Week 11 - Language Flashcards
1
Q
Communication
A
Behaviours that convey information
- Turn-taking
- Intonation
- Gesture (body language)
- Eye gaze control
- Touch
2
Q
Language
A
a communication system that has symbols (words) and rules for ways to assemble the symbols (grammar)
- thinking and processing is made possible
- intangible ideas (truth, virtue, freedom)
3
Q
Linguistics
A
the study of language structure, variation and change
- Phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics
4
Q
psycholinguistics
A
the psychology of our language as it interacts with the mind
- perception (speech, reading) and production (speaking, writing, signing)
5
Q
Ferdinand de Saussure
A
the pairing between a sound and meaning is arbitrary as different languages use different sound to convey the same meaning
6
Q
Iconicity
A
resemblance between form and meaning
- ‘teeny’ conveys a sense of smallness through the high-front vowel
- bouba-kiki effect: round and sharp shapes, respectively
7
Q
Systematicity
A
any statistical regularity between phonological structure and meaning
- phonesthemes: in english gl- frequently occurs in words referring to shiny visual phenomena, like, glitter, glimmer, glisten, glitz
8
Q
What are the two ways to represent sound patterns in speech?
A
- phonemes
- phonetics
9
Q
phonemes
A
smallest unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another
- ~44 phonemes are made up of our 26 vowels and consonants
- phonemes may be represented by different letters e.g. cat, kit, school
- allophones are different representations of the same phoneme e.g. lips, slip, spill, pills and lisp
10
Q
phonetics
A
the physical properties of speech sounds and how they are produced and perceived in different contexts
- international phonetic alphabet (IPA)
11
Q
language-specific phonemic charts
A
- families of sounds with qualities in common
- how a sound is made
- which part of the mouth and articulatory mechanism it is made
- where it is made
12
Q
Prosody
A
- the tune and rhythm of speech
- speech properties typically at a level above that of the individual phoneme/segment and in sequences of words
- conveys attitude, emotion, sarcasm
13
Q
what is prosody characterised by?
A
- vocal pitch (fundamental frequency)
- loudness (acoustic intensity)
- rhythm (phoneme and syllable duration)
14
Q
Morphology
A
- word structure and formation
- smallest unit of meaning within a language
- all speakers store morphemes from their native language in a mental lexicon
15
Q
free morpheme
A
stands alone as a single word e.g. cat
16
Q
bound morphemes
A
derivational: prefixes and suffixes e.g. re- charge -able
inflectional: suffixes e.g. plural -s and regular past tense -ed
17
Q
Syntax
A
- the system of rules specifying how words are combined in sentences
- Rules are productive (generative), a capacity for infinite expression: recursive syntax (phrase structure grammar)
18
Q
Subject-verb-order (SVO) word order languages
A
Rule: subject - verb - object
Correct: the boy - throws - a ball
incorrect: the boy - a ball - throws
19
Q
Structural ambiguity
A
- rules are not perfect
- a sentence is syntactically ambiguous when the string of words can plausibly be assigned more than one syntactic structure
- can happen with a misplaced modifier (used in jokes)
- make sure that modifies are as close to the word that they modify as possible
20
Q
Semantics
A
- how word and sentence level meanings are expressed in languages
- influenced by morphology, syntax and phonology
- monosemy refers to a word form that has only one meaning (or sense)
21
Q
lexical ambiguity
A
- A homonym is associated with two or more unrelated senses, e.g., “coach” = “bus” or
“sports instructor” - Polysemy refers to a single word form being associated with two or several related
senses, e.g., “the mouth of the river” (a metaphorical relationship) - A homophone is a word that is pronounced similarly to another word but differs in
meaning, e.g., “flower” and “flour”
22
Q
Pragmatics
A
- How context and other information
contribute to meaning - Explains how language users can
overcome apparent ambiguity - e.g., the cooperative principle
- Literal versus figurative meanings
- e.g., “the cat is out of the bag”
23
Q
Visual-gestural langues
A
- languages with the same expressive power as spoken languages
- Have the same organizational principles as spoken languages
- phonemes are communicated via handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, and non-manual markers.
- Tend to be less strict in word order (syntax) than spoken/written languages
- are iconic
24
Q
Speech perception
A
- The most important form of auditory perception for humans
- It is incremental
- processing (e.g., semantic, syntactic) occurs while a word is being attended to
- It is predictive
- listeners devote resources during sentence processing to predicting upcoming words or phrases
- So it is both bottom-up and top-down (flexibly dynamic and interactive)
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Processing stages
* Select the relevant speech signal
* Decoding (extracting either phonemes, allophones or syllables)
* Varies flexibly (~allophones earlier)
* Segmentation (word recognition/lexical retrieval)
* Interpretation (extract/reconstruct meaning)
* Integrate (with previous speech to construct overall message)
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Speech perception problems
- noisy, makes speech segmentation difficult
- co-articulation: pronunciation of a phoneme depends on the preceding and following phonemes.
- Speakers typically produce 10 phonemes per second and much acoustic information is lost within 50 ms if not rapidly processed
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Speech perception: helpful cues (lipreading)
Listeners (even with intact hearing) make extensive use of lip-reading when listening to
speech (multi-sensory information) to predictively anticipate the next sound
- McGurk effect
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Speech perception: helpful cues (sentence context)
* Influences phoneme perception and so rapidly influences spoken word perception
* Phonemic restoration effect
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Speech perception: helpful cues (prosody)
* Intonation helps to direct attention to the potentially most informative parts of speech
* Dynamically modifies the hypotheses a listener might entertain about a sentence
* Ladle Hat Rotten Hut
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Phonemic restoration
* Influences phoneme perception and so rapidly influences spoken word perception
* Demonstrated by the Phonemic restoration effect (Warren & Warren, 1970)
* Listeners heard a sentence with a missing phoneme that had been replaced with a
meaningless sound (cough) yet reported hearing the phoneme as if it were present.
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Reading
- word recognition is automatic
- University students can read ~300 words per minute (~200 ms per word)
- Estimates vary according to how “recognition” is measured:
* deciding a word is familiar
* accessing a word’s name
* accessing its meaning
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processes of reading
* orthography (the spelling of words);
* phonology (the sound of words);
* semantics (word meaning);
* syntax;
* higher-level discourse integration
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Eye movements
* Most text information we process relates to the word we are currently fixated on
* Not all words are fixated
* ~80% content words but only ~20% function
words, (e.g., a, the, and, or)
* Saccades take 20–30 ms to complete and are
separated by fixations lasting 200–250 ms
* Each saccade is about 8 letters or spaces long
* Your perceptual span extends 3 or 4 letters to left of fixation and up to 15 letters to the right depending on the difficulty of the text
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Orthographic processing
The automaticity of reading words aids letter identification
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phonological processing
* Debate about whether it is essential or just a by-product of reading (i.e., epiphenomenal)
* Some people don’t have “inner speech” or subvolcalisation
* Some evidence that word meaning can be accessed without access to phonology first,
unlike speech perception (i.e., via a direct route from orthography-to-semantics)
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Working memory in text reading
- Individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity (the ability to maintain and manipulate information concurrently) are moderately correlated with reading comprehension
- measured using the reading span task
- indirect relationship
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Inferential processing
- Readers with superior reading skills (including those with high working memory capacity) draw more inferences than other readers
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Braille reading
* Correlated with listening comprehension and working memory capacity
* Braille letters are read serially rather than parallel
* Braille readers find transposed letters much
harder to process
* Losing popularity due to audiobooks
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Language production
- We know much more about language comprehension than language production.
- Easier to control material to be comprehended than to constrain an individual’s production
- As production is about communication it is a flexible goal-directed activity
40
spoken word production processes
What we want to say, to whom and in what context?
* lexical concept
Retrieval of semantic, phonological and morphological characteristics
* lemma (debated)
Retrieval of morphemic and segmental content
* phonological codes
Assembly of phonological codes into syllables
* phonological word form
Phonetic encoding
* mental syllabary (debated)
Motor execution/articulation
41
Speech errors - units
* phrases, words (e.g. saying “pass the pepper” instead of “pass the salt”),
* morphemes, phonemes (e.g. saying “flock of bats” instead of “block of flats”)
* features (e.g. saying “turn the knop” instead of “knob”)
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mechanisms of speech errors
* anticipations (e.g. saying “the mirst of May” instead of “the first”)
* perseverations (e.g. saying “God rest re merry gentleman” instead of “God rest ye”)
* exchanges (e.g. “Guess whose mind came to name?” instead of “name came to mind”)
* substitutions (“Get me a fork” instead of knife)
* blends (saying “chung” for “children” and “young”).
43
Verbal self-monitoring
The set of processes speakers use to inspect their own speech to prevent errors and to
intervene when trouble arises
* Speakers are able to detect and rapidly correct their own speech errors
* Monitoring occurs from abstract conceptual formulation onward
* A repair may be marked by a hesitation followed by an editing term (e.g. 'i mean')
44
Perceptual speech monitor
* Speakers monitor both their inner and their overt speech
* Monitoring of overt speech involves auditory feedback (hearing)
* More so when speakers produce long and complex utterances
45
verbal self-monitoring accounts
- the perceptual loop model
- the forward model
46
Picture-word interference paradigm
* Semantically-related distractor words slow naming compared to an unrelated word
* semantic interference effect
* Phonologically-related distractor words facilitate naming compared to an unrelated word
* phonological facilitation effect
47
Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA)
Adjusting the timing of distractor versus picture presentation (or the stimulus onset asynchrony; SOA) provides information about the chronometry or time-course of semantic and phonological stages of production
* Early SOAs – distractor presented first
* Late SOAs – picture presented first
48
Continuous naming paradigm
Each additional presentation of an object from the same semantic category results in a ~30 ms slowing of naming latencie
49
Speech planning: syntactic priming in sentence production
* People are more likely to use a particular syntactic structure if that structure has recently been employed
* Syntactic (or structural) priming is the facilitation of processing that occurs when a sentence has the same syntactic form as a preceding sentence
* An automatic, implicit process
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