PSY1004 Chp 11 Language
Example of the operation of syntax is word order:
The sentence "The cat chased the bird" follows the rules of English syntax, but "Cat bird the chased" does not.
Definition of phonemes
The shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word.
While phonemes refer to sounds, morphemes refer to meanings. Morphemes are
The smallest unit of language that has a definable meaning or a grammatical function. For example, truck consists of a number of phonemes but only one morpheme, because none of the components that create the word truck means anything.
How did Warren (1970) demonstrated this effect? (Phonemic Restoration Effect)
Warren (1970) demonstrated this effect by having participants listen to a recording of the sentence "The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city." Warren replaced the first /s/ in "legislatures" with the sound of a cough and asked his participants to indicate where in the sentence the cough occurred (Figure 11.1).
Our focus on this chapter (Chp11) Studying language
We will refer back to the discoveries of the Wernicke and Broca area but our focus now is behavioural and cognitive research, starting in the 1950s
Finally, consider the following sentence in which the context indicates the more frequent meaning of tin: The miners went under the mountain to look for tin. (control word: gold) In this example, only the dominant meaning of tin is activated, so tin is read rapidly (Figure 11.5d).
What these results mean is that the process of accessing the meaning of a word is complicated and is influenced by multiple factors. First, the frequency of a word determines how long it takes to process its meaning. Second, the context of the sentence determines which meaning we access, if a word has more than one meaning. Finally, our ability to access 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. (See Table 11.2.)
Reicher's Word Superiority Effect
When Reicher's participants were asked to choose which of the two letters they had seen in the original stimulus, they did so more quickly and accurately when the letter had been part of a word, as in Figure 11.2a, than when the letter had been presented alone, as in Figure 11.2b, or as part of a non-word, as in Figure 11.2c (Reicher, 1969). This more rapid processing of letters within a word is the word superiority effect. The word superiority effect shows that letters in words are not processed one by one but that each letter is affected by the context within which it appears. Just as context affects how we hear phonemes and words in spoken sentences, context affects how we see letters in printed words. Table 11.1 summarizes the effects of context on perceiving phonemes, words and letters.
Phonemes Compounds of Words
When you say words, you produce sounds called a phoneme.
Human language goes beyond a series of fixed signals that transmit a single message such as "feed me," "danger," or "go that way for flowers." Human language provides a way of a
arranging a sequence of signals—sounds for spoken language, letters and written words for written language, and physical signs for sign language—to transmit information from one person to another. This could range from the simple and commonplace ("My car is over there") to messages that have never been previously written or uttered in the entire history of the world ("My trip with Julie, my cousin from France who lost her job in February, started on Christmas Day").
One way this has been demonstrated is through the lexical decision task, introduced in Chapter 9. In this task, participants are a
asked to read stimuli and decide whether they are words or non-words, as illustrated in the following demonstration.
In other cases, a word has more than one meaning but the meanings are equally likely. For example, cast (members of a play) and cast (plaster cast) are equally likely. When a word has more than one meaning but the meanings have about the same dominance, these words have
balanced dominance
When a word has two possible meanings, one of which is more likely than the other, the words have _____ dominance
biased Correct. When a word has two possible meanings, one of which is more likely than the other, the words have biased dominance.
When words have two or more meanings with different dominances, as in the case of tin, these words have
biased dominance.
The reason phonemes and morphemes are important is because they are
building blocks of words. But the idea that printing or writing can represent sounds, and that these sounds can create meanings, is just the beginning of language. Spoken language, in our everyday experience, involves perceiving sounds and assigning meanings to them. As we will now see, there is a close relationship between how we perceive the sounds of a language and the meanings that these sounds create.
A recent study by Brysbaert et al. (2016), analyzing data from an online vocabulary test (http://vocabulary.ugent.be/) taken by more than 220,000 individuals, revealed that
by the age of 20, native English speakers know about 42,000 words on average. By the age of 60, this number has risen to 48,200. This means that as adults age, they still add about one new word to their vocabulary every two days. It also suggests that once we know a word we will probably not forget it.
Error of syntax example
changing the sentence to "The cats won't eating" because the grammar is not correct.
The hierarchical nature of language means that it
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 become components of a story.
Neuropsychology, the study of brain-damaged patients, has provided evidence that syntax and semantics are processed in
different areas of the brain.
. When we listen to an unfamiliar foreign language, it is often
difficult to distinguish one word from the next, but if we know a language, individual words stand out. This observation illustrates that knowing the meanings of words helps us perceive them Perhaps you have had the experience of hearing individual words that you happen to know in a foreign language seem to "pop out" from what appears to be an otherwise continuous stream of speech.
Modern research however, has demonstrated that the dissociation between these brain areas is not exactly about production versus comprehension, but about syntax versus semantics. More specifically, as
discussed below, most contemporary researchers link Broca's area to syntax (the structure of sentences) and Wernicke's area to semantics (understanding meaning).
The rule-based nature of language means that these components can
e arranged in certain ways ("What is my cat saying?" is permissible in English), but not in other ways ("Cat my saying is what?" is not a proper English sentence).
We have been discussing how context helps us perceive the sounds of spoken language. Context also plays a role in perceiving written letters. The word superiority effect refers to
finding that letters are easier to recognize when they are contained in a word than when they appear alone or are contained in a non-word. Reicher first demonstrated this effect in 1969 using the following procedure.
Language makes it possible to create new and unique sentences because it has a structure that is ______________ and ______________.
hierarchical, governed by rules Correct. Language makes it possible to create new and unique sentences because it has a structure that is hierarchical and governed by rules.
Some words occur more frequently than others in a particular language. For example, in English,
home occurs 547 times per million words, and hike occurs only four times per million words.
What does dissociation mean?
how your mind handles information
Eye Movements in Reading In Chapter 4, we considered how people move their eyes from one place to another when looking at a scene, and in Chapter 10 we discussed the method of eye movement recording (or eye tracking) in more detail in the context of visual imagery (see Method box ). The monitoring of eye movements, fixations and saccades is also a very informative and important research tool in language research as it enables us
increase our understanding of the mental processes that occur when someone is reading (Rayner, 1998; 2009). For example, if a person pauses for a long time on a particular word, we can infer that he or she is taking longer to perceive that word or to process its meaning (Brown-Schmidt and Hanna, 2011; Rayner and Duffy, 1986). In the example of Figure 11.3 this is the case for the word "crocodiles," which receives most fixations, and together these add up to the longest total fixation time. Also, the order in which fixations occur provide interesting information, suggesting, among other things, that we sometimes double check on what we have read before. The beauty of using eye tracking methods to study reading is that it does not disturb the natural reading process.
We will now describe some of the factors that influence how we understand the meanings of words. We have noted that people have lexicons—words they know the meaning of—of about 42,000 to 50,000 words. While this number is impressive, we need to go beyond counting how many words we know. The first step in doing this is to determine how words are used in a particular language. This
is done by collecting a large representative sample of utterances or written text from a particular language. This sample, which is called a corpus of a language, indicates the frequency with which different words are used and the frequency of different meanings and grammatical constructions in that language (Roland, Dick & Elman, 2007). Basically, a corpus reflects how people typically use their language.
Speech segmentation is aided by a number of factors, of which
knowledge of the specific language concerned is the most important one.
Richard is completing a _____ task in which he must read a list of words and non-words and indicate which of the stimuli are actually words. Based on the _____ effect, it would be expected that he would make decisions more quickly when the "real" words are relatively common ones.
lexical decision; word frequency Feedback Correct. In a lexical decision task, the participant must identify words from a list of words and plausibly-constructed non-words. Decisions are made more quickly when the actual words are relatively common, which is consistent with the word frequency effect.
Lexical ambiguity refers to the existence of
multiple meanings for a single word. Correct. Lexical ambiguity refers to the existence of multiple meanings for a single word.
How Percieving Sounds and Letters is Affected by Meaning What is the phonemic restoration effect?
occurs when phonemes are perceived in speech when the sound of the phoneme is covered up by an extraneous noise.
The corpus is interesting to language researchers because a lot of what goes on during language comprehension can be traced to prediction. That is, we often predict what words, sentences or passages mean based on what we know about the properties of our language. In this context, think back to Chapter 3, in which we discussed how things that occur regularly in our environment influence our perception, or to Chapter 8, in which we discussed how our memories are influenced by our knowledge of the world. Building on the idea that our experience with the environment influences cognition, we will now show
our ability to perceive written words depends on how frequently they appear in our lexicon.
In the last section, we focused on perception
our ability to sense and identify sounds or see letters.
Rayner, Liersedge, White and Vergilino-Perez (2003) measured
participants' eye movements as they read sentences that contained either a high- or a low-frequency target word. For example, the sentence "Sam wore the horrid coat though his pretty girlfriend complained" contains the high-frequency target word pretty. The other version of the sentence was exactly the same, but with the high-frequency word pretty replaced by the low-frequency word demure. The results, shown in Figure 11.4, indicate that readers looked at low-frequency words (such as demure) about 40 ms longer than high-frequency words (such as pretty). One reason for this result could be that the readers needed more time to access the meaning of the low-frequency words. The word frequency effect, therefore, demonstrates how our past experience with words influences our ability to access their meaning. Kliegl, Grabner, Rolfs, and Engbert (2004) found a similar effect in German readers, while they also showed that there is a negative relationship between word frequency and the probability that a word is being fixated with first reading. In other words, the higher the frequency of the word the more likely it will be skipped during reading.
The smallest unit of language that has a definable meaning or grammatical function is a
phoneme Correct. A phoneme is the smallest unit of language that has a definable meaning or grammatical function.
The two smallest units of language are Components of Words
phonemes, which refer to sounds, and morphemes, which refer to meanings.
Even when a signal is weak, one is often able to understand static-obscured words, in part because of the _____ effect.
phonemic restoration Correct. The phonemic restoration effect occurs when phonemes are perceived in speech when the sound of the phoneme is covered up by an extraneous noise.
It could be argued however, that this definition doesn't go far enough, because it conceivably could include some forms of animal communication. Cats "meow" when their food dish is empty; monkeys have a repertoire of "calls" that stand for things such as "danger" or "greeting"; bees perform a "waggle dance" at the hive to indicate the location of flowers. Although there is some evidence that chimpanzees may be able to use language in a way similar to humans, most animal communication lacks the
properties of human language. So, what are the properties that make human language unique?
When taken out of context and presented alone, words become much more difficult to understand, because of people's often sloppy pronunciation in conversational speech. Pollack and Pickett (1964) demonstrated this by
recording the conversations of participants who sat in a room waiting for the experiment to begin. When the same participants were then presented with recordings of single words taken out of their own conversations, they could identify only half the words, even though they were listening to their own voices! The fact that they were able to identify words as they were talking to each other, but couldn't identify the same words when the words were isolated, illustrates that the ability to perceive words in conversations is aided by the context provided by the words and sentences that make up the conversation.
What did Chomsky's disagreement with behaviourism led him to publish? Studying language
scathing review of Skinner's Verbal Behaviour in 1959 (see also Chapter 1). In this review, he presented arguments against the behaviourist idea that language can be explained in terms of reinforcements and without reference to the mind. One of Chomsky's most persuasive arguments was that as children learn language, they produce sentences that they have never heard before and that have never been reinforced. (A classic example of a sentence that has been created by many children and that is unlikely to have been taught or reinforced by their parents is "I hate you, Mummy.") Chomsky's criticism of behaviourism was an important event in the cognitive revolution and began changing the focus of the young discipline of psycholinguistics, the field concerned with the psychological study of language.
To understand how words create the meaning of a sentence, we first need to distinguish between two properties of sentences:
semantics and syntax.
Components of Words The words on this page are made up of letters, but the units of language are defined not in terms of letters, but by
sounds and meanings.
Our ability to perceive individual words even though there are often no pauses between words in the sound signal is called
speech segmentation
The goal of psycholinguistics is to discover Studying language
the psychological processes by which humans acquire and process language (Clark and Van der Wege, 2002; Gleason and Ratner, 1998; Miller, 1965)
The finding that letters are easier to recognize when they are contained in a word than when they appear alone or contained in a non-word has been referred to as
the word superiority effect. Correct. The finding that letters are easier to recognize when they are contained in a word than when they appear alone or contained in a non-word has been referred to as the word superiority effect.
When Broca tested patients who had suffered strokes that damaged their frontal lobe, he found that
their speech was slow and laboured and often had jumbled sentence structure. Here is an example of the speech of a present-day patient, who is attempting to describe when he had his stroke, which occurred when he was in a hot tub:
This difference between biased and balanced dominance influences the
way people access the meanings of words as they read them. This has been demonstrated with eye tracking experiments in which participants read sentences with ambiguous (multiple meaning) or control words (just one meaning).
Estimates of how many words people know vary considerably however, ranging from 9,800 - 50,000. This variability is partly due to Perceiving Phonemes, Words and Letters
what researchers consider to be separate words (e.g., do 'display' and 'displayed' count as one or two?) and what task has been used to test someone's vocabulary (e.g., familiarity judgements versus providing descriptions or synonyms) (Brysbaert, Stevens, Mandera, & Keuleers, 2016) Other factors that contribute to variability in the size of our lexicon, which is a person's knowledge of what words mean, how they sound and how they are used in relation to other words, are age and education.
These two properties—a hierarchical structure and rules—endow humans
with the ability to go far beyond the fixed calls and signs of animals to communicate whatever we want to express.
The frequency with which a word appears in a language is called
word frequency
Language Properties B.F Skinner and N Chomsky Lecture
"Every intelligible sentence conforms - not only to the roles of its particular language- but to a universal grammar that encompasses all language" - Chomsky Two books published in 1957 new way of thinking about language First book by skinner (big component of behaviourism, Skinner box) - language was just any other behaviour we learn in reinforcement. Relation between symbol (sound/letter)to a reward. If sentence reinforced then likely to be repeated later on. Talk about creativity of language, some sentences that are unlike to be reinforced and still say it e.g child saying "I hate you Daddy" - unlike Daddy reinforced that sentence but child still comes up with it. Chomsky published different book in same year. This is the quote he said (above) Universal grammar refers to genetic ability to construct language. This is independent of specific languages. We all have the ability to produce and understand language across the globe. Acquired later on in development in babies is specific syntax structure . Also coined new field of psycholinguistics (study psychological aspects of language) We know : - very regularly structured (syntax) (Structured language, specific grammar when you learn a language ) - Structured at multiple levels - sound , words , phrases, sentences , stories. (Represents in phrase structure tree by psycholinguistics)
Language definition lecture
"Language is a mechanism by which thoughts are transformed into sentences" - William Wundt A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas and experiences. -Book Second def: Effectively similar but a little bit fuller Raises Qs as to what the mental representation is of language- is it a thought (want to express) that is extended into a different code? Or is language the code itself? Two features of language - follow rapid time corse (very quick) - People has vast storage capacity of words (depends on what you read around 50,000-75,000 in lexicon - storage system for words) The important function of our larynx - vocal tract enables you to speak. Larynx in humans in far lower down than it is in primates. Primates can sign or use symbols to communicate but can't speak. Larynx important to transform these thoughts into an actual voice. The larynx in babies is much further up. Drops down by the time a child is 2. The reason is babies should be able to feed and breathe at the same time - something that changes in development.
Language makes it possible to create new and unique sentences because it has a structure that is
(1) hierarchical and (2) governed by rules.
Note that because phonemes refer to sounds, they are not the same as letters, which can have a number of different sounds
(consider the "e" sound in "we" and "wet"), and which can be silent in certain situations (the "e" in "some"). Because different languages use different sounds, the number of phonemes varies in different languages. There are only 11 phonemes in Hawaiian, about 47 in English, and as many as 60 in some African dialects.
Humans language has the edge slightly of animal communication- Lecture Properties of human language
- Duality of patterning : meaningless units (phonemes); make different words if recombined - [kæt], [ækt],[tæk] - 3 phonemes (cat,act,tack) Gabriel notes: means when we are looking at simple units of language e.g phoneme (sounds in square brackets) doesn't actually contribute much to communication. But recombine them in many different ways to make words that have different meanings. (Animals can't do this when they communicate- animal alarm codes are universal) -Generate capacity to produce and understand;(language in a way animals can't do) -cartoony; y= "like" Gabriel : to produce and understand language- relate to creativity (create new words all the time) if we add one letter y then it means something is like a cartoon so different meaning (different to meaning of cartoon is an illsutration). Word selfie wasn't in dictionary as well as Google before search engine and phones invented. Good at creating words at every level that animals can't. Arbitrariness : No predictable relation between meaning and sound/spelling - head, Kopf, tête; (Different for different language , if we take the example head , it is an arbitrary relationship between what this means and the way it is spelled or different to shoulders, kopf is German, tote is French for head- demonstrate ability to use symbols in the way we wish and create something new) Recursion : embedding phrases/clauses into sentences; - The chef whom manager hired yesterday stole a sandwich (Make sentences longer, possible in human language and example) Exampke out a comma The chef whom manager hired yesterday , (insert clause) yesterday a stole a sandwich
Why is language important? Lecture
- Language proper evoked only about 1.5 million years ago (before human beings were gesturing/signing, making music or holding - much like primates and apes) -Clues for origin of speech from babies and apes (Koko- sign idea of feeling sad while watching a movie) - There are many language universals (universals important for cognitive function- around 7 months babble - development of babies similar regardless of language - around 2 years of age left hemisphere starts to form - complete by age of 5 when kids begin to articulate much better in speech , when you get activation in vroca and Warwick areas , right hemisphere takes care of environment e.g gestures and noises, left hemisphere specialise for actual language) - Why do we need language? (Communication much more efficient and rapid, lots of words stored in lexicon and categorise the world) - Efficient way of communication - Helps us to categorise the world and reduce complexity of conceptual structures
Example of phonemes
. Thus, the word bit contains the phonemes /b/, /i/, and /t/, because we can change bit into pit by replacing /b/ with /p/, to bat by replacing /i/ with /a/, or to bid by replacing /t/ with /d/. Phonemes are indicated by phonetic symbols that are set off with slashes.
The four major concerns of psycholinguistics are as follows: Studying language
1.Comprehension. How do people understand spoken and written language? This includes how people process language sounds; how they understand words, sentences and stories expressed in writing, speech or sign language; and how people have conversations with one another. 2.Speech production. How do people produce language? This includes the physical processes of speech production and the mental processes that occur as a person creates speech. 3.Representation. How is language represented in the mind and in the brain? This includes how people group words together into phrases and make connections between different parts of a story, as well as how these processes are related to the activation of the brain. 4.Acquisition. How do people learn language? This includes not only how children learn language but also how people learn additional languages, either as children or later in life.
Definition of Broca's aphasia
A condition associated with damage to Broca's area, in the frontal lobe, characterized by laboured ungrammatical speech and difficulty in understanding some types of sentences.
Definition of lexion
A person's knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words.
Shows procedure for word superiority effect
A stimulus that is either a word, such as FORK (Figure 11.2a); a single letter, such as K (Figure 11.2b); or a non-word, such as RFOK (Figure 11.2c) is flashed briefly and is followed immediately by a random pattern located where the stimulus was. This pattern is a mask designed to stop perception of the stimulus. Two letters are presented simultaneously with the mask, one that appeared in the original stimulus (K in this example) and another that did not (M). The mask and letters are flashed rapidly, and the participant's task is to pick the flashed letter that was presented in the original stimulus. In the example in Figure 11.2, K would be the correct answer in all three conditions.
The following definition of language captures the idea that the ability to string sounds and words together opens the door to a world of communication: Language is a
A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas and experiences.
According to B.F Skinner's idea of language What does this mean? Studying language
According to this idea, just as children learn appropriate behaviour by being rewarded for "good" behaviour and punished for "bad" behaviour, children learn language by being rewarded for using correct language and punished (or not rewarded) for using incorrect language.
Noah Chomsky idea about language ("human language coded in genes) Example Studying language
According to this idea, just as humans are genetically programmed to walk, they are programmed to acquire and use language.
. Consider for example the following sentence, in which the ambiguous word cast has balanced dominance. 1. The cast worked into the night. (control word: cook)
As a person reads the word cast, both meanings of cast are activated, because cast (member of a play) and cast (plaster cast) are equally likely. Because two meanings are activated, the person looks longer at cast than at the control word cook, which has only one meaning as a noun. Eventually, when the reader reaches the end of the sentence, the meaning becomes clear (Duffy, Morris, & Rayner, 1988; Rayner and Frazier, 1989; Traxler, 2012) (Figure 11.5a).
Although segmentation is aided by knowing the meanings of words and being aware of the context in which these words occur, listeners also use other information to achieve segmentation.
As we learn a language, we learn that certain sounds are more likely to follow one another within a word, and some sounds are more likely to be separated by the space between two words. For example, consider the words pretty baby. In English it is likely that pre and ty will follow each other in the same word (pre-ty) and that ty and ba will be separated by a space so will be in two different words (pretty baby). Thus, the space in the phrase prettybaby is most likely to be between pretty and baby. There is evidence that young children learn these rules about what sounds go together in words and what sounds are more likely to be separated into two different words (Gomez and Gerkin, 1999, 2000; Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1999).
What happened around 1950s in psychology? Studying psychology
At that time, behaviourism was still the dominant approach in psychology.
Focus on chapter
Because of the vast scope of psycholinguistics, we are going to restrict our attention to the first three of these concerns, describing research on how we understand language and how we produce it. We begin by considering each of the components of language: small components such as sounds and words, then combinations of words that form sentences, and finally "texts"—stories that are created by combining a number of sentences. At the end of the chapter, we describe some of the factors involved in how people participate in and understand conversations. Finally, we will look at cross-cultural research that considers how language affects thought, and how thought might affect language. As we progress from describing the sounds of language to how we understand stories and conversations, we will encounter some principles that were already introduced earlier in the book. One such principle is the importance of context. Whether we are considering letters in a word or the meaning of something being said in a conversation, the context within which letters, words or sentences appear helps us perceive or understand them. Another principle is knowledge. Our ability to understand both written and verbal communication depends not only on what is written or said but also on the knowledge we bring to the situation. As we progress from words to conversations, we will encounter these principles many times, illustrating the fact that language- perception, understanding and production are dynamic processes that are heavily influenced by top-down
Patients with this problem—slow, laboured, ungrammatical speech caused by damage to the frontal lobe—are diagnosed as having
Broca's aphasia.
Error of semantic example
Changing the sentence "The cats won't eat" into "The cats won't bake" is an error of semantics because the meaning doesn't make sense;
Perceiving Phonemes, Words and Letters One of the most amazing things about words is how many we know and how rapidly we acquire them.
Children produce their first words during their second year (sometimes a little earlier, sometimes later) and, after a slow start, begin adding words rapidly until, by the time they have become adults, they can understand sometimes more than 50,000 different words (Altmann, 2001; Dell, 1995).
What did Noah Chomsky conclude with their idea of language? Studying language
Chomsky concluded that despite the wide variations that exist across languages, the underlying basis of all language is similar. In addition, Chomsky saw studying language as a way to study the properties of the mind, and therefore disagreed with the behaviourist idea that the mind is not a valid topic of study for psychology.
Another example of how meaning is responsible for organizing sounds into words is provided by these two sentences:
Emma's mother said, "Be a big girl and eat your vegetables. The thing Big Earl loved most in the world was his car. "Big girl" and "Big Earl" are both pronounced the same way, so hearing them differently depends on the overall meaning of the sentence in which these words appear. This example is similar to the familiar "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream" that many people learn as children. The sound stimuli for "I scream" and "ice cream" are identical, so the different organizations must be achieved by the meaning of the sentence in which these words appear.
example of morpheme
For example, "truck" consists of a number of phonemes, but only one morpheme, because none of the components that create the word truck mean anything. Similarly, even though "table" has two syllables, "tabe" and "ul," it also consists of only a single morpheme, because the syllables alone have no meaning. In contrast "bedroom" has two syllables and two morphemes, because each syllable, "bed" and "room," has a meaning. Although endings such as "s" and "ed," have no meanings in themselves, they are considered morphemes because they change the meaning of a word. Thus "truck," which means "one truck" has one morpheme, and "trucks," which means "more than one truck," has two morphemes.
Warren (1970) also showed that the phonemic restoriation effect can be influenced by the meaning of the words that follow the missing phoneme For example
For example, the last word of the phrase "There was time to *ave ..." (where the * indicates the presence of a cough or some other sound) could be shave, save, wave or rave, but participants heard the word wave when the remainder of the sentence had to do with saying good-bye to a departing friend. These examples (and also the next ones) are illustrations of top-down processing.
lexical ambiguity examples
For example, the word bug can refer to an insect, a hidden listening device, or being annoying. Or consider the word bank. A few of the meanings of bank are illustrated by the following: "River bank"; "First National Bank"; "You can bank on it"; "See if you can make a bank shot." Just as words occur with different frequencies in a language, some meanings of a word are more likely than others in a particular language. As Traxler (2012) puts it, "Many words have multiple meanings, but these meanings are not all created equal."
Example of meaning dominance
For example, tin, in the meaning of a type of metal, is high dominance because it occurs more frequently than tin, in the meaning of a small metal container of food, which has low dominance.
Which of the following statements summarizes Chomsky's main idea about language the best?
Humans are programmed to acquire and use language. Correct. Chomsky's main idea about language is best summarised as humans are programmed to acquire and use language.
What happened in 1957; what did B.F Skinner publish? Studying language
In 1957, B. F. Skinner, the main proponent of behaviourism, published a book called Verbal Behaviour, in which he proposed that language is learned through reinforcement.
But consider the following, in which the ambiguous word tin is biased: 2. The tin was bright and shiny. (control word: gold)
In this case, people read the biased ambiguous word tin just as quickly as the control word, because only the dominant meaning of tin is activated, and the meaning of tin as a metal is accessed quickly (Figure 11.5b).
But meaning frequency isn't the only factor that determines the accessibility of the meaning of a word. Context can play a role as well. Consider, for example, sentences [3] and [4], in which context is added before the biased ambiguous word tin. In the following sentence added information indicates the less frequent meaning of tin: The miners went to the store and saw that they had beans in a tin. (control word: cup)
In this case, the context indicates the less frequent meaning of tin (food container), which strengthens the activation for this meaning. When the person reaches the word tin, the less frequent meaning is activated at increased strength because of the prior context, and the more frequent meaning of tin is activated as well. Thus, in this example, as with sentence [1], two meanings are activated, so the person looks longer at tin (Figure 11.5c).
In psycholinguistics, the topic of _____ is concerned with how people group words together into phrases and make connections between different parts of a story, as well as how these processes are related to the activation of the brain.
Incorrect. The psycholinguistic area of comprehension includes how people process language sounds; how they understand words, sentences, and stories expressed in writing, speech, or sign language; and how people have conversations with one another. (representation)
The fact that the sounds of speech are easier to understand when we hear them spoken in a sentence is particularly amazing when we consider that words spoken in a sentence are usually not separated by spaces.
Indeed, remember from Chapter 3, that a record of the physical energy produced by conversational speech reveals that there are often no physical breaks between words in the speech signal, or that breaks can occur in the middle of words (see Figure 3.13).
Our ability to access meaning is not only affected by word frequency but also by the fact that some words have more than one meaning. The existence of multiple word meanings is called
Lexical ambiguity
The fact that some meanings of words occur more frequently than others is known as
Meaning dominance
Warren -1970: Phoneme Restoration Effect
Participants could not identify the correct position of the cough, and, even more significantly, none of them noticed that the /s/ in "legislatures" was missing. This effect was experienced even by students and staff in the psychology department who knew that the /s/ was missing. This "filling in" of the missing phoneme based on the context produced by the sentence and the word containing the phoneme is an example of top-down processing.
. The modern scientific study of language traces its beginnings to the 1800s, when Studying language
Paul Broca (1861) and Carl Wernicke (1874) identified areas in the frontal and temporal lobes that are involved in different aspects of language
Two of the most famous uses of neuropsychology to elucidate brain function were the classic studies of
Paul Broca (1861) and Carl Wernicke (1879) that we introduced in Chapter 2 to illustrate localization of function. In brief, Broca identified an area in the frontal lobe (which came to be called Broca's area) that he proposed was involved in language production, and Wernicke identified an area in the temporal lobe (Wernicke's area) that he proposed was involved in language comprehension (Figure 2.11).
One of the challenges posed by the problem of perceiving words is that not everyone says words in the same way. e.g
People talk with different accents and at different speeds, and, most important, people often take a relaxed approach to pronouncing words when they are speaking naturally. For example, if you were talking to a friend, how would you say "Did you go to class today?" Would you say "Did you" or "Dijoo"? You have your own ways of producing various words and phonemes, and other people have theirs. For example, analysis of how people actually speak has determined that there are 50 different ways to pronounce the word the (Waldrop, 1988).
Although people do "talk" to themselves, language is primarily used for communication, whether it is conversing with another person or reading what someone has written. This need to communicate through language is "universal." For example, consider the following:
People's need to communicate is so powerful that when deaf children find themselves in an environment where nobody speaks or uses sign language, they invent a sign language themselves (Goldin-Meadow, 1982). All humans with normal capacities develop a language and learn to follow its complex rules, even though they are usually not aware of these rules. Although many people find the study of grammar to be very difficult, they have no trouble using language. Language is universal across cultures. There are more than 5,000 different languages, and there isn't a single culture without language. When European explorers first set foot in New Guinea in the 1500s, the people they discovered, who had been isolated from the rest of the world for eons, had developed more than 750 languages, many of them quite different from one another. In some multilingual countries language can be a contested political issue. In South Africa, for example, some languages have oral status while others are languages of teaching and learning. Thus, sociolinguistic status of a language determines which language is used. Language development is similar across cultures. No matter what the culture or the particular language, children generally begin babbling at about seven months, a few meaningful words appear by their first birthday, and the first multiword utterances occur at about age two (Levelt, 2001). Even though a large number of languages are very different from one another, we can describe them as being "unique but the same." They are unique in that they use different words and sounds, and they may use different rules for combining these words (although many languages use similar rules). They are the same in that all languages have words that serve the functions of nouns and verbs, and all languages include a system to make things negative, to ask questions, and to refer to the past and present.
Studying Language Language has fascinated thinkers for thousands of years, dating back to the ancient Greek philosophers
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (350-450 bce), and before.
Phrase structure tree of: The chef burned the noodles
Starting at the top (discourse) Language usually done in conversation -You want to convey information to somebody else Proposition : knowing its something to do with a chef and noodles and burning. Then the listener/reader makes interference well chef is incompetent The words: The chef burned the noodles (making a cohrent sentence) When starting at the bottom, when we are speaking we are going down to the smallest units of sound We transform the sound/letter into unit of meaning - morphemes (two bits of meaning in burn ed - something getting burnt but functional morpheme)
Around the same year as B.F Skinner's idea about language and learnt through reinforcement. What did Noah Chomsky publish? Studying language
Syntactic Structures, in which he proposed a totally different idea, namely that human language is coded in the genes.
What is psycholingusitics? Studying language
The field concerned with the psychological study of language.
Definition of corpus
The frequency with which specific words are used and the frequency of different meanings and grammatical constructions in a particular language.
Definition fo word superiority effect
The idea that letters are easier to identify when they are part of a word than when they are seen in isolation or in a string of letters that do not form a word
Lexical decision task demonstration
The lexical decision task involves reading a list that consists of words and non-words. Your task is to indicate as quickly as possible whether each entry in the two lists below is a word. Try this yourself by silently reading List 1 and saying "yes" each time you encounter a word. Either time yourself to determine how long it takes you to get through the list or just notice how difficult the task is. The task you have just completed (taken from Carroll, 2004; also see Hirsh-Pasek, Reeves, & Golinkoff, 1993) is called a lexical decision task because you had to decide whether each string of letters was a word in your lexicon. You may have noticed that you were able to carry out the lexical decision task more rapidly for List 2, which contains high-frequency words such as history and busy, than for List 1, which contains low-frequency words such as decoy and voluble. As discussed next, this slower response for less frequent words has also been demonstrated by measuring people's eye movements as they are reading.
What does semantic mean?
The meanings of words and sentences. Distinguished from Syntax.
Definition of word frequency
The relative usage of words in a particular language. For example, in English, home has higher word frequency than hike.(11)
What is syntax?
The rules for combining words into sentences. Distinguished from Semantics.