Language Science Exam #1

Neural Event

Neural transmission occurs as neurotransmitter molecules pass from the axon of one neuron to the dendrites of another across a synapse

2 types of nuerons

1. Excitatory: neurons that excite their neighbors

2. Inhibitory: neurons that reduce activity in their neighbors

Plasticity

the brain keeps changing with experience as synaptic connections change strength (basically our brain’s ability to change)

Hebbian Theory

• “Neurons that fire together wire together”

• pathways are strengthened because we are changing and adding connections between neurons

Spreading Activation

electrical activation spreads from neuron to neuron, being passed on from each neuron that reaches its activation threshold to all the other neurons that it connects to through its synapses

Gray matter

largely neuronal cell bodies (around cortex of the brain)

White matter

• largely axons (important as highways across larger brain areas) covered with myelin

• myelin is critical for good function

Central Nervous System

• brain

• spinal cord

Peripheral Nervous System

• cranial nerves

• spinal nerves

Four lobes of the brain

1. frontal

2. parietal

3. occipital

4. temporal

Frontal Lobe Functions

• “executive functions”

  • plan

  • organize

  • carry oneself through a task

  • reason

  • recognize consequences of actions

  • problem solve

  • inhibit inappropriate responses

• motor movement

• expressive language - Broca’s Area

Temporal Lobe Functions

• “Receptive Language”

  • auditory language comprehension

• memory (specifically auditory memory)

• emotion

• hearing

Parietal Lobes

• perception related to touch, pressure, temperature and pain

  • sensory cortex is in parietal lobes

Occipital Lobes

• vision - optic nerves cross all the way through the brain to occipital lobes

Arcuate Fasciculus

track that connects neurons in Wernicke’s area (in Temporal Lobe) to neurons in Broca’s area (in Frontal Lobe)

Top-down Processing

using clues taken from your expectations of a language’s structure, frequency of use, relationship to context

• Examples:

  • understanding speech in a noisy environment

  • reading a bad photocopy

  • reading a page with left margin cut off

Bottom-up Processing

using clues from the acoustic or visual signal being directed towards you

• Example:

  • someone with limited english is speaking with lots of hand gestures that help you understand their meaning

  • sounding out all the sounds in a sentence and then thinking of the meaning

Coarticulation

Anticipating or retaining articulatory movements

3 ways to describe speech sounds

1. Place: where in the vocal tract is the sound made (usually this means where do parts of the vocal tract come closest together)

2. Manner: how close do the parts of the vocal tract come to each other during the production of the sound (complete closure? stop? etc.)

3. Voicing: do the vocal folds vibrate during the production of the sound?

Production Errors

1. slips of the tongue

2. tip of the tongue state

Tip of the tongue state

problems in lexical retrieval where you may try several “candidate words”

• candidates often share sounds and stress patterns

slips of the tongue

• most common speech error

• altering the order of sounds or words OR using the wrong word

  • I’ll move over here until I can get things put awayed

  • lost my track of thought

Perception errors

1. Mondegreens

2. Slips of the ear

Mondegreens

misheard song lyrics (also prayers, pledges, etc.) usually involving a phrase

Slips of the ear

related to Mondegreens, which may start out as slips of the ear

• I’m getting married —> I’m getting buried

• recite —> recylce

Tacit Knowledge

know how to do things

Explicit Knowledge

knowing about things in a way that you are aware of, being able to explain why

Morphemes

smallest unit in a language that can be assigned a meaning

free morpheme

a morpheme that can stand alone - a “word”

• girl, boy, dog, run, hide, jump, etc.

Bound morpheme

a morpheme that must be combined with another to form a word

• plural –s (cats); past tense –ed (talked)

2 types of free morphemes

1. content words - labels for people, animals, things, properties, and actions in the real or imagined worlds

2. function or functor words - usually little words that aren’t content words

2 types of Bound morphemes

1. inflectional morphemes - usually suffixes in english that don’t seem to change the core meaning (changes tense or plurality)

2. derivational morphemes - prefixes and suffixes that do seem to change meaning (changes in word class - noun to verb - or meaning)

compound words

created when 2 existing free morphemes are combined to create a new meaning

utterances

what people say – which may or may not be utterances

• hey there

• how are you?

• been better

syntax versus semantics

syntax: grammar and help create well-formed utterances

semantics: for creating meaningful utterances

noun phrases

nouns and words that modify them

• the tall man

• the ranger with the white hat

prepositional phrases

preposition plus a noun phrase

• from the tall man

• for the ranger with the white hat

verb phrases

verb and any direct or indirect objects

• direct object - receives the action of the verb

• indirect object - to whom or for whom the action is performed

Transitive Verbs

have an object

• He hates Veronica.

• He kicked the ball.

• She plays the piano.

  • can you answer the question: who or what?

Intransitive Verbs

do not have an object

• I think

• He muddles along

• They argue

Semantic Roles

1. Agent - the person who is doing what the verb phrase says

2. undergoer - the person affected by the action

pragmatics

the ways in which language is used for social purposes

Speech Processing Model (5 steps)

1. Message level - conceptual

2. Functional level - 1st linguistic level

3. Positional level - 2nd linguistic level

4. phonological encoding

5. Speech gesture level (ARTICULATION)

Message level

choosing what you are going to try to put into words (choose the event, what tone you want, and in what order events occured)

• pragmatics:

  • who are you talking to

  • why are you talking

Functional Level

involves picking specific word meanings (this stage is the words minus the sounds)

• lemmas - the meaning of a single word without its sounds

  • the semantic and grammatical information in your brain about each word you know, but not the phonological or orthographic information

• it is possible to activate the wrong lemma

  • my dissertation is too short —- long. (corrected by the speaker)

Spreading Activation

a cognitive theory explaining how the brain retrieves memories and ideas by tracking interconnected networks of related concept

• memory is stored as a web and nodes are the ideas while the links are what connect the ideas to one another

word frequencies

lemmas of frequent words have a high resting level of articulation

• high resting level of articulation:

  • apple

  • dog

  • show

  • milk

  • cow

• low resting level of articulation:

  • pomegrante

  • ferret

  • shawl

  • eggnog

  • ostrich

evidence for semantic relations in slips of the tongue

• you say the opposite of what you intended

  • i went downtown (you meant uptown)

• you say something that fits in the same category

  • I come from….Burlington/Columbus

• Blend errors

  • I lost my track of thought

blend errors

when two lemmas are activated to just about the same extent

Cascade Model

lemmas don’t all wait for each other to be activated before a sentence-under-construction leaves the message level

Buffer

if an item is activated before it can be used in putting the sentence together, it’s temporarily held here (i.e. waiting place)

Tag

information about the semantic role of a referent (agent, undergoer, goal….) that gets attached to its lemma at the functional level so that it can then be given its proper slot (subject, object, of a preposition…) at the positional level

Positional Level

where syntax takes over from semantics

• this determines order in: sentences and words

slots

the place where a word should go so that it gets produced in the right order for the intended meaning

Phonological Encoding

where sound comes in but still linguistic rather than involving movement

Speech Gesture Level

where you plan the specifics of actually moving your oral structures to say something

morpheme stranding

morphemes remain in place but are attached to the wrong words

• he has already trunked two packs

  • bound morphemes stay in place

exchange errors in morphemes (positional level)

a language needer learns

• –er on the loose from “A language learner needs”

blend errors in morphemes (positional level)

“momentaneous” from momentous and instantaneous

deletion errors in morphemes (positional level)

(avoiding possible repitions) Did the printout turn out okay? —> Did the printout turn okay?

sound errors at phonological encoding level

• the horrible mess —> “merrible hess”

• night life —> light knife

• relevant —> revelant

these are considered phonological rather than at the articulatory level because phontactic constraints are still obeyed

• most of the time a sound moves from its place in the target syllable to a very similar if not identical kind of place in the error syllable

Speech gesture level errors

errors at this level are often due to damage to parts of the central or peripheral nervous system that controls movements

• errors are often slurred or unclear

self monitoring

having enough awareness to stop you errors before they get to the Speech Gesture Level

Types of speech errors

• shift - one speech segment disappears from its appropriate location and appears somewhere else

  • that’s so she’ll be ready in case she decide to hits it (decides to hit it)

• exchange - (double shifts) - two linguistic units change places

  • fancy getting your model renosed (getting your nose remodeled)

• anticipation - a later segment takes the place of an earlier one. They differ from shifts i that the segment that intrudes on another also remains in its correct location and thus is used twice

  • bake my bike (take my bike) → activates too soon because you know it’s coming

• preservations - an earlier segment replaces a later item

  • he pulled a pantrum (pulled a tantrum)

• addition - add linguistic material

  • I didn’t explain this clarefully enough (carefully enough)

• deletion - leaves out linguistic material

  • I’ll just get up and mutter intelligibly (unintelligibly)

• substitution - one segment is replaces by an intruder, whereby the source of the intrusion may not be in the sentence

  • At low speeds it’s too light (heavy) → wrong lemme was activated

• blend - apparently occurs when more than one word is being considered and the two intended items “fuse” or “blend” into a single item

  • I miss you a very much (a great deal, very much() → this example is in phrase level, not word level