Week 9: language Flashcards
Why is human language important?
🫂coordinate large groups
📚transfer knowledge
⌛past consideration, future planning
How do animals communicate
🐜pass chemical signals on to each other through antenna
🐝through body language
🐒basic vocalization
Have been able to teach some human language to animals
Animal communication is limited by
Quantity: Few signals, Restricted to info about food sources
Quality: Immediate environment
Structure: Do not have complex grammar, Not productively
Structure of language
Phonology: elementary sounds of a language
Morphology: elementary units of meaning
Lexicology: meaning of standalone words
Syntax: sentence structure
Semantics: study of meaning
Pragmatics: how context contributes
Grammar
- connected with computation
- is the lower bound of how computation is able to process a system
Teaching language to parrots
- Can mimic speech and other sounds
- Taught over 200 words including shapes, colours and numbers
Teaching language to chimpanzees
- Learned up to 250 signs
- Acquired abstract concepts
- Combined words to create new ones
Language uniqueness
nature (born with capabilities) vs nurture (learned)
Naturists
- Ability to recognise syntax and words from birth
- Which ones are learned through experience
Nurturists
- Trial and error
- Modelling with others’ language skills
Universal grammar
- Humans have basic scaffolding for syntax but specific details need to be learned through experience
- Proposed linguistic abilities resulted from rapid mutations in the brain across a brief evolutionary span
FOXP2
gene that is important in human language development
Developmental Verbal Dyspraxia
Gene mutation: Affects the ability to pronounce syllables and words &
Regulates vocal communication in other animals too
Chomsky: Poverty of stimulus
- Do not have enough information from just utterances to make a definite grammar (cannot be just trial and error)
- Must be some innate aspect
- Argument against behaviorists
Is language innate?
- To a large extent, yes
- Children learn language in a consistent manner
- Well known learning trajectory for language
Motherese (child directed speech)
sing-song like cadence, exaggerated vowels, crawling → helps child learn
Ambiguity in language
- Phonology
- Syntax
- Semantics
the auditory system
transmits sound waves, turning them into neural signals
how does the auditory system work?
- Contains several structures that capture and amplify inputs
- Does so in the best way for the brain to interpret
cochlea
- coil shaped with hairs in the basilar membrane inside
Ossicles
- Series of tiny bones; ensures appropriate frequencies are delivered to the cochlea
pinna
- Folded outer cartilage; captures sound in the air, transmits to ear canal
ear canal
- Narrow tube; amplifies certain frequencies, transmits to eardrum
eardrum
- Thin tissue; separates ear canal from inner ear, passes sound to ossicles
Basilar Membrane
Strip of tissue with tiny hair cells
called mechanacoreceptors that
move in vibration with fluid in the
cochlea
Tonotopic map
- Responding frequencies decrease as the coil progresses inward.
- Sound signal is systematically organized into different frequencies as it is sent to the brain.
- Organization is preserved as signals are sent to subcortical structures to the auditory cortex.
Phonological ambiguity
The sounds people make are highly ambiguous
Phonetic restoration effect
recorded a spoken sentence and then removed an individual phoneme and replaced it with a non-speech sound (cough)
McGurk effect
what you see is what you hear
speech segmentation
Morphological/lexical boundaries are not obvious in the auditory signal
homophony
spoken the same but are different (ate and eight)
Saffran study
invented artificial language and concluded babies use prior knowledge to extract information
Homography
spelled the same but have different meanings. EX. Bow (bend down, knot, tree branch)
Parsing
break up sentence into its constituent parts to determine meaning
Garden-path sentence
interpretation is incorrect because of sentence structure (still grammatical)
Late closure
we tend to attach incoming words to the phrase we are currently processing rather than assuming they belong to different phrase that is still coming up
Syntax-first parsing
based on principles of grammar alone, regardless of meaning
Prosody
speakers patterns of stress and intonation (changes meaning of phrase)
Discourse processing
the ability to understand language that is at least several sentences long (involves making inferences beyond the text itself)
Anaphoric inference
a guess in what word is first and is being referred to by another
Causal inference
something mentioned will later lead to something else
Necessary inference
the only way to make sense of certain phrases is based on referring to previous information
Elaborative inference
info is interred from the text
Online processing
inferences actively being generated while people are listening to reading a text
Offline processing
Inference taking place in memory after
initial encoding
Arcuate Fasciculus
An extensive band of fibers deep in
the brain that connect Wernicke and Broca’s area directly (absent in many non-humans)
Hemispheric Specialization: Beeman et al., (2000)
Language production mainly occurs in the left hemisphere, but the right
hemisphere seems to be important for higher-order language processing
Linguistic Relativity
The specific language we speak
determines the kinds of thoughts we
can and do have
Linguistic Universalists
Differences among languages are
fairly superficial and tend to express
the same basic ideas in different ways
Ambiguous sounds: Pollack & Pickkett (1964)
Secretly recorded conversations of psychology students waiting to participate in an experiment. Spliced out individual words, played them back for those who had originally spoken them. Identified less than 1/2 out of context word but performed better when played with a few words before and after the target word.
Phonemic Restoration Effect (Warren, 1970)
Recorded a spoken sentence and then removed an individual phoneme and replaced it with a non-speech sound. Most didnt notice because they had sufficient information.
Speech segmentation: Saffran et al., (1996)
Invented an artificial language made up of word-like letter strings (bida, tigo). Babies looked at non-words and encoded frequently heard sounds as words.
lexical representation: Scarborough et al (1997)
lexical decision task: responds if words were real or not as fast as possible, people are better at recognising real words when they are more common
Multiple lexical activations: Swiney (1979)
“The reported explained she was a member of the press.” > meaning of homophone “press” is clear
reduced RTs- brain briefly entertains both meanings before turning to context
Syntax-First Parsing: Kako & Wagner (2001)
Nonsensical< weird image
Semantic effects in parsing: Trueswell et al., (1994)
Presented participants with sentences that contained parsing ambiguity. Tracked eye movements. Meaning of word affected parsing, not just grammatical category.
Necessary vs. Elaborative Inference: Johnson et al., (1973)
Presented participants with a set of sentences including: “He slipped on a wet spot and dropped the delicate glass pitcher on the floor.” Had to judge whether sentences had been in the original set they had seen (‘old’) or not (‘novel’). Those who had heard the sentence above were likely to rate this sentence as ‘old’: “He slipped on a wet spot and broke the delicate glass pitcher when it fell on the floor.”
Online vs Offline Discourse Processing: Haviland & Clark (1974)
Participants pressed a keyboard button to progress through a sentence at the pace they felt comfortable…
compared reaction times for beer and picnic sentences. Took time to interpret beer as a picnic supply- supports online inference.
Online vs Offline Discourse Processing: Singer (1979)
The instrument or tool that is likely to be used for a task in inferred even though it is not vital to the text understanding. It is inferred that knife is used to “cut the bread”. Elaborative inference takes longer.
Knowledge and Discourse Processing: Bransford & Johnson (1972)
contexualised inference can lead to comprehension and durable memory storage
Hemispheric Specialization: AbdulSabar et al., (2014)
Measured brain activity while people either comprehended or produced complex narratives. Found pronounced activation
in the right temporal lobe,
specifically for comprehension.
Language and cognition: Winawer et al., (2007)
Russian speakers have different names for dark and light blue and can perceive more colours
