Week 5 Flashcards
Patterns of change across the lifespan: Sensory abilitiy
Declines as we age: sense of touch, vision, and hearing decreases
Patterns of change across the lifespan: cognitive ability
declines over time
What 3 cognitive abilities decline as we age?
memory, attention, processing speed,
How is the state of language studies
it is not studied enoguh
How are language skills often categorized as 5 things
speaking, listening, reading, writing, non-verbal
Traditionally a lot of studies focus on blank and blank in older adults
focus on reading and comprehension in older adults
What is the problem with reading and comprehension tests
reading something and then asked to explain it- the issue here is that it’s actually relying on memory
Another way of studying language comprehension can include testing both the
the speaker and listener on remembering info
People are sometimes tested talking to ai as well. Whats the issue with this?
People who talk to AI are typically white, rich people and this is not a representative sample
To process something that requires cognitive abilities, and cognitive abilities rely on accurate sensory info acquisition. What happens if sensory data is not acquired?
the cognitive ability will be informed and wont be good
Speech production in older adults: they are worse which looks like what
talk about unrelated topics, overall less efficient speakers
What do comprehension tests show when looking at older and younger participants
older people perform worse, show less comphrehension
When comparing both younger and older people in similar sensory degradation levels what does the data show?
it says that younger and older people score similarly
What does this data indicate
Hints that sensory degradation as we age may be behind lower comprehension scores in older participants
What is transmission deficit theory:
The transmission deficit model suggests that semantic and phonological information is stored in memory and retrieved separately.
The transmission deficit model suggests connections between semantic representations and phonological representations. do what in aging
they are weakened by aging
What data shows that these connections get worse: vocab size increases with age while total usage remains stable, causing what
causing overall reduction in word frequency, and thus leading to reduced activation of nodes and weakening of connections
What is the tip of the tongue:
Knowing something but the word isnt coming out
Tot task:
shown a picture, and the participant either has to say knows, don’t know, or the word is on the tot
What is semantic ambiguity?
Semantic ambiguity is an uncertainty that occurs when a word, phrase or sentence has more than one interpretation.
Semantic ambiguity processing: there is always a blank and blank ambiguity
always a dominant and subordinate ambiguity
Semantic ambiguity example: juggling
Dominate (first thought association)- very dangerous \
Subordinate (second thought) - juggling knives are less sharp than people think.
What is referential communication:
Refers to ways of talking about things in the environment
Referent communication involves a speaker and a listener. Sufficient referential communication:
the speaker wants a cup- asks for a cup/ there is only one cup so there is no confusion
insufficient referential communication example 2:
please pass the cup- there is two cups- which causes confusion in the listener, so this is insufficient communication
Referential communication issue: over-specification
Adding in additional info that is not needed. Over specification actually induces more communication.
To test referential production in the aging population, a tank test is used. explain tank test.
multiple images of people in different position is presented:
participants job is to listen to descriptions and assign an image to the description
Methods of test: measures
speech onset latency, speech rate, fluency
Results:
younger and older adults were similar. Elder speak occurred though
elder speak
young people spoke to older people slower
Descriptive results: older adults- over and under specification
did over specify and did not underspecify
In reference to age what was shown?
Measures of speech performance are stable as we age
Older adults over specified but it doesn’t really suggest a decline
Real-time comphrehension is also something studied as we age: two ways of testing
eye tracking, and physiological reaction time
How many words are said per second in conversational speech?
2.5 words
What is real-time comprehension?
Looking at how u comprehend what I say as I say it
pragmatic inference Study question
Are there age-related differences in inferences underlying real-time language comprehension
Experiment results:
clear evidence of contrastive inferencing in both age groups
Conventionalized patterns of inference appear to be stable in aging
Study question 2:
do human listeners spontaneously ascribe human attributes to artificial
agents and use this belief to guide real time language comprehension?
Experiment 2 results:
younger but not older listeners were able to suppress contrastive
inferences
Older adults had more difficulty in keeping robots limitations in mind during
real time language comprehension
Explanation for age similarities in results
Simple task
Cognitive abilities
Sensory abilities
Motivation- more motivated
explanation for age differences
Task complexity- more demand
Cognitive abilities
Motivation- crunch model, lose motivation
Lifelong experience
Bilingual advantage on executive function tasks
Bilinguals must select the target language that is appropriate fir content
while controlling interference from the nontarget language
- Great demand on executive control
These people adapt to meet demands. Thus, bilinguals may show benefit over monolinguals.
Billingualism and alziemherzers
Evidence of billinguals showing a delayed onset of alzheimers disease
symptoms compared to monolinguals (biaylstok)
Chertkow found that bilingual individuals showed that for non immigrant Canadians
Small advantage for non immigrant Canadians if they spoke more than 2
languages
immigrant group results
Immigrant group showed a delay by almost 5 years,
Bilingualism and transmission deficit theory
Billinguals have even more vocab across their languages and as such they
experience more TOT compared to monolinguals
Bilingual speech perception: can be more or less challenging due to
- Individual differences in sensory and cognitive abilities
- Individual differences in language ability
research comparing speech perception in noise for bilinguals vs monolinguals
l2 listeners
perform more poorly than monolinguals, but benefit from a predictable
sentence context
The benefit for high predictable in bilinguals suggest that this may be due to
the shift from bottom up to top down compensatory strategies
Blincs model:
Billingual language interaction network for comprehension of speech
BLINCs says
The idea is that when u are listening and have both visuall and auditory input and you use both to understand the speech of others
