Week 8+9+10 (M3) Flashcards
Language allows us to…
- Discuss things in the past and present
- Discuss abstract concepts
- Pass on knowledge
- Individual communication
- Communication through entire civilizations
- Sharing new ideas
Children learning language
- Learn language rapidly
- Without being explicitly taught
- Know lots of native language by three
Language per second and per minute
Done at 200 words per minute
Made of 40 diff phonemes
Can do 11 phonemes per second
Types of representation
Ex. Lexical
- Social → who am I talking to and what am I trying t do in this conversation
- Conceptual → the meaning of what you’re saying
- Grammatical → rules
- Lexical
- Phonological → sounds
- Prosodic → the tune of the sentences
- Motor → allowing mouth to move
Language as translation
- Nonverbal thoughts
- Sequences of words
- Sequences of sounds
Aka a relay race of processes working together, or a production line
High-level errors
Repeating a word (ex. a synonym) = redundant
Phrase errors
Errors in the ordering of the phrase
Word errors + what do they relate to
- swapping words (ephemery instead of epiphany)
- swapping words within the same sentence
- combining two words
Relates to tip-of-the-tongue errors and the building blocks of language
Morpheme errors
- meaningful parts of the word get mixed up
ex. “This bar is UNDERrun with OVERgrads”
Phoneme/phonological errors
- sound bits of the word (phonemes) get mixed up
ex. “Calcium, lust and rhyme dissolver” → rust and lime
Spoonerisms aka Freudian slips
phoneme exchange errors
- Suppressed/repressed inner desires and thoughts that inadvertently come out
- Sometimes makes sense, “hurrific”
- We think of these ones and report on them most often, but they’re not as prevalent as other types of errors
Are speech errors random?
NO
Regularities in errors
Word errors obey word rules
- Nouns exchange with nouns
- Verbs exchange with verbs
- Outcomes are grammatically legal
Sound errors obey sound rules
- Beginnings exchange with beginnings
- Similar sounds exchange
- Outcomes are phonologically legal
Words split apart at really predictable places
What do speech errors reveal
- The building blocks of language
- The rules we use to put those blocks together
Examples of lab procedures to test errors
- Tongue twisters
- The SLIPS procedure
- TOT (tip-of-the-tongue) elicitation
What makes tongue twisters hard
These are hard because they’re hard in your head (would even make these errors in your head)
- Difficulty planning, selecting, and executing these sound sequences
The SLIPS procedure
s for spooner
- Experimentally elicits phoneme exchange errors (spoonerisms)
- Gives a phoneme pattern of paired words, then changes it up and gets you to repeat THAT pair aloud = phoneme errors
TOT (tip-of-the-tongue) elicitation
Give definitions of fairly rare terms and get the person to report if they know it, don’t know it, or if it’s on the tip of their tongue
- Issue getting from lemma level to phonological level
Two stage model of language production
technically 3
- Related to TOT issues
Conceptual level (image of a cat)
→ lemma level (cat)
→ phonological level (/k/ /ae/ /t/)
Atriculatory level
Toin coss explanation
Planning errors - phonological exchange with the two stage model
- Should to first word levels, then second word
- If you get a bit ahead of yourself, gets in the way of your planning and is integrated too early
Phoneme manipulation to cause word errors
Make selection process more difficult
Ex. poke x 7, what is the term for white of an egg (yolk! no)
Ex. siblings with the same first letter names get called the wrong name more often
TOT test in the lab
Two possibilities
1. Some words are just idiosyncratically hard
2. TOT states can be LEARNED
Learning hypothesis:
- A TOT is an incorrect mapping of representations during retrieval
- Making a TOT constitutes a strengthening of that incorrect mapping
Method
- Elicit TOTs, then retest
- Measure TOT recurrence rate
Hypotheses
1. A TOT at Test 1 increases the likelihood of a TOT on that same word at Test 2
2. Long Test 1 TOTs should lead to more Test 2 TOTs than short Test 1 TOTs
- Longer breaks while thinking of it
Error repetition + delay effects
Error repetition effect
→ purple bars, much more likely to experience a TOT if you experienced it the first time
Delay effect
→ thinking hard (TOT long) = more likely TOT again
Resolution effect
- If TOT resolved, not likely to make the error again
Resolving it yourself protects from further error. Telling people the right answer doesn’t.
What are the results of the TOT test after time
Same results if the participants are brought back a week later instead of just 48 hrs later
If retested immediately; still same results
If retested immediately and told there will be a retest; STILL same results
Phonological cued resolution
- Spontaneous resolution rate = 32%
- Phonologically cued resolution rate = 82%
- Still much more likely to make the TOT again
- Immediate answer NOT helpful
TOT resolved using cue = helpful
Are TOTs an issue with the phonological mapping stage? Why or why not?
Give a slightly different definition and see if they still have the TOT error
If phonological mapping = no effect (definition not helpful = still make the errors)
Result: yes still errors = yes phonological mapping error
Elicited phonological errors using SLIPS procedure
will you remake the same error
Making a mistake once makes it over 4 times as likely that you will make it again on retest
Summary of TOT results
Resolving a TOT helps prevent error reoccurrence more than being told the answer
However, if we help you resolve it with a phonological cue, it still helps
What’s special about language
- Uniquely human skill
- Incredibly complex system that is mastered by babies incredibly quickly
- Language is something we do very rapidly and effortlessly, but there is a lot of work that has to happen
Prescriptive vs. descriptive
Prescriptive
- What you ought to do
- Some set of “rules”
Descriptive
- What the language actually is
- How do people use it
- People don’t follow the rules
Psycholinguistics
Language is what’s in your head
Examples of the generativity of language
→ can create new sentences out of old words (express new ideas)
→ can create new words (ex. new scientific terms)
→ can apply old rules to new words (ex. Yeet -> yeeted)
→ can create infinitely long sentences
Are language and thought the same
NO
- Not everything you think is in words
- It’s actually a translation process of nonverbal concepts to language
- Holistic to linear
- Conceptual to lemma to phonological
- They influence each other
Language representational levels
Discourse: “Hi how are you? I saw two dogs”
Sentences: “I saw two dogs”
Phrases: “two dogs”
Words: “dogs”
Morphemes
Phonemes
Features: stop, alveolar, +voice
Semantics: meaning
Syntax - grammar
Prosody - tune
Morphology - the meaningful bits of words
Phonology - sounds
Pragmatic - real world meaning “do you have the time”
Why is comprehension hard
- Understanding language is hard
- Hard because of semantics, syntax, and also phonology
- Ambiguity issues (ex. un-buttonable or unbutton-able)
Garden path sentence
As you walk along the “garden path” you’re guided to parse a certain way
- Based on top-down assumptions
The parsing of a sentence in your head can get interrupted (the sentence structure/flow)
Ex. “the horse raced past the barn fell” harder to understand than “the presents placed by the fire burned”
Because you know the presents aren’t placing themselves by the fire, so you’ll add “that had been”
Why is it hard to understand other languages
- No gaps between words, and speech is very fast
- Think speech segmentation issue
- Sounds aren’t constant - different accents/speakers/sounds themselves
= variance
Ex. /e/ in different words
Phonology
Study of the sound patterns that occur within languages
- Huge amount of systematicity
3 ways to describe phonemes
- Place of articulation (where in the mouth)
- Manner of articulation (how you put air through)
- Voicing (how your voice box is moving)
Place of articulation
(where in the mouth)
ex. /f/ versus /th/
Manner of articulation
(how you put air through)
ex. /n/ versus /s/
Voicing
(how your voice box is moving)
ex. /s/ versus /z/
Voiced onset time
time between release of air and start of vibration
Other languages, different VOTs, include pre-voicing
Categorical perception
within language
- You don’t perceive the variability of /b/ vs /p/
- Never perceive sounds that sound “in between”
- also present for infants
- for ANY language
- not uniquely human
- Has to do with the properties of the human auditory system - languages have evolved to take advantage of differences that people are good at detecting
- Put boundaries where phonemes naturally lie