Chapter 11: Language

categorical perception (Rosch)

stimuli in same categories are more difficult to discriminate from one another than stimuli in two different categories.

lexical ambiguity

the fact that a word can have more than one meaning. The context of the sentence is used to determine which definition applies.

prosody

the pattern of intonation and rhythm in spoken language

speech segmentation

the perception of individual words even though there are often no pauses between words.

How can garden path sentences be related to prediction?

Our predictions lead us down a garden path. They help us deal with the rapid pace of language. They can influence eye movements.

What are some of the factors that help us achieve speech segmentation?

Past experience with words, the word's context, statistical properties of language, and knowledge of the meanings of words help solve this problem.

herbert clark

says language should only be studied in natural studies. From this, grounding and common ground were established in conversations.

Describe the constraint-based approach to parsing. How does it differ from the garden path approach?

semantics, syntax, and other factors operate simultaneously to determine parsing (i.e. story context, scene context, memory load and prior experience with language)

What is the evidence that context helps people deal with the variability of word pronunciation?

The pronunciation of words is variable (i.e. accents), which can make it difficult to perceive words when they are heard out of context.

over-generalization reveals what about language?

Can't be copied

spoonerisms

changing first sound in two words ("top man" becomes "mop tan").

Two mechanisms proposed to explain parsing are

(1)the garden path model and (2)the constraint-based approach.

wernicke's aphasia

Impairs understanding language of others AND affects how they speak. They show fluid speech but it doesn't make sense.

Describe research on cursing

1. All languages have them 2. They express emotions 3. Gender diffs (more in men>women) 4. There are different contexts for appropriate use of them 5. Automaticity; retained even with loss of language (old people curse more and remember those from their youth) 6. Acquisition; starts at childhood with "poopy face", girls>boys before school starts and then flips around. 7. Classified into anticipation and exchange. They all happen within a phrase - could influence parsing.

properties of language

1. Communicative; transmitting information 2. Arbitrary; ambiguous to interpretation 3. Dynamic; development of vocabulary and grammar evolves over eras 4. Structured; syntax matters in English, not all languages 5. Generative; Chomsky - generate and understand sentences never spoken or heard before (rather than reinforcement); infinity-like. 6. Displacement - refers to things other than the present 7. Hierarchical; Consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units (i.e. words->phrases)

Properties of Ape Language

1. Communicative? Yes 2. Arbitrary? Yes 3. Dynamic? Not really; no evolving 4. Structured? Probably not; not tested for since their sentences are too short to learn 5. Generative? Not really; talk about a limited range of topics (i.e. food), and no tepmoral displacement

Describe Branigan's experiment

1. Describe the pictures in their card-filled box to other participants 2. Choose cards from the rest on the table that matched the other participant's description, placing thse in the empty box What's being manipualted: How the confedereate talks about the pictures. 1. Prepositional object; "the girl gave the book to the boy" 2. Double object; "the girl gave the boy the book" The result showed that if they are primed with one description, they will produce in the same grammatical construction.

What is syntactic coordination? Describe the syntactic priming experiment that was used to demonstrate syntactic coordination.

1. How people's grammatical constructions become coordinated. 2. Two people converse, and you determine who's grammatical construction is making the other conform. In Branigan's experiment, they play a card game (like battleship). BUT, the way that the participant subsequently speaks usually conforms to how the confederate speaks.

Wada test

1. Inject barbiturate (anesthetic) into carotid artery 2. Lift hands and count 3. Opposite hand drops, counting stops. The hemisphere that contains the language ability is where they can continue counting when the other is anesthetized.

How is language learned?

1. Innate (Chomksy and Pinker); generative effect (i..e knows past tense). 2. Past tense learned by listening 3. Overgeneralization errors 4. irregular past-tense verbs (i.e. singed versus sang)

language and the brain

1. Lateralization; left hemisphere involved in producing (Broca's) and comprehending (Wernicke's) language. The right hemisphere processes complex spatial relationships 2. Wada test finds which hemisphere hold language

Levels of studying language

1. Phonology; sound units (phonemes) - sounds come from oral structures. Different languages use different phonemes. 2. Morphology; smallest unit of meaning (morpheme). Not the same as phonemes. 3. Syntax; the structure of the language (grammar - structure and order rules for putting sentences together and is learned implicitly). 4. Semantics - meaning of sentences. Influenced by grammar. 5. Pragmatics - social and contextual rules for language

Describe the nature (innate) view of language development

1. Pidgin languages; when parts of two or more languages are combined in a simplified structure and vocabulary 2. Creole language; where second-generation pidgin language expands the vocabulary and grammar of their language to become a new language. 3. Predisposition to learn language; infants babble all phonemes before a certain age, crticial period (recall Jeanie - deprived of language, interactions, didn't learn grammar, could convey intent but not the rules) 4. Second language acquisition - being over 11 yo means you can learn faster but the acquisition (propensity) is slower. As well, different brain region is active compared to learning first language. 5. Recovery from aphasia depends on age (100% recovery before 11 yo)

Commonalities in cursing

1. Religious 2. Taboo 3. Superstition

The process of accessing the meaning of a word is complicated and is influenced by multiple factors. What are these?

1. Word frequency determines how long it takes to process its meaning. 2. For words with multiple meanings, the context of the sentence influences which meaning we access. 3. Accessing the correct meaning of a word depends on both the word's frequency and, for words with more than one meaning, a combination of meaning dominance and context.

What part of the brain does language occupy for infants just learning language?

1. language areas are diffuse 2. become more adult-like by age 4 or 5

What is common ground? How is it established in a conversation?

1. the mental knowledge and beliefs shared among conversational parties - where both understand the content of the conversation. 2. Established (studied with referential communication task) by knowing what each other knows. 3. Makes conversations flow much more smoothly - entrainment

critical period of learning grammar is what?

11 years old.

principle of minimal attachment/late closure

A heuristic that says to attach each new word to an existing group such that each new word is added to the current phrase for as long as possible. When I pass + the + ball. Reveals how we construct the syntax as we hear words

situational model

A mental representation of what a text is about as we read - people represent the situation in a story in terms of the people, objects, locations, and events that are being described in the story.

garden path sentence

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. This leads us to backtrack to find the correct grouping. Illustrates temporal ambiguity

lexicon

All the words a person knows (mental dictionary)

what is unique about baby babbling?

Babbling reflects phonemes of all languages and when they grow, they reflect the native language.

broca's area

Controls language expression - an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech.

How is language initially acquired?

Copying what's heard

inferences

Determining what the text means by using our knowledge to go beyond the information provided by the text.

Regier et al found what (relating language and cognition)

Different languages have similar choice for best colour example - cluster. The overlap is the same between speakers of different languages.

Describe the study by Roberson et al.

Dividing the colour spectrum varies by language. Shows that whether your language has cateogircal names for different shades affects how you identify them.

What is coherence?

Enables us to understand stories. It is how well ideas are connected. 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 and is largely determined by inference

What is parsing?

Grouping words together according to their syntactic rules. The way a sentence is parsed determines its meaning.

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.

What part of the brain does language occupy for people who are deaf or hearing-impaired

If learned as a child, same patterns as native language in hearing adults.

Why has the need to communicate been called universal?

Language occurs wherever there are people (i.e. in deaf children who create sign language, in all cultures and similar development in them, have similar systems to communicate certain aspects)

lexical priming

Priming that involves the meaning of words. Typically occurs when a word is followed by another word with a similar meaning—for example, when presenting the word ant before the word bug causes a person to respond faster to the word bug than if ant had not preceded it.

What part of the brain does language occupy for bilinguals who learn their second language before the critical period?

Same as for their native language

What are some similarities and differences between music and language?

Similarities: There is a close relation between song and speech, music and language both cause emotion via prosody, and both consist of organized sequences. Differences: They create emotions in different ways (music through sounds that have no meaning and language with meaningful words), and rules for combining tones and words are different. The most important difference is based on the fact that words have meanings.

Once common ground is established, what happens?

Synchronization between the people in the conversation (entrainment; gestures speaking rate, body position, pronunciation, and grammatical structure.), as demonstrated by syntactic coordination (using similar grammatical structure)

What is psycholinguistics?

The field concerned with the psychological study of language; the psychological processes by which humans acquire and process language. Focuses on comprehension, representation, production, and acquisition.

Effects of incorrect parsing

The way in which we initially interpret a sentence will influence processing later on (think of priming).

If music and language both activate the same brain area, can we say with certainty that they share neural mechanisms?

There is evidence that music and language activation can occur within an area but involve different neural networks

What is the given-new contract?

a speaker should construct sentences so that they include two kinds of information: (1)given information—information that the listener already knows; and (2)new information—information that the listener is hearing for the first time New then becomes the given information. Think of transition words in long paragraphs.

language

a system of communication that uses sounds or symbols that enable us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences. It is hierarchical, creative, rule-based.

Describe the different types of inference that help achieve coherence.

anaphoric; an inference that connects an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence. instrument; An inference about tools or methods causal; 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.

wernicke's area

controls language reception - a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe

semantic coordination

conversations go more smoothly if participants have shared knowledge

Describe the garden path model of parsing.

emphasizes how rules such as heuristics and syntactic mechanisms such as late closure determine how a sentence is parsed.

Broca's aphasia

impaired ability to speak. There is a lot of halting, where complete sentences cannot be spoken.

aphasia

impairment of language

low coherence would mean

jumping around a lot

linguistic relativity (looser version)

language INFLUENCES thinking - language differences in cultures are associated with cultural differences in thinking. More similar languages conceptualize more similarily.

Sapir-Whof hypothesis

language influences concepts/thoughts that we have. Consists of linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity

linguistic determinism (stronger/extreme version/way)

language may DETERMINE our thinking patterns - the way we think about and view the world. Need a word for a concept.

What is meaning dominance? Biased dominance? Balanced dominance?

meaning dominance; the relative frequency of the meanings of ambiguous words. biased dominance; when a word has more than one meaning, and one meaning is more likely. balanced dominance; When a word has more than one meaning and all meanings are equally likely. The type of dominance, combined with the word's context, influences which meaning is accessed.

What part of the brain does language occupy for bilinguals who learn their second language as adults?

more diffuse and do not overlap

Gricean maxims of cooperative conversation

pragmatic rules of conversation, including moderation of quantity (not too much or to little), quality (truthful), relation (related to what you communicate), and manner (clear voice)

What is the tonic? What does return to the tonic say about expectation in music?

tonic; The key of a musical composition return to tonic; In a musical composition, coming back to the tonic note that was at the beginning of the composition. It says that the way in which the notes are organized around a key set's an expectation for what a song will be like.

grounding

where the responder understands what the questionnaire meant

How does word frequency affect our processing of words? Describe the eye movement experiment that illustrates an effect of word frequency.

word frequency effect; the faster response (RT) to high-frequency words in the lexical decision task and by measuring eye movements (longer fixations and lower-frequency words). This is related to our ability to access their meaning.