Week 9 Flashcards
This week’s objectives
By the end of this week you should be able to:
- Describe, with examples, some similarities and differences between how animals and humans use language.
- Describe the notion of linguistic relativity and how language might constrain the way we think.
- Describe how certain patterns of aphasia may arise from damage to different areas of the brain.
- Discuss how these patterns of aphasia may tell us something about the organisation of language
- Describe the dual-route cascaded model of reading
explain how the model accounts for surface dyslexia, phonological dyslexia and deep dyslexia. - List some of the limitations of the model.
1.
Describe, with examples, some similarities and differences between how animals and humans use language.
Many species communicate.
Bees are only able to convey a few messages.
The signals bees use are tied closely to their meaning: they are not arbitrary. They can’t vary the script and give other meanings (Can’t advise to look out for the wasps too).
In contrast, human language is generative.
- Because of the arbitrary nature of its symbol-meaning relations
- it consists of a hierarchy of units, each with their own rules of combination,
-It has generative power that can be used to create a potentially infinite number of different messages.
- Phonology and morphology can be used to create new words such as google and repurpose, and we can use the rules of syntax to generate sentences we’ve never heard anyone else say before.
We can talk about past and future events.
The human language is at the centre of those abilities we consider to be uniquely human, including the ability to mentally ‘time travel’, and to explore hypothetical situations and alternative possibilities.
- Human language consists of a hierarchy of units and rule systems.
- Each native speaker of a language implicitly understands the units and the rules that combine them, even if they cannot state what these rules are in words.
-Humans have a larger portion of cortex compared to other animals.
While there are similarities in language of human and animals, animal communication is restriction because it lacks recursion)
What are the four qualities that define language?
Discreetness: These are the small units or sounds that we use to create words. When combined, they help us to communicate ideas.
Grammar: This is the system of rules that govern how we combine individual sounds and/or word units.
Productivity: This is the ability to produce an unlimited number of communications from these sounds and/or words units.
Displacement: This is the ability to talk about something either in the past, the future or as an abstract idea (e.g. fiction).
Which of the four features of human language can be seen in the way bees communicate?
Bees use grammar and displacement.
When did the human brain achieve its present form?
70,000 years ago.
What is psycholinguistics?
The scientific study of the psychological aspects of language, such as how people understand, produce and acquire language.
What is grammar?
Hierarchy, units are combined according to an agreed set of rules, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the language,
What is a phoneme?
It is the smallest unit of speech sound in a language that can signal a difference in meaning.
They have no meaning, but can alter a word when combined with other elements. D changed to I in dog would make it different.
What is phonology
A set of phonological rules.
P can not precede S. eg. Psychology.
What are morphemes?
2nd from he bottom in the hierarchy. The smallest units of meaning in a language.
What is morphology?
determine how morphemes can be combined to make words.
For example, even if you’ve never heard the words reskill or downscale before, you’ll already have a fair idea of what they might mean.
Words, phrases and sentences
Words are third from the bottom of the hierarchy.
Words form sentences.
Adjective come before the noun in the English language.
Syntax
Grammatical function words and grammatical endings need to be included, are collectively referred to as the rules of syntax.
Semantics
The study of word and sentence meaning.
Content words
Words that represent specific objects, events, ideas, feelings and actions.
Arbitrary words are
Words that don’t have any direct relation to the concept it stands for. For example, the Spanish, French and German words for dog are perro, chien and Hund, respectively.
Function words
Have little meaning on their own, but specify the meaning relationships among other words (e.g. to in She gave the book to the boy).
Some function words contribute virtually no meaning at all; they are just required according to the rules of the language (e.g. to in I love to write).
Thematic role
Each word or phrase contributes to the meaning of the sentence in a specific way.
For example, if you hear the sentence The mouse chased the cat, you know that the mouse is doing the chasing. The mouse is the agent. That is its thematic role. In contrast, in the sentence The mouse was chased by the cat, the mouse is the one being subject to the action; the mouse is the patient.
Pragmatics
The study of how language meaning is influenced by social context is referred to as pragmatics. Pragmatics concerns itself not with the grammatical structure of language, but with the social purpose it serves, and the social rules governing what language to use in different situations. “Can you raise your hand” can mean two different things from a doctor to a teacher.
What are the four types of speech acts, based on the scheme proposed by Bach & Harnish (1979)?
Constatives These include statements of fact (It’s half past five), claims (Picasso is a great artist), descriptions (That bus is filthy!) and arguments (You cannot rely on Mary’s testimony, because she has dementia).
Directives: These include commands (Shut the door please!) and requests (Could I have another piece?).
Commissives: These include making promises (I’ll be there by half past ten).
Acknowledgements: These include statements that acknowledge another person’s feelings (You seem sad today), apologies (I’m sorry for losing my temper), thanks and condolences.
Damage to specific areas in the temporal lobe (usually on the left) can lead to:
Pure word deafness, a disorder in which the person’s hearing remains normal, but they have difficulties understanding speech.
Damage to specific areas in the temporal lobe (usually on the left) can lead to:
Pure word deafness, a disorder in which the person’s hearing remains normal, but they have difficulties understanding speech.
Voice onset time is:
The delay in which the word is spoken.
Categorical perception
Demonstrates something very important about speech perception: that we learn to hone in on the sound differences that are most important in our language, and ignore the others.
Speech segmentation
The task of perceiving where each word within a spoken sentence begins and ends.
Top down processing in speech.
Top-down processing refers to the use of existing knowledge, concepts, ideas and expectations to help interpret incoming sensory information. Many of these processes take place without our awareness.
Mental lexicon
Understanding word meanings involves making contact with our our internal store of knowledge about words we know and their meanings.
Categorical perception is:
Demonstrates something very important about speech perception: that we learn to hone in on the sound differences that are most important in our language, and ignore the others. We’re ‘tuned’ to pick up the important differences. This is why it’s often hard to hear differences between similar-sounding words in a foreign language. The sound distinctions you need to pay attention to are not the same.
Brain regions involved in speech comprehension:
Left hemisphere: Speech comprehension.
What is Wernicke’s area?
What happens if it is damaged?
An area that was first linked to auditory word recognition over a century ago.
Wernicke’s aphasia - speech disorder where speech compression is severely compromised.
What is aphasia
It is the name given to a language disturbance that occurs as a result of a stroke or other brain impairment.
What is Broca’s area responsible for?
Speech production.
Damage to left frontal lobe.
Deciding what to say, organising words into sentences, planning articulacy movements.
What is Wernick’s area responsible for?
Perceiving speech sounds, recognising auditory word, retrieving knowledge about word sounds.
Examples of speech aphasia
Sentence is empty if you can’t describe what you are seeing in detail.
Word retrieval takes part in
Different areas of the brain.
Language experts believe:
Humans are born linguists, inheriting a biological readiness to recognise and eventually produce the sounds and structure of whatever language they are exposed to.
- have genetic and neural capacities that make them ideally equipped for learning complex movement sequences such as the ones needed for language, including sequences of speech sounds
Linguist Noam Chomsky believes:
Humans are uniquely born with a brain mechanism already ‘prewired’ to understand general grammatical rules common to all languages (which he terms ‘universal grammar’;
Brain areas responsible for language:
he size of the human cerebral cortex—and of the frontal lobes enables us to maintain long sequences of information over short periods.
This capacity, known as working memory, makes it possible for us to understand and formulate complex action sequences of the kind found in language.
Finally, the human frontal lobes in particular are capable of exerting powerful control over our mental processes, which enables us to be less tied to the present and allows us to think in much more abstract ways.
What is child directed speech?
High pitch tone that we use when talking to babies. Used all over the world.
What is the critical period (hypothesis) for acquiring a new language?
Infancy to puberty
This can be applied to learning a second language as well.
Sensitive period hypothesis.
Some specific aspects of language competence, such as phonology and syntax, develop fully only if they are acquired before puberty.
Deaf people who are not exposed to sign language before the age of 12 fail to acquire which kind of rule?
Some types of grammatical rules; for example, rules about when and how to apply morphological inflections, such as the sign language of adding -ing to verbs.
Why might there be an optimal period for acquiring certain aspects of language?
The brain is maximally ‘plastic’ at a young age.
- There are still large regions of cortex that can be dedicated or rededicated to the learning of complex associations.
- In contrast, the mature brain has already been organised to support certain kinds of learned associations, and there is less flexibility for acquiring new ones.
Phonological awareness
Awareness of the sound structure of one’s language.
-people need to have grasped the idea that words can be decomposed into phonemes.
An important prediction of a child’s reading ability.
What are eye fixations when reading?
The positions where the eye lingers for a few milliseconds.
What are saccades when reading?
The red arrows represent the sweeping movements of the eyes that occur between fixations.
Sight vocabulary
A mental lexicon of familiar visual word forms, whose entries can be activated rapidly as we view words.
