Chapter 9 [Cognition]

Basic unit of spoken language. Ex. sounds a, k, and th. The English language has about 40 phonemes. If you change just one phoneme in a word, you change the meaning of that word. Kiss has a very different meaning from this.

Phoneme

Our knowledge of the social rules that underlie language use; pragmatics takes into account the listener's perspective. For example, think how you would define the word syntax to a 12-year-old child, as opposed to a college classmate. -->Pragmatics is the discipline within linguistics that focuses most on social interactions.

Pragmatics

Beginning in the 1970s, many psychologists became discouraged with Chomsky's emphasis on the grammatical aspects of language. These psychologists began to develop theories that emphasized the human mind and semantics, rather than the structure of language

Psycholinguistic Theories that Emphasize Meaning

An interdisciplinary field that examines how people use language to communicate ideas.

Psycholinguistics

Current discipline of psycholinguistics can be traced to the 1960s, when psycholinguists began to test whether psychological research could support the theories of a linguist named Noam Chomsky

A Brief History of Psycholinguistics

--> Some of the findings may apply only to English speakers, rather than to all humans. --> Linguists estimate that about 7,000 languages are spoken throughout the world. *The emphasis on English is especially unfortunate because English is an ''outlier language'' for two important reasons:* 1. English has relatively simple grammar, partly because there is a negative correlation between a language's number of speakers and the complexity of its language 2. English has many more irregular pronunciations than other major world languages. A sequence of letters in English can have variable pronunciations. The first six letters of the words though and thought are identical. However, these two words are pronounced differently, and they also have very different meanings. -->English word meaning does not depend on the relative pitch of the syllables in a word. However, in Mandarin Chinese, ma means ''mother'' when the word is spoken at a single pitch. In contrast, ma means ''horse'' when spoken in a tone that initially falls and then rises. A child can create a yes-no question in English by using a rising intonation, such as ''I going outside?'' However, young children in Finland cannot use this option, because Finnish does not use this method for asking a question -->Sesotho (SA Language)—uses the passive voice more than English does. Also, you probably know at least one European language in which the nouns have a grammatical gender, even though English nouns do not. -->Brain processing even differs as a function of a person's language. For example, one specific region in the frontal lobe is activated when English speakers listen to certain complex sentences. However, this same region does not respond when German speakers listen to the translated versions of those sentences.

A Caution: Psycholinguistics Is English-Centered

Psychologists have designed several methods of measuring the difficulty of understanding a sentence with an ambiguous word or phrase -->For example, one method measures the amount of time that the reader pauses on a word before moving his or her eyes to the next words in the sentence. People typically pause longer when they are processing an ambiguous word, for example, when they are completing a questionnaire. -->When people encounter a potential ambiguity, the activation builds up for all the well-known meanings of the ambiguous item. Furthermore, people are likely to select one particular meaning (1) if that meaning is more common than the alternate meaning and (2) if the rest of the sentence is consistent with that meaning. Consider this potentially ambiguous sentence: Pat took the money to the bank. Here, the ''financial institution'' interpretation of bank would receive the most activation. After all, this is the most common interpretation of bank, and the context of money also suggests this meaning. Some minimal activation may also build up for other meanings of bank (as in riverbank and blood bank). However, just a fraction of a second later, these alternative meanings are suppressed, and they are no longer active. -->So far, we have considered ambiguous words. However, sometimes a sentence structure is ambiguous, especially if it contains no punctuation --> In fact, we can usually understand ambiguous sentences, just as we can usually understand negative sentences, sentences using the passive voice, and sentences with complex syntax. However, we typically respond more quickly and more accurately when the language we encounter is straightforwar

Ambiguity

Reading requires you to use many cognitive processes that we have discussed in previous chapters. For example, you must recognize letters (Chapter 2), move your eyes across the page (Chapter 3), use working memory to remember material from the sentence you are currently processing (Chapter 4), and recall earlier material that is stored in long-term memory (Chapter 5). --> Need to use metamemory / metacomprehension. Possibly construct a mental image. In addition, you should consult your semantic memory, your schemas, and your scripts when you try to understand a paragraph. --> In English, we do not have a one-to-one correspondence between letters of the alphabet and speech sounds. These irregular pronunciations make English more challenging than languages with consistent pronunciations, such as Spanish or Russian

Basic Reading Processes

1. Why is language one of the most impressive human accomplishments? Describe at least six cognitive processes that you are using while you are reading this sentence. 2. According to the discussion of factors affecting comprehension, we have more difficulty understanding a sentence if it is in the passive voice, instead of the active voice. Referring to the cognitive-functional approach, why would we occasionally choose to create a sentence such as, ''The window was broken by Fred''? 3. Suppose that you are reading a story in which Sam is described as a' 'left-brain person.'' Suggest at least three reasons why this phrase is not consistent with the research. 4. Context is an important concept throughout this chapter. Explain how context is important in (a) processing an ambiguous word, (b) discovering the meaning of an unfamiliar word, and (c) background knowledge in understanding discourse. 5. This chapter emphasizes that memory contributes to language comprehension. Using the chapter outline as your guide, specify how both working memory and long-term memory are essential when you try to understand language. 6. This chapter emphasized that English is an ''outlier language.'' Explain this term, and describe why the English-language research about psycholinguistics may not apply to other languages. If you speak another language, how might the research show a different pattern? 7. Describe the constructionist view of inferences discussed in the last section of this chapter. Think about several kinds of reading tasks you have performed in the last two days. Be sure to include examples other than reading your textbook. Point out how the constructionist perspective would be relevant during each discourse-processing task. 8. Describe the research on metacomprehension skills. How could you apply these strategies to improve your own reading skills for a course other than cognitive psychology? 9. Summarize the parts of this chapter that describe individual differences. How might individual differences also be relevant in other aspects of language comprehension? 10. This chapter discussed both listening and reading. Which processes are similar, and which are different? In preparation for Chapter 10, compare speech production and writing in a similar fashion.

Chapter Review Questions

Proposed that there is more to a sentence than meets the eye (or the ear). --> Argued that your impressive language abilities must be explained in terms of a complex system of rules and principles that are represented in your mind --> Proposed that humans have innate language skills. As a result, children do not need to learn the basic, generalizable concepts that are universal to all languages. --> Proposed that language is *modular*; people have a set of specific linguistic abilities that is separated from our other cognitive processes, such as memory and decision making. Chomsky argues young children learn complex linguistic structures many years before they master other, simpler tasks, such as mental arithmetic. --> Chomsky pointed out the difference between the deep structure and the surface structure of a sentence. The *surface structure* is represented by the words that are actually spoken or written. In contrast, the *deep structure* is the underlying, more abstract meaning of a sentence. People use *transformational rules* to convert deep structure into a surface structure that they can speak or write. -->Two sentences may have very different surface structures, but very similar deep structures. For example, consider these two sentences: (1) ''Sara threw the ball'' and (2) ''The ball was thrown by Sara.'' However, ''deep down,'' speakers of English feel that the sentences have identical core meanings. In fact, 40 minutes after seeing a sentence such as, ''The ball was thrown by Sara,'' people are likely to report that they had seen a semantically similar sentence, such as ''Sara threw the ball'' -->Also pointed out that two sentences may have identical surface structures but very different deep structures; these are called *ambiguous sentences.* For example, I live near the small town of York in rural upstate New York. One day I drove past the announcement board outside the York Town Hall, and the message said: ''POP CAN DRIVE.'' I was puzzled: Whose father is now allowed to drive, and why had he previously been prohibited from driving? To be honest, the alternate meaning (focusing on a community fundraiser) did not occur to me until the next day.

Chomsky's Approach

Reading differs in many important ways from the comprehension of spoken language: 1. Reading is visual and is spread out across space, whereas speech is auditory and is spread out across time. 2. Readers can control the rate of input, whereas listeners usually cannot. 3. Reader scan re-scan the written input, whereas listeners must rely much more heavily on their working memory. 4. Readers usually encounter standardized, error-free input, whereas listeners often need to cope with variability, gramatical errors, sloppy pronunciation, and interfering stimuli. 5. Readers can see discrete boundaries between words, whereas listeners often encounter unclear boundaries in spoken language, as you saw on page 60 in Chapter 2. 6. Readers encounter only the stimuli on a page, whereas listeners encounter both nonverbal cues and auditory cues, such as emphasized words and variations in pace. Researchers are just beginning to appreciate the importance of these additional cues. 7. Children require elaborate teaching to master some written languages—such as written English—but they learn spoken languages much more easily. 8. Adult readers typically learn new words more quickly when they appear in a written form, rather than a spoken form. -->For adults, scores on reading comprehension tests are strongly correlated with scores on oral comprehension tests; typically, the correlation is about +.90

Comparing Written and Spoken Language

People have trouble understanding complex syntax, such as a sentence with a nested structure. In a *nested structure*, one phrase is embedded within another phrase. Readers often experience a memory overload when they try to read a sentence that has a nested structure -->Whenever possible, follow these guidelines: (1) Use linguistically positive sentences, rather than negative ones; (2) use active sentences, rather than passive ones; and (3) use relatively simple sentences, rather than sentences with complex syntax.

Complex Syntax / Nested Structures

Interrelated units of language that are larger than a sentence. Ex. News --> Research on discourse revived in the 70's --> At all levels of language comprehension, we see additional evidence of Theme 5. That is, the processing of the physical stimuli (bottom-up processing) interacts with the context provided by our expectations and previous knowledge (top-down processing). This interaction is especially prominent when we form an integrated, cohesive representation of the text and when we draw inferences, which are conclusions that go beyond the isolated phrase or sentence --> Our exploration of discourse comprehension in this section focuses on the follow- ing selected topics: (1) forming an integrated representation of the text, (2) drawing inferences during reading, (3) teaching metacomprehension skills, (4) individual differences in test anxiety and discourse comprehension, and (5) a technique that can assess the semantic content of discourse.

Discourse

Whenever we read, we activate important mental processes by making inferences that go beyond the information presented on the printed page. -->When we make an inference during reading, we use our world knowledge in order to access information that is not explicitly stated in a written passage -->Let's explore several issues that researchers have explored, in connection with inferences during reading. First, we'll consider the constructionist view of inferences. Then we'll discuss factors that encourage inferences. Our final topic is higher-level inferences.

Drawing Inferences During Reading

Sometimes you read a word by a direct-access route; you recognize this word directly through vision, without ''sounding out'' the words. For example, you look at the word choir and the visual pattern is sufficient to access the word and its meaning. You are especially likely to use direct access if the word has an irregular spelling and cannot be ''sounded out''—for example, the words one or through. --> Other times, you read a word by an indirect-access route; as soon as you see a word, you translate the ink marks on the page into some form of sound, before you can access a word and its meaning (Harley, 2010; Treiman et al., 2003). You are especially likely to use indirect access if the word has a regular spelling and can be sounded out—for example, the words ten and cabinet. -->As we noted earlier, the dual-route approach has the definite advantage of flexibility. This approach argues that the characteristics of the reading material determine whether access is indirect or direct. For instance, you may use indirect access the first time you see a long, uncommon word; you may use direct access for a common word -->The dual-route approach also argues that people's reading skills can determine whether they use indirect or direct access. Beginning readers would be especially likely to sound out the words, using indirect access. More advanced young readers would be especially likely to recognize the words directly from print. Adults also vary in their reading styles. People who are relatively poor readers primarily use indirect access. In contrast, people who are good readers primarily use direct access -->At present, the dual-route approach seems like a useful compromise. The dual- route approach is also consistent with brain-imaging research. Readers can identify words either directly or indirectly, depending on their own reading skills and the characteristics of the text.

Dual-Route Approach to Reading

In general, people have difficulty understanding sentences in these four conditions: 1. If they contain negatives, such as not. 2. If they are in the passive rather than the active voice. 3. If they have complex syntax. 4. If they are ambiguous.

Factors Affecting Comprehension

Naturally, we do not always draw inferences when we read a passage. Some readers fail to activate information that appeared much earlier in the passage. People are likely to draw inferences if they have a large working-memory capacity. They are also likely to draw inferences if they have excellent metacomprehension skills. -->People are also likely to draw inferences if they have expertise about the topic described in the text. In fact, expertise in an area can compensate for a relatively small working-memory capacity -->Our inferences blend with the text, forming a cohesive story. We often retain the gist or general meaning of a passage, forgetting that we constructed some elements that did not actually appear in the story.

Factors That Encourage Inferences

In everyday life, we try to figure out the mental state of other people in our lives, a concept called *theory of mind*. For example, we might say, ''Judith is usually very kind, but she really was mean to Kathy. Maybe she is worried about her final exams.'' Similarly, readers often try to figure out the mental states of the people they read about in a story or a book. -->The research on reading shows that skilled readers frequently organize and integrate information into a cohesive story --> Readers also construct internal representations that include descriptions of the characters in a story. This descriptive information may include the characters' occupations, relationships, emotional states, personal traits, goals, and actions -->In addition, readers often make inferences that go beyond the information supplied by the writer.

Forming an Integrated Representation of the Text

Scientists also noticed that individuals with speech disorders typically had more severe damage in the left hemisphere of the brain, rather than the right hemisphere. During the mid-1900s, researchers began a more systematic study of lateralization. *Lateralization* means that each hemisphere of the brain has somewhat different functions. --> Most neurolinguistic studies find greater activation in the left hemisphere than in the right. Still, for about 5% of right-handers and about 50% of left-handers, language is either localized in the right hemisphere or is processed equally by both hemispheres -->The left hemisphere does indeed perform most of the work in language processing, for the majority of people. -->In general, then, the right hemisphere is responsible for more abstract language tasks

Hemispheric Specialization

A relatively recent topic in neurolinguistics focuses on the mirror system. The mirror system is a network of neurons in the brain's motor cortex; these neurons are activated when you watch someone perform an action --> Recorded the responses of single neurons in the motor cortex of several monkeys -->Additional research focuses on the mirror system in humans. For example, Beatriz Calvo-Merino and her colleagues (2005) gathered fMRI data for individuals who were experts in classical ballet, while they watched (a) videos of classical ballet and (b) videos of a Brazilian form of martial arts, called capoeira. Their fMRIs showed significantly greater activation in the motor-cortex areas relevant to ballet movements, and relatively little activation in the areas relevant to capoeira. In contrast, individuals who were experts in capoeira showed the reverse activation pattern. In other words, experts can grasp meaning by watching another person, when they have fully developed the appropriate motor ''vocabulary.'' -->Language is not limited to spoken and written messages; physical actions are also important. Specifically, these authors emphasize that sound-based language is not the only way that people can communicate with one another. They emphasize that sign language, based on gestures, represents a fully structured system of communication. --> Mirror neurons also play a role in language comprehension --> Mirror neurons may be especially active when we try to listen to someone talking in a noisy setting—a setting where we really need assistance -->In summary, the neurolinguistics research highlights the complexity of our language skills. We've considered (a) studies about individuals with aphasia, -->(b) information about hemispheric specialization, (c) fMRI research, and (d) studies focusing on the mirror system. Neurolinguists still have a long distance to travel, but they have identified some important information about the coordinated brain regions that allow us to understand language. In the first section of this chapter, we examined the basic structure of language, the history of psycholinguistics, factors affecting comprehension, and neurolinguis- tics.

How the Mirror System Can Facilitate Communication

Study that measured children's reading skills in 14 different European countries; Languages such as Spanish and German have extremely predictable pronunciation, and children learning to read these languages had close to 100% reading-accuracy scores on a standardized test. Languages such as French and Portuguese are less predictable, and these children achieved reading-accuracy scores of about 80%. English was the least predictable of the languages, and these children achieved reading-accuracy scores of only 34% In general, those who favored the direct-access approach also favored the whole-word approach. -->In contrast, people who favor the indirect-access hypothesis typically support the phonics approach. -->Children should be taught to use phonics to access the pronunciation of a word; they should also use context as a backup to confirm their initial hypothesis. Even the strongest phonics supporters would also agree that teachers should encourage children to recognize some words by sight alone. Teachers should also emphasize oral language throughout the curriculum -->Furthermore, educators typically favor some components of an approach called the whole-language approach

Implications for Teaching Reading to Children

Discipline that examines how the brain processes language. Research in this area has become increasingly active in recent years, and it demonstrates that the neurological basis of language is very complicated. --> Unfortunately, however, the popular press typically oversimplifies the complex results reported by neurolinguists (Borst et al., 2011; Schumann, 2010). In this part of the chapter, we will consider four topics: (a) people with aphasia, (b) hemispheric specialization in language processing, (c) neuroimaging research with individuals who do not have language disorders, and (d) research on the mirror system, which may facilitate communication.

Neurolinguistics

According to numerous studies, people who are high in test anxiety often perform poorly on examinations. The traditional explanation is that worry intrudes on people's consciousness, blocking them from retrieving the correct answers on a test. -->However, Jerrell Cassady (2004) proposes that test anxiety also decreases students' skills in understanding the information in their textbooks. Cassady examined the link between anxiety and discourse comprehension by instructing 277 undergraduate students to read several paragraphs from a textbook, and then to read it a second time. Next, everyone completed a measure called the Cognitive Test Anxiety Scale, followed by a multiple-choice test on the earlier textbook material. The students then repeated this procedure with a comparable passage from a different textbook. Then they completed a study-skills survey prior to the multiple-choice test. Cassady found that scores on the Cognitive Test Anxiety Scale were strongly correlated (r = −.55) with performance on the multiple-choice tests. In other words, people who are highly anxious tend to perform poorly on a reading-comprehension test. -->Surprisingly, however, study skills were not strongly correlated with recall on the multiple-choice test (r = + .24). -->People with high scores on the Cognitive Test Anxiety Scale also made more errors in summarizing the textbook material. These people also made more errors on a test that assessed their ability to make correct inferences, based on the textbook material. In summary, when people are highly anxious about taking tests, they may experience interference from high levels of worry. In addition, they perform poorly on a variety of tasks related to reading comprehension.

Individual Differences: Test Anxiety and Reading Comprehension

Neurolinguistics began in the 1800s --> Researchers studied individuals who had language disorders. In fact, before the early 1970s, almost all the scientific information about neurolinguistics was based on people with aphasia (difficulty communicating, caused by damage to the speech areas of the brain. This damage is typically caused by a stroke or a tumor) --> Damage to Broca's area typically leads to hesitant speech that primarily uses isolated words and short phrases. Broca's aphasia is primarily characterized by an expressive-language deficit—or trouble producing language. These symptoms make sense. Broca's area is one of the locations of the brain that manages motor movement. To produce speech, you must move your lips and tongue. Therefore, it makes sense that these individuals have trouble with speech production. may also have some trouble with language comprehension -->Damage to Wernicke's area typically produces serious difficulties understanding language (Gazzaniga et al., 2009; Harley, 2001). In fact, people with Wernicke's aphasia often have such severe problems with language comprehension that they cannot understand basic instructions such as, ''Point to the telephone'' or ''Show me the picture of the watch.'' However, many people with Wernicke's aphasia also have problems with language production, as well as language comprehension. Specifically, their spoken language is often wordy and confused. They usually have relatively few pauses, compared to someone with Broca's aphasia. Let's consider another reason why these two varieties of aphasia are more similar than researchers once thought. This reason focuses on the problem of English-centered research, described on pages 299-300. 1. English speakers use the same grammatical form for a noun, whether we use this noun as the subject or the object of a sentence. Suppose that researchers study speech production in English speakers who have Wernicke's aphasia. These speakers would not reveal a problem on this specific grammatical task. 2. In contrast, languages such as German and Czech add letters to the end of a noun if it is the object of a sentence, rather than the subject. Interestingly, people with Wernicke's aphasia who speak German and Czech often fail to add the appropriate endings to the nouns. These speakers would reveal a problem with language production.

Individuals with Aphasia

Thomas Landauer and his colleagues created a useful artificial intelligence program. Their program, called latent semantic analysis (LSA), can perform many fairly sophisticated language tasks. For example, LSA can assess creative writing. -->Used LSA to analyze young adults' self-descriptions, before and after psychotherapy. Their self-descriptions showed significantly greater change than the self-descriptions supplied by people in a control group. -->LSA can also assess the amount of semantic similarity between two discourse segments. In fact, LSA can be used to grade essays written by college students -->LSA is indeed impressive, but even its developers note that it cannot match a human grader. Furthermore, all the current programs master just a small component of language comprehension. For example, LSA typically ignores syntax, whereas humans can easily detect syntax errors. -->Once again, the artificial intelligence approach to language illustrates humans' tremendous breadth of knowledge, cognitive flexibility, understanding of syntax, and sources of information.

Language Comprehension and Latent Semantic Analysis

The basic unit of meaning. For example, the word reactivated actually contains four morphemes: re-, active,-ate, and -ed. Each of those segments conveys meaning. Many morphemes can stand on their own (like giraffe). Morphology refers to the study of morphemes; morphology therefore examines how we create words by combining morphemes

Morpheme

A sentence in a newspaper column reads. "Georgia rejected a challenge to a referendum that had barred same-sex unions." Requires multiple readings. -->Clark and Chase (1972) showed a picture of a star above a plus sign. Then they asked people to verify statements, such as the following: STAR IS ABOVE PLUS + * --> The participants responded quickly in this case, when the sentence was affirmative. They responded more slowly if the sentence contained the negative form isn't (for example, ''Plus isn't above star''). The participants also made fewer errors with affirmative sentences than with negative sentences. C=onsistent with Theme 3 of this textbook: Our cognitive processes handle positive information better than negative information. --> For example, people perform only slightly better than chance when they judge sentences such as, ''Few people strongly deny that the world is not flat'' -->Practical applications in numerous areas, such as education, advertisements, and surveys

Negatives

However, one disadvantage is that fMRI values can be inaccurate when participants move their heads even slightly (Saffran & Schwartz, 2003). You can guess, therefore, that fMRIs are more suitable for language comprehension than for language production. (Try talking without moving your mouth, your tongue, or any other portion of your head!) -->Let's examine two areas of research using the fMRI method, first with language tasks that are typically associated with the left hemisphere and second with a language task typically associated with the right hemisphere.

Neuroimaging Research in Adults Without Aphasia

Initially, psychologists responded enthusiastically to Chomsky's ideas. However, some of the research did not support his theories. For example, the research failed to support Chomsky's prediction that people would take longer to process sentences that required numerous transformations. Furthermore, Chomsky's theories argue that all languages share the same universal patterns of grammar. Research has demonstrated that many non-European languages do not show these patterns. -->Chomsky's more recent theories have provided more sophisticated linguistic analyses. He later proposed that young language learners make only a limited number of hypotheses about the structure of their language. Chomsky's newer approach also emphasizes the information contained in the individual words of a sentence. For example, the word discuss conveys information about the word's meaning. However, discuss also specifies the requirement that discuss must include a noun later in the phrase (Ratner & Gleason, 1993). Consider a sentence that begins, ''Rita discussed. . . . '' The remainder of the sentence must include a noun phrase such as '' . . . the novel.''

Reactions to Chomsky's Theory

How do we look at a pattern of letters and actually recognize that word? For example, how do you manage to look at the eleven letters in the fourth word in this paragraph and realize that it says examination? How about a word with an unusual spelling, such as choir or aisle? -->Researchers have debated whether readers actually ''sound out'' words while reading a passage. Some researchers conclude that readers always sound out the words, and other researchers conclude that they never sound them out. In the current era, the debate is mostly resolved. You have probably completed enough psychology courses to guess the answer: Sometimes readers sound out the words, and sometimes they do not. In fact, the dual-route approach to reading specifies that skilled readers employ both (1) a direct-access route and (2) an indirect-access route

Reading Words: Theoretical Approaches

1. Some of the central concepts in psycholinguistics are the phoneme, the morpheme, morphology, syntax, grammar, semantics, semantic memory, and pragmatics. 2. Most psycholinguistics research focuses on English, which has simpler grammar and more variable pronunciation than most other languages. Therefore, we do not know whether the findings from English speakers can be applied to other languages. 3. According to Noam Chomsky, (a) language skills are innate in humans, (b) language is modular, and (c) the deep structure of a sentence captures its core meaning. 4. Many current psychologists emphasize the meaning of language, rather than linguistic structure. For example, the cognitive-functional approach to language emphasizes that we design our language so that listeners will pay attention to the information we want to emphasize. 5. Sentences are more difficult to understand if they (a) contain negatives, (b) use the passive voice, (c) use complex syntax, and (d) are ambiguous. 6. People typically read quite rapidly; this ''good-enough heuristic ''usually—but not always—leads us to accurate comprehension. 7. Neurolinguistic research on adults with aphasia suggests that damage in Broca's area usually leads to difficulty in producing language, whereas damage in Wernicke's area usually leads to difficulty in understanding language; however, the distinction is not clear-cut. 8. In general, the left hemisphere performs most components of language processing, such as speech perception and understanding meaning. However, the right hemisphere performs abstract language task such as creating a cohesive story. 9. Recent research using fMRIs highlights some specific brain regions in the left hemisphere that are responsible for well-defined language tasks such as distinguishing between sentences and nonwords. Also, fMRI research confirms that the right hemisphere processes subtle distinctions in meaning. 10. Recent research on mirror neurons—in the brain's motor cortex—provides information about some nonverbal aspects of communication.

Section Summary I

1. Reading is a challenging cognitive task that differs from understanding spoken language in many respects. For example, readers can control the rate of input and they can re-scan the text; furthermore, there are clear-cut boundaries between words. 2. The dual-route approach to reading argues that readers sometimes recognize a word directly from the printed letters (by direct access), and sometimes they convert the printed letters into a phonological code to access the word and its meaning (by indirect access). 3. Skilled adult readers are especially likely to use direct access. In contrast, beginning readers and less skilled adult readers are likely to sound out the words and understand meaning by indirect access. 4. According to research conducted in 14 European countries, when children learn to read languages like Spanish and German, they achieve almost perfect reading accuracy on a standardized test by the end of first grade, in contrast to only 34% of children learning to read English. 5. In teaching young students to read, the whole-word approach emphasizes visual recognition of words, whereas the phonics approach emphasizes sounding out the word. Most educators and researchers favor a combination of these approaches. 6. The whole-language approach emphasizes language meaning, as well as inte- grating reading throughout the curriculum and reading books at home. 7. Children with poor reading skills can benefit from early exposure to reading; another benefit is that preschoolers are more aware of other people's feelings if their parents read to them. Unfortunately, close to one billion adults throughout the world are illiterate.

Section Summary II

According to the constructionist view of inferences, readers usually draw inferences about the causes of events and the relationships between events. When you read a novel, for instance, you construct inferences about a character's motivations, personality, and emotions. You develop expectations about new plot developments, about the writer's point of view, and so forth. -->This perspective is called a ''constructionist view'' because readers actively construct cohesive explanations when they integrate the current information with all the relevant information from the previous parts of the text, as well as their background knowledge

The Constructionist View of Inferences

1. Psycholinguists are increasingly focusing on discourse processing, or language units that are larger than a sentence. 2. Readers try to form integrated representations of discourse by using subtle cues, mental models, long-term memory, and inferences. 3. According to the constructionist view, people actively draw inferences that connect parts of the text, even though the parts may be widely separated. 4. Inferences are especially likely when people have large working-memory capacity, excellent metacomprehension skills, and expertise in the area. People also draw higher-level inferences, beyond the level of the paragraph. 5. Educators are beginning to emphasize teaching metacomprehension skills to older children and teenagers. 6. Compared to people who are low in test anxiety, people who are high in test anxiety typically make more errors on multiple-choice tests, in summarizing textbook material, and in drawing inferences from a textbook. 7. Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is an artificial intelligence program that was designed to understand language, and it can perform some useful analyses. However, the relatively narrow scope of LSA highlights humans' competence on a wide variety of reading tasks.

Section Summary III

The area of psycholinguistics that examines the meanings of words and sentences. --> Semantic memory, refers to our organized knowledge about the world.

Semantics

In contrast to Chomsky's theory, the standard cognitive approach argues that language is not modular. Instead, it is interconnected with other cognitive processes such as working memory. According to this alternative approach, we are skilled at language because our powerful brains can master many cognitive tasks. Language is just one of those tasks, and it has the same status as tasks such as memory and problem solving.

Standard Cognitive Approach

Refers to the grammatical rules that govern how we organize words into sentences -->A more inclusive and familiar term, grammar, encompasses both morphology and syntax; it therefore examines both word structure and sentence structure

Syntax / Grammar

Chapter 6 focused on the general topic of metacognition, which is your knowledge about your cognitive processes, as well as your control of these cognitive processes. An important part of metacognition is metacomprehension, a term that refers to your thoughts about comprehension. --> Most young children do not have the appropriate cognitive skills for metacomprehension; it's challenging enough to read individual words and sentences. Furthermore, some aspects of children's reading are counterintuitive. For example, doesn't it seem logical that reading skills would improve if children tried to relate the text to nearby photos? Surprisingly, however, pictures actually reduce reading skills -->However, older children, teenagers, and adults can think about their reading and listening strategies (Lynch, 2010). For instance, when you read a book, you know that you should think about your relevant background knowledge. In addition, you consider whether you should read every sentence or else skim through the details. --> Educators are currently developing some helpful strategies. For instance, teachers can instruct students in middle school to think out loud, so that they can summarize passages, make predictions about possible outcomes, and describe puzzling sections

Teaching Metacomprehension Skills

According to the good-enough approach to language comprehension, we frequently process only part of a sentence. Consistent with Theme 2, this strategy usually works well for us. For instance, when I first saw this sentence about the burial, it seemed perfectly correct. However, I had not paid sufficient attention to bottom-up processing, so I missed the meaning of the specific word ''survivor.'' -->The authorities needed to decide where to bury the survivors. -->In Chapters 7 and 8, we discussed the term heuristic, which is a general rule that is typically accurate. Notice that the good-enough approach to language comprehension is another example of a heuristic

The ''Good-Enough'' Approach to Language Comprehension

The cognitive-functional approach emphasizes that the function of human language in everyday life is to communicate meaning to other individuals. As this name suggests, the cognitive-functional approach also emphasizes that our cognitive processes—such as attention and memory—are intertwined with our language comprehension and language production. -->Michael Tomasello points out that young children have extremely powerful cognitive skills and social-learning skills. During the years when they are mastering language, they will hear several million adult sentences. As we'll see in Chapter 13, children analyze these sentences, and they use flexible strategies to create increasingly complex language --> We structure our language in order to focus our listeners' attention on the information we want to emphasize. --> In short, the cognitive-functional approach argues that people can use language creatively, in order to communicate subtle shades of meaning.

The Cognitive-Functional Approach

John Huitema and his coauthors (1993), who studied brief stories like the one you read in Demonstration 9.7. The introductory material in this demonstration led you to believe that Dick will soon be lounging on a sunny beach. You drew this inference on line 3, and this inference is contradicted five lines later, rather than in the very next sentence. The dependent variable here was the amount of time that participants had taken to read the crucial line about Dick's travel destination. -->Tested four conditions. 1. Far/Inconsistent --> Several lines of text between the first sentence, which stated the goal, and the inconsistent statement. 2. Near/Inconsistent --> The goal and the inconsistent statement were in adjacent sentences. 3. Far/Consistent version, several lines of text separated the goal and a consistent statement (in which Dick asked for a plane ticket to Florida—a place consistent with swimming). 4. Near/Consistent --> The goal and the consistent statement were in adjacent sentences. -->The data from Huitema and his colleagues (1993) support the constructionist view. Readers clearly try to connect material within a text passage, and they consult information stored in long-term memory, in this case, the enthusiasm and sunbathing. During discourse processing, we try to construct a representation of the text that is internally consistent, even when irrelevant material intervenes

The Constructionist View of Inferences (Study)

A classic study demonstrates that people can recognize a word visually, without paying attention to the sound of that word. -->Bradshaw and Nettleton (1974) showed people pairs of words that were similar in spelling, but different in sound, such as mown-down, horse-worse, and quart-part. In one condition, the participants were instructed to read the first word silently and then pronounce the second word out loud. Now, if they had been translating the first member of a pair into sound, the sound of mown would interfere with pronouncing down out loud. However, the results showed that the participants experienced no hesitation in pronouncing the second word. This finding—and other similar studies—suggests that we can go directly to the word; we do not silently pronounce every word during normal reading.

The Direct-Access Route

Many studies suggest that we often translate visual stimuli into sound during reading. Furthermore, the sound coding may enhance working memory, providing an auditory image to assist the visual image during reading. -->A study by Luo and his coauthors (1998) provides evidence for the indirect-access approach in college students. These researchers instructed the students to read a series of pairs of words and decide whether the two words were related or unrelated in meaning. A typical pair in the experimental condition was LION-BARE. As you know, the word BARE sounds the same as the word BEAR, which is indeed semantically related to LION. The students frequently made errors on these pairs, because they incorrectly judged the two words as being semantically related. This error pattern suggests that they were silently pronouncing the word pairs when they made the judgments. In contrast, they made relatively few errors on control-condition word pairs, such as LION-BEAN. In this word pair, the second word looked like the word BEAR, although it did not sound the same. -->That is, the children who are able to identify sound patterns in a word also receive higher scores on reading achievement tests -->Adults read ''tongue twisters'' very slowly, which indicates that—at least in some circumstances—they are indeed translating the printed words into sounds

The Indirect-Access Route

Chomsky pointed out that the active and passive forms of a sentence may differ in their surface structure, even though they have similar deep structures. -->However, the active form is more basic. For example, we need to add extra words we want to create the passive form of a sentence. As you might guess, the English language uses the active voice much more often than the passive voice -->The active form is also easier to understand. For example, Ferreira and her coauthors asked participants to determine whether each sentence in a series was plausible. The participants were highly accurate in responding ''No'' to sentences in the active voice, such as, ''The man bit the dog.'' In contrast, their accuracy dropped to about 75% when the same sentences were converted to the passive voice, for example, ''The dog was bitten by the man'' -->Most current writing-style manuals recommend using the active voice.

The Passive Voice

States that readers recognize words by trying to pronounce the individual letters in the word. If your grade school teachers told you to ''sound it out'' when you stumbled on a new word, they championed the phonics approach. -->The phonics approach argues that speech sound is a necessary intermediate step in reading. It also emphasizes developing young children's awareness of phonemes. According to the research, it's clear that phonics training helps children who have reading problems. For example, a metaanalysis of 34 studies showed that phonological training programs had a major impact on children's reading skills

The Phonics Approach

The whole-word approach argues that readers can directly connect the written word—as an entire unit—with the meaning that this word represents -->emphasizes that the correspondence between the written and spoken codes in English is notoriously complex, as we saw in Demonstration 9.5. Supporters therefore argue that children should not learn to emphasize the way a word sounds. Instead, the whole-word approach encourages children to identify a word in terms of its context within a sentence. One problem, however, is that even skilled adult readers achieve only about 25% accuracy when they look at an incomplete sentence and guess which word is missing

The Whole Word Approach

Neurolinguists have been unsuccessful in identifying specific areas responsible for a variety of language-comprehension tasks. Nancy Kanwisher--> Important reason for this problem. As it happens, there are large individual differences in the anatomical structure of the language-related regions of brain. Suppose that researchers give 40 participants a very specific language task, and these reseachers gather fMRI data while the participants perform this task. The researchers then combine these data, across all participants. Individual differences are so strong that the fMRIs would not be able to identify one specific region. --> Language-Localizer Task, which compensates for the problem of individual differences. For example, Evelina Fedorenko, Michael Behr, and Nancy Kanwisher (2011) began their study of each person with several relatively complex language tasks that lasted 10 to 15 minutes. The researchers gathered fMRI data during this period, and this information allowed them to create a ''linguistic map'' that applied only to this specific person. -->Later, the researchers tested each person on a variety of language and nonlanguage tests. Then they tried to figure out whether certain parts of each person's brain might respond only to language tasks. Using this technique, Fedorenko, Behr, and Kanwisher (2011) were able to identify specific regions of the left frontal lobe that responded only to language tasks, but not to other kinds of cognitive tasks such as performing mathematical problems or using spatial working memory. In further research using this individual-differences approach, Evelina Fedorenko, Alfonso Nieto-Castan ̃o ́n, and Nancy Kanwisher (2011) were able to locate portions of the left hemisphere that process specific linguistic information. For example, one location responded more vigorously to sentences than to ''nonwords'' consisting of jumbled letters. This new approach to neurolinguistics will pinpoint additional portions of the brain that each correspond to a specific language task.

Using the fMRI method to study language in the left hemisphere --> Language localizer task

Plays important role in language comprehension, even though the left hemisphere receives most of the media publicity -->As Gernsbacher and Robertson emphasize, when a series of sentences uses the word ''The,'' these sentences seem to create a cohesive story in which the grandmother, the child, and other family members are connected with each other. In contrast, the string of sentences with the word ''A'' seems disconnected; the characters don't seem like a cohesive unit. Impressively, the right hemisphere manages to respond differently to connected language than to disconnected language.

Using the fMRI method to study language in the right hemisphere

Reading instruction should emphasize meaning, and it should be enjoyable, to increase children's enthusiasm about learning to read. Children should read interesting stories and experiment with writing before they are expert spellers. They also need to use reading throughout their classroom experiences -->In addition, children need to have books that they can read outside of school because even children with limited reading skills can benefit from leisure reading --> Social benefits associated with reading

Whole-Language Approach