Week 16

Question 1

What is language?

Answer 1

• human’s system for communicating with others using signals that convey meaning (combined according to the rules of grammar)
• much more complex than signalling systems used to communicate for other species (humans can express a much wider range of ideas and concepts)

Question 2

What does the act of speech involve?

Answer 2

• conceptualisation (what message you want to convey at thought level)
• formulation (how you will say it and in what form, requires lexicalisation: the process whereby the thoughts underlying words are turned into sounds)
• articulation (process of delivering the message, involving the human physiology)

Question 3

How did we come to have language?

Answer 3

main debate about whether language is a learned/acquired skill (i.e. can be explained by general learning mechanisms) or is it innate (may be explained by special purpose brain systems)

Question 4

Language being a learned skill (Skinner/behaviourist approach)

Answer 4

• reading appears to be a learned skill (link to language)
• also many people around the world are illiterate suggesting this is not innate
• claims that children acquire language through simple principles of operant conditioning; as infants mature, they begin to vocalise and maintain those that are reinforced and build up a vocabulary (e.g. saying dada will be reinforced by parents saying good!!); this offers a simple account of language development but does not account for all aspects well enough - as not everything is acquired, for example overgeneralisations of grammar rules (would not happen if it was just learning solely through reinforced individual sentences)

Question 5

Language being innate (Chomsky approach)

Answer 5

• many grammar/language concepts are fundamentally deep-rooted
• language is universal across all cultures (even those that are completely isolated)
• brain damage can impair language specifically (e.g. Broca’s and Wernicke’s area)
• appears to be a critical period for language learning (e.g. Genie) –> if language were down to practise, we should surely be able to acquire learning of language at any age?
• language appears to be unique to humans (animals have only been able to learn a very small vocabulary and primary syntax whereas humans are so much more complex)
• children learn language at an extremely rapid rate (fast mapping –> when children map a word onto an underlying concept after only a single exposure)
• Nativist explanation argues that humans have a particular aptitude for language development that is separate from general intelligence (i.e. an innate, biological capacity) → Chomsky thought the human brain came equipped with a language acquisition device (LAD), e.g. genetic dysphasia - issues with LAD area; also consistent with the evidence that language can only be acquired during a restricted period of development but this theory does not explain how language develops, just why

Question 6

Interactionist explanation

Answer 6

the belief that we are born with an innate ability to acquire language but that social interactions also play a very crucial role (e.g. parents speaking slowly and enunciating clearly when speaking to babies); important to give language meaning, for example social experience

Question 7

Broca’s area

Answer 7

• left frontal cortex
• involved in the production of sequential patterns in vocal and sign language
• Broca’s aphasia is when patients understand language relatively well, although they have increasing comprehension difficulty as grammar gets more complex (mainly struggle with speech production with a lack of function morphemes)

Question 8

Wernicke’s area

Answer 8

• left temporal cortex
• involved in language comprehension
• Wernicke’s aphasia is when patients can produce grammatical speech but is generally meaningless and they have considerable difficulty comprehending language

Question 9

Arguments against language being innate

Answer 9

• just because something is universal does not make it an instinct and may just be an obvious thing to learn
• specific deficits occur for cognitive skills that are not an instinct (e.g. dyslexia even though reading is not innate)
• learning can lead to parts of the brain becoming specialised, meaning specialisation is not simply the product of evolution
• critical period for language does not make it impossible to learn language after this period, there is just a decline in proficiency –> this is the same for language as other general learned skills (e.g. playing a sport)
• if language had evolved, surely there would be some form of it in monkeys or other related mammals

Question 10

Language Instinct (Pinker)

Answer 10

• explains that the absence of language in other related species does not challenge the evolutionary hypothesis
• we are not descended from monkeys like a ladder, we are actually just very distant cousins with the idea of a common ancestor
• so it does actually follow the idea of evolution where language emerged after the point of our common ancestor existing so it may make sense that only humans have it as it is branched off

Question 11

Language conclusions

Answer 11

• overall, difficult to conclude as language shows properties of being both an instinct and a learned process
• best offered alternative to language being an instinct is that it is the by-product of increased intelligence (so link to evolution is the key to supporting language by selecting for greater intelligence)
• continued debate about the beginnings of language

Question 12

Subsystems involved in language

Answer 12

• orthography (involved in recognising written letters and words)
• phonology (system involved in encoding the sounds of letters and words)
• semantics (system involved in encoding the meaning of words)
• also syntax is involved to combine words into a coherent sentence

Question 13

Phoneme

Answer 13

• smallest unit of sound that is recognisable as speech rather than just a random noise (the building blocks of language)
• combined to make morphemes (smallest meaningful units of language) –> content morphemes refer to things and events whereas function morphemes serve grammatical functions

Question 14

Grammar

Answer 14

• set rules that specify how units of language can be combined to produce meaningful messages
• morphological rules indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words
• syntactical rules indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences

Question 15

Five communicative categories of speech

Answer 15

• representative (asserting a fact or conveying a belief)
• directive (trying to get the audience to do something)
• commissive (an assertion of a future goal)
• expressive (revealing an internal psychological state)
• declarative (announcing a new or previously unattended state of affairs)

Question 16

What happens in a conversation?

Answer 16

• alignment is the process whereby speakers share a reciprocal arrangement to exchange information
• achieved by priming (enhanced ability to think of a stimulus as a result of recent exposure to the stimulus), inference (where speakers generate deeper conceptual understanding based on what has been said), routine expressions (unambiguous conventions that facilitate language), speech monitoring and repair (when speakers interact to understand what others are saying by seeking clarification)

Question 17

Dual route model of reading

Answer 17

• route A (sub-lexical route - serial process of converting print to sounds, maps the grapheme directly onto the pronunciation so we can read novel words)
• route B (lexical-phonological route - recognise the word visually at a whole word level in the orthographic representation and then convert it to the lexical phonological representation, where the grapheme maps directly onto the phoneme based on information stored in the lexicon)
• route C (lexical-semantic route - goes from lexical orthographic representations to lexical phonological representations but via the semantic system, therefore encoding meaning of the word)
• regular words can be read by all three routes (naming speed and pronunciation is based on the route that gets there first!); irregular words can only be read by the two-lexical routes (would be mispronounced by the sub-lexical route); nonwords can only be read by the sub-lexical route

Question 18

Frequency effect

Answer 18

• high frequency words read more quickly than low frequency words, translates to faster reaction times
• high frequency words are processed more quickly within the lexical routes (speed of access to the word in the long-term orthographical system)

Question 19

Regularity effect

Answer 19

• regular words read more quickly than irregular words
• interaction with frequency effect as high frequency irregular words may be encountered more often so regularity effect only really stands for low frequency words
• due to conflicting pronunciations of irregular words derived from lexical and sublexical routes (when both routes finish at the same time this leads to slower processing) but conflict is avoided for high frequency words, lexical route is finished before the sub-lexical route gets there

Question 20

Surface dyslexia

Answer 20

• difficulty in reading irregular words but fine with nonwords and regular words
• die to damage to both lexical routes (with the sub-lexical route spared)

Question 21

Phonological dyslexia

Answer 21

• difficulty in reading nonwords, but fine with irregular and regular words
• selective difficulty using the sub-lexical route (nonwords will not exist in the memory store)

Question 22

Deep dyslexia

Answer 22

• difficulty with nonwords, irregular words and regular words
• better with high imageable than low imageable words
• often make striking semantic errors
• can only read by the lexical-semantic route (and the semantic route is also partially damaged, they can access the correct semantic category but not determine specifics within it so make errors)

Question 23

Developmental dyslexia

Answer 23

• difficulty in learning to read despite normal intelligence and opportunity to learn to read
• usually due to a mild difficulty in phonological processing

Question 24

Lexical knowledge

Answer 24

whole word-level knowledge (could be orthographic, phonological or semantic)

Question 25

Sub-lexical

Answer 25

sub-word information, e.g. individual letters or phonemes, or groups of letters/graphemes, e.g. syllables

Question 26

Word length

Answer 26

• short words appear to be identified more quickly than long words if all else is equal
• but may actually just be due to frequency (e.g. typically short words are more high frequency and often more imageable)

Question 27

Visual similarity of words

Answer 27

• rhymes, neighbours, supersets, subsets, transposed letters
• the main conclusion is that similarity hurts the identification of words and makes it more difficult as there is increased competition in the orthographic lexicon

Question 28

Age-of-acquisition impact

Answer 28

• words acquired at an earlier stage in life tend to be read more quickly than words acquired later on
• however early learned words also tend to be higher frequency so maybe it is due to this?

Question 29

Alternative parallel distributed processing approach

Answer 29

• in this approach, it gets rid of the lexical-phonological route
• so there is only the phonological and semantic routes that work similarly
• also introduces learning into the model
• continued debate between this and original dual route model

Question 30

Linguistic determinism

Answer 30

• claims that speakers of different languages are constrained to think and perceive in certain ways because of their specific language
• e.g. if there is no term for the colour blue in your language, you therefore cannot see blue
• usually rejected as this is quite extreme

Question 31

Linguistic relativity

Answer 31

• claims that different language shape or bias (rather than outright determine) the thoughts of speakers
• e.g. masculine/feminine terms for words leads to you viewing the object with gender-related connotations
• e.g. if your language has different words to distinguish between two colours it will be easier for you to notice a difference between them
• on this view language does not fundamentally restrict our perceptual abilities, it just biases thoughts
• also determines whether it is the structure of language (e.g. syntax) has an effect on our thoughts

Question 32

Thinking-for-speaking

Answer 32

• the claim that different languages shapes thoughts of speakers while we are speaking
• e.g. concludes that language influences the task only as you are speaking, rather than all the time (as linguistic relativity believes)

Question 33

Categorical perception

Answer 33

• we perceive discrete categories in the world when in reality everything is continuous
• sharp labelling function (e.g. splitting up variables into our own distinct categories)
• discontinuous discriminations (the closer you are to the boundary of two categories, the more difficult it is to discriminate - but in reality, as the world is continuous, this difference should be the same regardless of proximity to the boundary)
• question is how much language contributes to categorical perception

Question 34

Colour (categorical perception)

Answer 34

perceived differences among wavelengths that fall into different categories are exaggerated due to our categorical perception, and differences among wavelength in the same category are minimised - despite the actual visible spectrum of colour being continuous, we perceive sharp boundaries

Question 35

Phoneme categorical perception

Answer 35

although stimuli that vary in voice onset time (vibrations of vocal cords that change sounds) vary in a continuous rather than blunt way, our percpetions are categorical (e.g. ba or pa)

Question 36

Visual and speech categorical perception

Answer 36

• the language we learn impacts on our perception of colour and speech sounds
• e.g. as English distinguishes between green and blue, we reorganise colour space to make this contrast salient
• also if p/b or l/r contrasts are critical for language, we reorganise our perception in order to improve perception of these particular sounds
• however, another explanation is that the physiology of the visual and auditory systems do this automatically without language

Question 37

Physiology + language approach for speech

Answer 37

• e.g. for speech, chinchillas have been shown to identify different sounds in the same way as humans so seeing as they don’t have language this seems to be physiology based due to the auditory system
• but also the language we speak impacts our perception of sounds depending on what our native language is (babies initially perceive a wide range of phonemes then this is narrowed down as adults)

Question 38

Language approach for colour

Answer 38

• colour perception is very visually different depending on focal and non-focal colours in the English language (participants were better able to remember a colour that had a high codability colour name)
• different languages carve up different sections of colours with different terms
• shown that Berinmo speakers could not remember English focal colours better, rather they remember their own categories better which implies that this categorical perception is down to language rather than visual physiology
• also for visual search task, was shown that, when displayed on the right side (correlating to the left hemisphere - where language occurs) it was much easier to distinguish between colours that cross a boundary which show the impact of language
• same study in split brain patients, showed the exact same findings (right visual field = left hemisphere = clearer distinction between categories than not between categories)

Question 39

Language conclusions

Answer 39

• overall, there is evidence that language impacts our perception of speech sounds and colours
• consistent with linguistic relativity (but no linguistic determinism)
• but there is of course continued debate