Slides Week 10 Flashcards
1
Q
What is Language?
A
- 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?
2
Q
Does Language Convey Meaning?
A
- 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
3
Q
What does language make possible?
A
- 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
4
Q
Language satisfies our need to Communicate
A
- All humans develop language and learn to follow its complex rules
*
5
Q
Syntax
A
The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language
6
Q
Deaf Children in Nicaragua
A
7
Q
Language satisfies our need to communicate
A
- 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
8
Q
Language Studies - Verbal Behaviourism
A
- Language is learned through reinforcement
- B.F. Skinner 1957
9
Q
Language Studies - Noam Chomsky 1957
A
- 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
10
Q
Psycholinguistics
A
The Study of psychological process by which humans acquire and process language
- Comprehension
- Speech Production
- Representation
- Acquisition
11
Q
Psycholinguistics - Comprehension
A
How people understand spoken and written language
12
Q
Psycholinguistics - Speech Production
A
How people produce language
13
Q
Psycholinguistics - Representation
A
How Language is represented in the mind and in the brain
14
Q
Psycholinguistics - Acquisition
A
15
Q
Lexicon
A
- All the words a person understands
- Our Mental Dictionary
- The vocabulary of a person
16
Q
Phonology
A
- The pronunciation of words
17
Q
Orthography
A
- Written form of the word
- The conventional spelling system of a language.
18
Q
Semantics
A
- The meaning of words in a language
- The analysis of word meanings and relationships between them
19
Q
Components of Words
A
- Phonemes
- Morphemes
20
Q
Components of Words - Phonemes
A
- The shortest segment of speech that if changed changes the meaning of a word
- Perceptually distinct units of sound
- Distinguish one word from another,
21
Q
Components of Words - Morphemes
A
- Smallest unit of language that has definable meaning
- A unit of a language that cannot be further divided
22
Q
Phonemic Restoration effect
A
- 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
23
Q
Perceiving individual words in sentences
A
Perceiving words is challenging because not everyone says words in the same way
24
Q
Speech Segmentation
A
- 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.
25
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
26
Understanding Language - Phonemic Restoration
* Phonemes can be perceived even if obscured by noise
* knowledge of meaning helps fill in the blanks
27
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
28
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
29
Understanding Language - Word Superiority
* Letters presented visually are easier to recognise when in a word
* Letters are affected by their surroundings
30
Lexical Decision Task
* A task where you must decide whether words are real words or not, it can be difficult
31
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.
32
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
33
Meaning Dominance
Some meanings of words occur more frequently than others
34
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
35
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
36
Understanding Language -
The process of accessing the meaning of a word is complicated and is influenced by multiple factors.
1. 1.The frequency of a word determines how long it takes to process its meaning.
2. The context of the sentence determines which meaning we access.
3. Our ability to access the correct meaning of a word depends on both the word’s frequency, dominance and context.
37
Understanding Sentences - Semantics
* Semantics is the meaning of words in a language
* Also the meaning of words in a sentence
* Syntax
* Parsing
38
Syntax
* Rules for combining words into sentences
* Sentences are strings of words in a sequence
39
Parsing
* Mentally grouping the words into phrases
* This helps listener create meaning
40
Brain Areas for Syntax and Semantics
* Broca's Area - linked to syntax
* Wernicke's Area - Linked to semantics
41
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.
42
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.
43
Visual World Paradigm
* Tanenhaus et al. (1995)
* developed technique to determin how subjects process information as they are observing a visual scene
