Language Psychology Exam 1

Core methods: Behavioral

ACCURACY

RESPONSE TIMES

READING TIMES

Neural

fMRI
EEG/MEG
PATIENT STUDIES
INTRACRANIAL RECORDINGS
TMS
fNIRS

Physiological

EYETRACKING
SKIN CONDUCTANCE

Behavioral: Accuracy

Advantages:
- easy! (able to collect accurary data in the classroom)

• directly measures behavior (able to ask questions about what people know, think, etc.)

• can be done almost anywhere

Limitations:
- requires measuring performance against some standard

• the underlying mechanism is unclear - the same task might be done in different ways

• people can fail for many different reasons

Example: Legalese (Case Study)
(to comply with the law, people should be able to understand it, but notably people find it hard to read including lawyers themselves)

Behavioral: Response Times

Also called reaction times

Clap if this animal lives in water
- identifying could be affected due to schema, recent experience/encounters, the animal sometimes living on land (and you think about that first), linguisics properties, social pressures, frequency (fish is more common, armadillo is less common)

Advantages:
- easy!

• can shed light on the mechanism (starting to talk about the how, not just the what)

underlying behavior

• can be done almost anywhere

Limitations:
- does not apply to tasks that are internally initiated

• requires comparing two competing

hypotheses that make different

predictions about response times

• can be hard to determine the source of the delay/speedup

Behaviorial: Reading Time

Advantages: easy-ish

• can shed light on the mechanism underlying language comprehension

• does not require an explicit task (other than reading)

Limitations: limited to reading times

• effects “spill over” onto

subsequent words - not always easy to analyze

• only an indirect measure of mechanism

example: congruent sentences quicker to read:

80 billion

how many neurons does the brain have?

Axon

What is the missing part?

Celebral Cortex

FP

TO

multifaceted

the kinds of things we can talk about when talking about language is ____

Mind

according to the slides, we already have this technology in our ______

to know

Lets say you have two people and one person wants to express that the sky is blue. When they say “the sky is blue” that image will be engraved in the others head.

and you can also make inferences from it (i.e., if you’re both in Atlanta/the same location)

head

Language as a window into the mind:

Language allows us to figure out whats going on in another person’s ___

The Turing Test

Alan Turing wrote a paper asking if machines could think. The ____ ____ is a thought experiment proposed by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper to see if a machine can chat well enough to fool a human into thinking it is also a person. If a human judge cannot tell the machine and human apart through text, the machine passes.

Today AI systems pass the turing test

Fallacy

good at language —> good at thought (being able to express yourself well doesnt mean you are correct) and bad at language —> bad at thought (being bad at expressing yourself, having an accent, etc.) is a ___

What this class is about

-pyschology of language processing

-neuroscience of language processing

-language and thought

-language development

-language disorders

• language science (drawing on research papers and research studies)

  • we will examine research evidence supporting scientific claims

  • we will hear from experts in the field

  • we will read and interpret scientific plots

What this class is NOT about

• formal linguistics

• why languages are the way they are

• ai models of language

• evolution of language

communication

What features does language have?

The defining feature of language is _____

compositionality

What features does language have?
Structure: ________

means two completely different things

reference; displacement

What features does language have?

content: _____

(not self contained, linked to our reality; whatever we are referring to doesnt have to be present in our reality, it can be displaced in time or in space)

Productivity

building new sentences you have never heard before

Average english speaker’s vocabulary: 40k words (limited)

10 word sentences: 95 trillion understandable sentences.

15 word sentences: 931 quintillion

Examples of Productivity

Using old words in new ways, i.e., “Someone was having an allergy attack and sneezed his way into the hind end of a truck” (there is a lot more the sneezing is doing here, this is kinda like how authors write *in my opinion)

• language allows us the bend the rules to communicate some kinds of meanings

I’m about to “new phone, who dis” my way out of this relationship

imperfect

Language communication is____

• it is a hard problem

• “Good enough” processing - fast but lossy

• brain processing power is limited (its hard for us to keep too many words in mind verbatim)
  
  Example: “the old man the boats” (is a full sentence)
  “Lawyers Give Poor Legal Advice” (could have two different meanings)
  “More people have been to Poland than I have”

Why study language?

Understanding what it means to be human

An important yet imperfect communication tool

A window into the mind

Uniqueness - only humans have language

Universality - all human cultures have language

Behavioral, Neural, Physiological

The three core methods we use to study human language processing can be categorized as:

Lexical; Conceptual

Case study: concepts

Behavioral - response times

Researches wanted to see what underlies our knowledge of things in the world (what kind of represenation of things in our mind allows us to access information like “what kind of animal lives under water?”

Popular view (_____ Model): you need to access the word —> the word then gives you access to the rest of the conceptual information. Predicts that there is going to be a delay in response time

The verbal form isnt privileged; carrot goes to the verbal form, the picture carrot goes to the image form, and then they both get shared to the conceptual form

ruled out the lexical model (you need to access the lexical information when you name it, but not when you answer conceptual questions)

Neural: fMRI

MRI brain scans with mRI machines (recording brain activity, capturing brain signal, see what parts of the brain is responding when and how)

these can tell us a lot about language in the brain

Need 2 conditions to compare (just measuring the signal related to the blood flow does not tell us anything)

Advantages:

• non invasive and safe

• relatively good spatial resolution (mm’s)

• can track mutiple processing stages at once

Limitations

• indirect (measuring blood flow, not actual neurons firing)

• bad temporal resolution

• correlation, not causation (tasks might not casually be correlated to the brain activity)

• expensive and not fully inclusive

fMRI; MRI

Difference between fMRI and MRI
- can look at brain activity over time is _____ while ____ is a structural image. fMRI measures the level of oxygenated blood flow in the brain

When neurons need more oxygen

Blood vessels dilate to bring more blood to the neurons

Oxygen binds to hemoglobin, which contains iron, which affects the magnetic field.

The MRI can detect these changes in magnetic field.