Week 3-Language Part 2 Flashcards

Question

True or false: Sentences are not stored in the mental lexicon

Answer 1

True! ■ We need rapid mechanisms for parsing and extraction of the information they convey (‘who is doing what to whom’) (which requires different areas of the brain)

Answer 2

 Syntactic rules: the rules that govern how words can be combined  They allow all permissible sentences to be generated; and rule out all illegal sentences "Powerful little fruits produce open-source initiatives" No meaning, but syntactically correct  Principles for combining words into sentences that do not depend on meaning  Based on knowledge about grammatical categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions etc.,

Answer 3

■ THE GIRL hits the woman WITH A BAG ■ The girl hits the WOMAN WITH A BAG ■ Comprehension depends (in part) on the grammatical relations that listeners can establish among the words in a sentence

Answer 4

1. Garden-path model (Frazier & Rayner, 1982): Initial parsing is purely syntactic, meaning is not involved in the selection of the initial syntactic structure (i.e., less focus on semantics). 2. Constraint-based theories (MacDonald et al, 1994): The initial interpretation depends on all available sources of information (syntactic, semantic, general world knowledge) 3. Unrestricted race-model (Van Gompel et al, 2000): All sources of information used to identify a syntactic structure 4. ‘Good-enough’ representations (Ferreira et al, 2002): Processing depth / type of information used depend on the task (i.e., you will not do the same analysis everytime).

Answer 5

■ Types of information used to understand sentences: – syntactic principles – statistical regularities – grammatical categories – prosodic cues – semantic information – world knowledge – (...and more)

Answer 6

Late closure principle: new items are attached to the phrase or the clause most recently processed, if grammatically possible. The girl hits the woman with a bag Preferred interpretation? The girl has a bag X The woman has a bag (this is achieved through syntactic parsing as the object is assigned to the most recently processed object in this case the woman).

Answer 7

 Minimal attachment links each incoming word to the existing structure using the simplest syntactic structure that is consistent with the input.  A strategy of parsimony: The parser builds the simplest structure that obeys the rules of language.

Answer 8

 Evidence: Effects of word order have been demonstrated in sentence to picture matching tasks (match a sentence heard to a picture that is similar to that), where active sentence types are processed (canonical word order, more frequently used) faster than passive sentence types

Answer 9

■ Individual words provide reliable cues for sentence interpretation (narrowing down the options for what it could be) (esp. grammatical words like prepositions, articles, pronouns) The girl hits the ... ■ A grammatical word and signals a new phrase node The girl and the boy run away ■ A complementiser (that, which, etc.) signals embedded sentence The girl who hits the woman runs away

Answer 10

 Meta-analysis of 128 neuroimaging studies of syntactic processing  Extended fronto-temporal processing network, more prominent on the left  Requires intact left fronto-temporal white matter connections (dorsal and ventral)

Answer 11

■ Strict left-lateralization of grammatical function; primacy of Broca’s area ■ Emphasis on distinguishing between simple and complex syntactic computations ■ Two neural computational systems supporting syntax: – Ventral pathway (BA45 – aSTG) for simple syntax The cat sat on the mat – Dorsal pathway (BA 44 – pSTG) for complex syntax The juice that the child spilled stained the rug

Answer 12

■ Exchange of information between individuals using a common system of symbols, signs, or behaviour ■ Broader than language as it also refers to: - non-verbal communication - use of iconic and indexical signs - animal communication, etc., ■ People use a variety of additional communication mechanisms to complement language, some of them possibly informative in the context of language evolution e.g., gestures

Answer 13

1. Beats: Simple, brief, repetitive movements. Coordinated with the speech prosody but bear no obvious relation to the meaning of the accompanying speech 2. Pointing: Simple conventionalised movements that refer to spatial locations, or bind objects to spatial locations 3. Symbolic gestures Movements with specific, conventionalised meaning such as OK, thumbs up, fingers crossed, etc., 4. Lexical gestures: Hand movements of different shape and length, non repetitive and changing in form, that appear related to the meaning of the accompanying speech

Answer 14

■ Not necessarily because others can see us, or we understand that gestures are conveying useful information to the listener ■ Congenitally blind people gesture as much as sighted people, even when they talk to other blind people ■ Clearly some communicative and informative function ■ However, gestures are often rather vague and meaningless without words, and performed in the absence of listeners ■ Hp: Gestures may facilitate word production

Answer 15

■ Most of the gestures start between 500ms and 1s before the words ■ Familiar words: – closer gesture asynchrony – briefer gesture

Answer 16

■ Task: Describe clips from the cartoon Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote -Performance measured on speech with or without spatial content (i.e., gestures) -Fake skin conductance electrodes applied to immobilise hands and arms, and prevent gesturing (i.e., deception) Findings: Preventing gestures has a negative effect on speech fluency, only if the content of speech is spatial-related (shows a causal role between gesturing and speech fluency)