- B.F. Skinner 1957
Language Studies - Noam Chomsky 1957
- Human language is coded in our genes
- Underlying basis of all language is similar
- All language has similar grammatical structure
- Children produce sentences they have never heard and don’t get reinforced
Psycholinguistics
The Study of psychological process by which humans acquire and process language
- Comprehension
- Speech Production
- Representation
- Acquisition
Psycholinguistics - Comprehension
How people understand spoken and written language
Psycholinguistics - Speech Production
How people produce language
Psycholinguistics - Representation
How Language is represented in the mind and in the brain
Psycholinguistics - Acquisition
Lexicon
- All the words a person understands
- Our Mental Dictionary
- The vocabulary of a person
Phonology
- The pronunciation of words
Orthography
- Written form of the word
- The conventional spelling system of a language.
Semantics
- The meaning of words in a language
- The analysis of word meanings and relationships between them
Components of Words
- Phonemes
- Morphemes
Components of Words - Phonemes
- The shortest segment of speech that if changed changes the meaning of a word
- Perceptually distinct units of sound
- Distinguish one word from another,
Components of Words - Morphemes
- Smallest unit of language that has definable meaning
- A unit of a language that cannot be further divided
Phonemic Restoration effect
- Meaning influence perception of sound
- Warren 1970
- In the sentence “there was time to *ave”,
- People hear “wave” if the sentece was completed with “goodbye to our friends”
- The way we perceive sounds and letters
Perceiving individual words in sentences
Perceiving words is challenging because not everyone says words in the same way
Speech Segmentation
- Sound of speech easier to understand when heard spoken
- Words in sentences usually not separated by spaces
- Perception of words is acheived via meaning, context and statistical learning.
Word Superiority Effect
- Finding that letters are easier to recognise when they are in a word
- Harder when they are alone or in a non-word
Understanding Language - Phonemic Restoration
- Phonemes can be perceived even if obscured by noise
- knowledge of meaning helps fill in the blanks
Understanding Language - Words Isolated from Conversational Speech
- It is difficult to percieve the isolated words
- Context provided by the surrounding words aids in perception of words
Understanding Language - Speech Segmentation
- Individual words are perceived in spoken sentences
- Usually no breaks between words in speech
- Knowledge of meaning of words in language
- Familiar sounds that go together in a word
- All these combined help create speech segmentation
Understanding Language - Word Superiority
- Letters presented visually are easier to recognise when in a word
- Letters are affected by their surroundings
Lexical Decision Task
- A task where you must decide whether words are real words or not, it can be difficult
Word Frequency Effect
- We respond to high frequency words than words that are not used as often
- Rayner & Duffy 1986 studied fixation and gaze times
- Participants looked at low-frequency words longer than high-frequency words.
Lexical Ambiguity
- Words often have multiple meanings
eg: River Bank, Commonwealth Bank - Homonyms
- How do we know which meaning to access
- Matthew Traxler (2012) “Many words have multiple meanings, but these meanings are not all created equal
Meaning Dominance
Some meanings of words occur more frequently than others
Biased Dominance
- When words have two or more meanings with different dominances
- Tin - A type of metal - High dominance
- Tin - Small metal container of food - is low dominance
Balanced Dominance
- When a word has more than one meaning but the meanings have about the same dominance
- Cast - Members of a play
- Cast - Plaster cast
- Both words have equal dominance
Understanding Language -
The process of accessing the meaning of a word is complicated and is influenced by multiple factors.
- 1.The frequency of a word determines how long it takes to process its meaning.
- The context of the sentence determines which meaning we access.
- Our ability to access the correct meaning of a word depends on both the word’s frequency, dominance and context.
Understanding Sentences - Semantics
- Semantics is the meaning of words in a language
- Also the meaning of words in a sentence
- Syntax
- Parsing
Syntax
- Rules for combining words into sentences
- Sentences are strings of words in a sequence
Parsing
- Mentally grouping the words into phrases
- This helps listener create meaning
Brain Areas for Syntax and Semantics
- Broca’s Area - linked to syntax
- Wernicke’s Area - Linked to semantics
Event Related Potential
- (a) The N400 wave of the ERP is affected by the meaning of the word.
- (b) The P600 wave of the ERP is affected by grammar.
- N400 response is associated with structures in the temporal lobe.
- P600 response is associated with structures in the
- frontal lobe, more toward the front of the brain.
Garden Path Sentences
- Sentences that begin appearing to mean one thin but then end up meaning something else
- Only one syntactical structure is initially considered.
- The simplest syntactical structure is chosen.
- The parser assumes new word is part of the current phrase (the principle of late closure).
- Semantics do not influence syntactic construction.
- If the syntactic structure is incompatible with additional information semantic information processed, then initial syntactic structure is revised.
Visual World Paradigm
- Tanenhaus et al. (1995)
- developed technique to determin how subjects process information as they are observing a visual scene
