Language Chapter 11 Cognitive Psychology

universality of language

- deaf children invent sign language that is all their own - all humans with normal capacities develop a language and learn to follow its complex rules - language is universal across cultures - language development is similar across cultures - languages are "unique but the same" - different words, sounds, and rules - all have nouns, verbs, negatives, questions, past/ present tense

variable word pronunciation

- didjoo? gonna - use context to understand words with unfamiliar pronunciations

Four major concerns of psycholinguistics

1. Comprehension - How do people understand spoken language? 2. Speech production - How do people produce language, included both mental and physical processes. 3. Representation - How is language represented in the mind? 4. Acquisition - How do people learn language?

sentences create context for words that make it possible too...

1. deal with eh variability of word pronunciations 2. perceive individual words in a continuous stream of speech 3. determine the meanings of ambiguous words

our ability to hear and understand spoken words is affected by

1. how frequently we have encountered a word in the past 2. the context in which a words appears 3. our knowledge of statistical regularities of our language 4. our knowledge of word meanings

heuristics properties

1. on the postitive side they are fast, which is important for language, which occurs at 200 words per minute 2. on the negative side they sometimes result in the wrong decision

influence of word meaning

1. the dog buried in the sand was hidden 2. the treasure buried in the sand was hidden Why does one of these lead to the wrong conclusion?

influence of memory load and prior experience with language

1. the senator who spotted the reporter shouted 2. the senator who the reporter spotted shouted The second one is harder to read because it has object-relative construction and requires more of the readers memory and is more complicated. Subject-relative constructions are 65% of relative cause constructions.

heuristics

A "rule of thumb" that provides a best-guess solution to a problem.

lexical decision task

A procedure in which a person is asked to decide as quickly as possible whether a particular stimulus is a word or a nonword.

garden path sentences

A sentence in which the meaning that seems to be implied at the beginning of the sentence turns out to be incorrect, based on information that is presented later in the sentence. Meaning is different in the end.

temporary ambiguity

A situation in which the meaning of a sentence, based on its initial words, is ambiguous because a number of meanings are possible, depending on how the sentence unfolds. The meaning is clear at the end. "Cast iron sinks quickly rust" is an example of a sentence that creates temporary ambiguity.

causal inference

An inference that results in the conclusion that the events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous clause or sentence.

physiology of simulations

Approximately the same areas of the cortex are activated by actual movements and by reading related action words The activation is more extensive for actual movements

studying language in cognitive psychology

B.F Skinner 1957 (Verbal Behavior) Language is learned through reinforcement Noam Chomsky 1957 (Syntactic Structures) Human language is genetic, underlying basis of all language is similar, children produce sentences they have never heard and that have never been reinforced

syntactic priming

Hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a statement that follows will be produced with the same construction by another person, Reduces computational load in conversation.

given-new contract

In a conversation, a speaker should construct sentences so that they contain both given information (information that the listener already knows) and new information (information that the listener is hearing for the first time).

visual world paradigm

In experiments on language processing, determining how subjects are processing information in a scene as they respond to specific instructions related to the scene.

late closure

In parsing, when a person encounters a new word, the parser assumes that this word is part of the current phrase.

Robert Stanfield and Rolf Zwaan 2001, situation models

Presented two sentences: "He hammered the nail into the wall" and "He hammered the nail into the floor." followed with a matching and un-matching picture. There was a faster response when the picture matched the sentence more closely.

lexical priming

Priming that involves the meaning of words. For example, rose would prime flower, because their meanings are related - people briefly access all meanings of a word before relying on context to determine accurate meaning

parsing

The mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases. The way a sentence is parsed determines its meaning.

word frequency effect

The phenomenon of faster reading time for high-frequency words than for low-frequency words.

speech segmentation

The process of perceiving individual words within the continuous flow of the speech signal, even though there are no silences between spoken words. - context - understanding meaning - understanding of sounds and syntactic rules - statistical learning

word frequency

The relative usage of words in a particular language. For example, in English, home has higher word frequency than hike.

coherence

The representation of a text or story in a reader's mind so that information in one part of the text or story is related to information in another part.

influence of story context

The sentence "The horse race past the barn fell" is strange out of context. "One horse raced along the garden path and the other horse raced past the barn. The horse race past the barn fell"

Aniruddh Patel 1998, music

There was three keys in the music: one that fit well(A), one that did not fit as well(B), and a distant key that fit less well(C). A was deemed acceptable 80% of the time, B 49%, C 28%. Similar to the previous ERP experiment, A had no P500 response, but the response was more active for B and C (much more for C). When listening to music we have expectations on what is going to happen next.

Holly Branigan 2000

Two people had cards in front of them and had to describe the cards to a person across a screen. 78% of the trails the description the person gave matched the priming statement. Speakers are sensitive to the linguistic behavior of other speakers and adjust their behavior to match.

lexical ambiguity

When a word can have more than one meaning. For example, bug can mean an insect, a listening device, or to annoy.

congenital amusia

a condition present at birth, in which people have problems with music perception, including tasks such as discriminating between simple melodies or recognizing common tunes

situational model

a mental representation of what a text is about

garden path model of parsing

a model of parsing that emphasizes syntactic principles as a major determinate of parsing - listeners use heuristics (rules) to group words into phrases -grammatical structure of sentence determine parsing - late closure: parser assumes new word is part of the current phrase

lexicon

a person's knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words all words a person understands

subject- relative construction

a sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is also the subject in the embedded clause, as in the sentence, the senator who spotted the reporter shouted

object-relative construction

a sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is the object in the emedded clause as in this sentence. The senator who the reporter spotted shouted

narrative

a story that progresses from one event to another

referential communication task

a task in which two people are exchanging information in a conversation when this information involves reference- identifying something by naming or describing it

constraint-based approach to parsing

an approach to parsing that proposes that semantics, syntax, story context, memory load (subject relative and object relative sentence construction), and other factors operate simultaneously to determine parsing

instrument inference

an inference about tools or methods that occurs while reading text or listening to speech

anaphoric inference

an inference that connects an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence

Information contained in the words of a sentence...

and in the context within the sentence occurs, is used to make prediction about how the sentence should be parsed

nonverbal communication

being able to interpret and react to the persons gestures, facial expressions, tones of voice, and other cues to meaning

Broca's aphasia

condition resulting from damage to Broca's area, causing the affected person to be unable to speak fluently, to mispronounce words, and to speak haltingly

common ground

consider not only providing given and new information but also taken into account the knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions that the other person brings to the conversation.

Olaf Hauk 2004

found a link between movement, action words, and brain activity with an fMRI. The cortex lights up both from actual movement and reading the action words.

Susan Haviland and Herbert Clark 1974, given-new contract

found that "We checked the picnic supplies. The beer was warm" is harder to understand than "We got some beer out of the trunk. The beer was warm."

John Bransford and Marcia Johnson 1973, inference

had participants read passages and then tested them to determine what they remembered. They often added things that were not in the story, created by inference

return of the tonic

in a musical composition, coming back to the tonic note that was a the begging of the composition.

inferences

in language, the process by which readers create information that is not explicitly stated in the text

language

is a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences

language and music

language combines words and music combines tones to create structured sequences that unfold over time.

Mathew Traxler 2012

many words have multiple meanings, but these meanings are not all created equal. Competition between equally likely meanings of a word with balanced dominance results in slow access. Activation of only the most frequent meaning of a word with biased dominance results in fast access. (If there is context before a word with biased dominance). Activation of both the less frequent and most frequent meaning results in slow access. Activation of only the most frequent meaning of fast access.

Ross Metusalem 2012 situation models

measured event related potential as participants were reading a story. There is a bigger reaction from the N400 wave when a word does not fit into context. However when the word was event-related (guitar) it got less of a reaction compared to event-unrelated (barn). "The musicians walked out onto the (guitar or barn).

Keith Rayner and Susan Duffy 1986, reading fixations and gazes

measured eye movements and the durations of fixations while reading. The average frequencies were 5.1 times per million for the low-frequency words and 122.3 times per million for the high-frequency words. The duration of the first fixation for the low-frequency words was 37 msec longer than high-frequency words. Gaze duration for low-frequency words was 87 msec longer than high-frequency words.

situation model

mental representation of what a text is about Represent events as if experiencing the situation Point of view of protagonist

syntactic coordination

process by which people use similar grammatical constructions when having a conversation

Gerry Altmann and Yuki Kamide 1999, predictions

showed that participants were making predictions as they were reading a sentence by measuring their eye movements. When shown a boy in a play room and presented with the sentence "The boy will eat..." their eyes moved towards the cake, the only edible thing in the room.

Michael Tanenhaus 1979, lexical priming

showed that people briefly access multiple meanings of ambiguous words before the effect of context takes over. They found this using lexical priming in two conditions: noun-noun (she held a rose) and verb-noun (they all rose). When the two words were related (ex. rose and flower) there was a 37 msec faster response. There was a 20 msec faster response for verb-noun. However when a 200 msec delay was applied priming occurred for noun-noun, but was lost for noun-verb.

Irwin Pollack and J.M Pickett 1964, words isolation

showed that words are more difficult to understand when taken out of context and presented alone. When participants were presented with recordings of single words taken out their own conversations they could identify only half the words, even though they were listening to their own voices!

meaning dominance

some meanings of words occur more frequently than others

Patel 2008, music and language overlap

studied people with Broca's aphasia giving them: A. a language task that involved understanding syntactically complex sentences. B. A music task that involved detecting the off-key chords in a sequence of chords. There is a connection between language and music, but the deficits on the music task were too small compared to the language task.

entrainment

synchronization between partners in a conversation. This can include gestures speaking rate, body position, pronunciation, and grammatical structure

Robert Slevc 2016

tested a 64 year old women with Broca's aphasia. She had trouble understanding complex sentences and had trouble putting words together for a meaningful though, but was able to detect out-of-key chords in sequences.

Influence of the scene context

tested by Michael Tanenhaus 1995 using visual world paradigm. Participants were shown two towels, one towel had an apple on top, and a box. Participants were told "Place the apple on the towel in the box" They looked to the other towel before the box. With the ambiguous sentence participants looked at the towel 55% of the time. When there were two apples (one not on a towel), participants eyes only moved to the towel 10% of the time. Linguistic and nonlinguistic information used simultaneously.

theory of mind

the ability to understand what others think feel or believe

psycholinguistics

the field concerned with the psychological study of language. Discover psychological process by which humans acquire and process language: comprehension, speech production, representation, and acquisition.

hierarchical nature of language

the idea that language consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units. For example, words can be combined to create phrases, which in turn can create sentences, which themselves can be come components of a story.

rule based nature of language

the idea that there are rules in a language that specify the permissible ways for arranging words and phrases

tonic

the key of a musical composition. The tonic note is the first note of a scale in a particular key.

semantics

the meaning of language: words and sentences

lexical semantics

the meaning of words- each word has one or more meanings

prosody

the pattern of intonation and rhythm in spoken language, often creates emotion in spoken language (speakers soaring oratory)

syntax

the rules for combing words into sentences

situation model and movement

the situational model approach explains that a reader stimulates the motor characteristics of the objects in a story. A story that involves movement will result in stimulation of this movement as the person is comprehending the story.

other skills for effective communication

theory of mind and nonverbal communication

P. Stellman and Susan Brenna 1993, referential communication task

two partners (director and matcher) had identical sets of 12 cards with pictures of abstract geometrical images. A arranged the cards in a specific order and B task was to arrange the cards in the same order, but B could not see A cards. They had to determine the identity of each card through conversation. As the trails go on describing the cards get shorter, there is now a common ground

balanced dominance

when a word has more than one meaning and all meanings are equally likely

biased dominance

when a word has more than one meaning and one meaning is more likely