Language (Exam 4)

Language 3 Key Features

• Language

  • A system of symbols and rules used to communicate.

  • It lets us create endless messages.

  3 Key Features

  • Symbolic: Words/sounds stand for things in the world.

  • Structured: Rules help us combine words so others understand.

  • Generative: A limited number of words can make unlimited sentences.

Association Theory — Skinner

Association Theory — Skinner

• We learn sentences by connecting words we’ve heard together before.

• Example: The → cat → chases → the → mouse

• Problem: There are too many possible word combinations to memorize.

• People also create new sentences they’ve never been rewarded for saying.

• Example: “Mommy, I hate you!”

Grammar Theory — Chomsky

Grammar Theory — Chomsky

• We learn grammar rules that help us create sentences.

• Grammar lets us make new sentences we’ve never heard before.

• We use a sentence “frame” and plug in the right types of words.

Example grammar frame:
Subject + Verb + Object

Examples:

• The cat chases the mouse.

• The dog bites the man.

Language Deficits Notes

Language Deficits Notes

• Aphasia = language problems caused by brain damage.

• Broca’s Aphasia

  • Trouble speaking in proper grammar.

  • Speech may be slow, broken, or missing small words.

  • Meaning is usually still understandable.

• Wernicke’s Aphasia

  • Trouble speaking with meaning.

  • Speech may sound fluent but not make sense.

• Both happen from damage to different areas of the left side of the brain.

• These disorders show that grammar and meaning are separate parts of language

Components of Language: Morphemes

Components of Language: Morphemes

• Morphemes = smallest parts of language that have meaning or a grammar role.

• They can be:

  • Root words: speak, dog

  • Endings/suffixes: -ing, -er, -s

• Morphemes help make new words by adding or changing meaning.

Examples:

• speak + ing = speaking

• speak + er = speaker

Morpheme Acquisition

Morpheme Acquisition

• Morphemes are small word parts that carry meaning.

  • Example: dog + s = dogs

  • Example: walk + ed = walked

• Children learn grammar rules for combining morphemes.

  • They can make words plural or past tense without being directly taught every word.

• Some rules are easy:

  • Add -s for plural: dog → dogs

• Some rules are harder:

  • Contractions: can not → can’t

• Children sometimes make mistakes by overusing regular rules:

  • mouse → mouses instead of mice

  • catch → catched instead of caught

• This shows they are learning grammar patterns, even if they apply them to irregular words.

Three Stages of Morpheme Acquisition

Three Stages of Morpheme Acquisition

1. No grammar yet

   • Child uses basic root words together.

   • Example: “Glass break.” / “Daddy go home.”

2. Memorizes irregular forms

   • Child learns special past tense words.

   • Example: “Glass broke.” / “Daddy went outside.”

3. Learns grammar rules

   • Child starts using correct sentence structure and tense.

   • Example: “The glass was broken.” / “Daddy was going to take me to the zoo.”

Warren (1970) — Phoneme Restoration Effect

Warren (1970) — Phoneme Restoration Effect

• A sentence was played, but one speech sound was replaced by a cough.

• People had to say where the cough happened.

• Most people could not locate the cough correctly.

• Many did not even notice a sound was missing.

• This shows the brain “fills in” missing speech sounds using context.

Main idea:
Top-down processing helps us hear missing sounds that are not actually there.

Phonemes

Phonemes

• Smallest units of sound in a language.

• Phonemes build morphemes and words.

• They do not have meaning by themselves.

• Changing one phoneme can change a word:

  • bit = /b/ /i/ /t/

  • change /b/ → /p/ = pit

  • change /i/ → /a/ = bat

English Phonemes

• English has about 37 phonemes:

  • 24 consonant sounds

  • 13 vowel sounds

• Same letter can make different sounds:

  • “o” in boat vs. “hot**

Different Languages

• Each language has its own phonemes.

• Hawaiian has about 11 phonemes.

• Some African dialects have up to 60 phonemes.

Phoneme Recognition

• Recognizing speech sounds can be hard when speech is unclear or noisy.

• Context helps us understand sounds, just like context helps us recognize blurry objects.

Developmental Changes in Phoneme Recognition

Developmental Changes in Phoneme Recognition

• Phonemes = the basic speech sounds in a language.

• Adults struggle to hear phonemes that are not in their native language.

  • This makes learning new languages harder.

  • It also makes speaking like a native speaker difficult.

  • If you cannot hear the difference, you may not notice when you pronounce something wrong.

• Infants can hear all phoneme differences before about age 1.

  • Babies can tell apart sounds from many different languages.

• Around 6 months, the brain starts focusing on the sounds it hears most.

  • This means the brain becomes “tuned” to the native language.

  • Sounds not heard often become harder to recognize.

• Perceptual magnet effect:

  • The brain forms “prototypes” for native-language sounds.

  • These prototypes help us recognize familiar sounds quickly.

  • But they make unfamiliar foreign sounds harder to hear clearly.

Speech Errors

Speech Errors

• Speech error = a “slip of the tongue.”

• You mean to say one thing, but accidentally say something else.

• These errors usually happen within the same language level:

  • words switch with words

  • morphemes switch with morphemes

  • sounds/phonemes switch with sounds/phonemes

Why Speech Errors Matter

• Psycholinguists study speech errors to understand how language works in the brain.

• Mistakes reveal how the language system is organized.

Three Types of Exchange Errors

Three Types of Exchange Errors

1. Word Exchange

• Whole words switch places.

• Intended: “I gave the bone to the dog.”

• Error: “I gave the dog to the bone.”

2. Morpheme Exchange

• Word parts switch places.

• Intended: “The dog is getting fat.”

• Error: “The dog is fatting get.”

3. Phoneme Exchange

• Individual sounds switch places.

• Intended: “the brown dog”

• Error: “the down brog”

Language Comprehension

Language Comprehension

• Language comprehension = understanding words we hear or read.

• Sometimes sentences are ambiguous, meaning they can have more than one meaning.

• Ambiguous wording can make comprehension harder because the reader may misunderstand the sentence.

Examples of Ambiguous Headlines

• “Police begin campaign to run down jaywalkers”
  Sounds like police will hit jaywalkers, but it means they will catch or stop them.

Main Idea

Language comprehension depends on clear wording and context. When sentences are unclear, people may interpret them the wrong way.

Levels of Ambiguity

Levels of Ambiguity

Ambiguity = when language can have more than one meaning.

Phonemic ambiguity

• Words or phrases sound the same but mean different things.

• Example: “grade A” vs. “gray day”

• They sound identical when spoken.

Lexical ambiguity

• One word has multiple meanings.

• Example: “bank”

  • A place for money

  • The side of a river

Syntactic ambiguity

• The sentence structure can be understood in different ways.

• Example: “Visiting relatives can be boring.”

  • Visiting your relatives is boring

  • Relatives who visit are boring

Pragmatic ambiguity

• The context changes how the sentence is understood.

• Example: “I forgot how good beer tastes.”

  • The speaker missed drinking beer

  • The speaker has been drinking bad beer recently

Context can remove ambiguity

Context can remove ambiguity

• Example: “The spy saw the man with binoculars.”

  • The spy used binoculars

  • The man had binoculars

• Example: “The duck saw the man with binoculars.”

  • Ducks can’t use binoculars, so the man probably had them.

Swinney & Hakes (1976)

Swinney & Hakes (1976)

• Main idea: They studied how people understand ambiguous words in sentences.

• Ambiguous word: A word with more than one meaning.

  • Example: “bugs”

    • Could mean insects

    • Could mean listening devices

Method

• Participants listened to passages.

• They had to press/respond when they heard a certain sound.

  • Example: the /c/ sound in “corner.”

Key Finding 1

• When the sentence used an ambiguous word like “bugs,” people were slower to detect the sound.

• When the sentence used a clear word like “insects,” people responded faster.

Why?

• The brain had to spend extra time figuring out which meaning of “bugs” was correct.

Key Finding 2

• When the sentence gave clear context, like “spiders, roaches, and other bugs,” people understood that “bugs” meant insects.

• In that case, they responded just as fast as they did with the word “insects.”

Conclusion

• Ambiguous words slow comprehension.

• But strong context helps resolve the ambiguity quickly.

Swinney (1979)

Swinney (1979)

Main question:
Does context stop the wrong meaning of an ambiguous word from activating, or does the wrong meaning activate briefly?

Example word:
“bugs” can mean:

• insects

• listening devices

Method:
Participants listened to sentences while doing a lexical decision task.

Lexical decision task:
They saw letter strings and quickly decided if each one was a real English word.

Example sentence:
“The secret agent planted bugs throughout the government building.”

Then participants saw words like:

• SPY = matches the sentence meaning

• ANT = does not match the sentence meaning

Results:
Right after hearing “bugs,” participants were equally fast at recognizing SPY and ANT.

But 800 milliseconds later, they were faster only for SPY, not ANT.

Conclusion:
Both meanings of an ambiguous word activate at first, but context quickly selects the correct meaning and suppresses the wrong one.

Gernsbacher (1993)

Gernsbacher (1993)

• Asked: Why are some readers better than others?

• Poor readers struggle with ambiguous words.

• Both meanings stay active for too long.

• They have trouble suppressing the wrong meaning.

• This causes confusion and weaker comprehension.

Ambiguous Words + Context

Ambiguous Words + Context

• Some words have multiple meanings.

  • Example: “bug” can mean an insect or a problem/glitch.

• It might seem better to activate only the most likely meaning.

  • Example: If the topic is spiders, assume bug = insect.

• But this can be risky because context does not always come before the word.

Context Before the Word

• “After watching the documentary on spiders, John felt like there were bugs in his apartment.”

• Here, the spider context comes first, so bug = insect is easy to understand.

Context After the Word

• “John felt like there were bugs in his apartment after watching the documentary on spiders.”

• Here, the word bugs comes before the full context.

• The brain may need to keep multiple meanings active until the sentence becomes clearer.

Main Idea

• Keeping multiple meanings active can cause temporary confusion.

• But it helps avoid misunderstanding the sentence.

• The brain trades short-term confusion for better overall accuracy.

Key Term

• Repair / error recovery: when you first understand a sentence wrong, then go back and reinterpret it.

Miyake, Just, & Carpenter (1994)

Miyake, Just, & Carpenter (1994)

• Poor readers may have smaller short-term memory capacity.

• Good readers can keep multiple meanings of a confusing word/sentence active at once.

• This helps them use context to figure out the correct meaning faster.

• Poor readers often keep fewer meanings active, so they may misunderstand and need to “repair” their interpretation.

• The study found that poor readers generally had lower STM capacity.

Why someone may be a poor reader:

1. They take too long to ignore the wrong meaning.

2. They cannot keep enough possible meanings in memory.

Ambiguities and Word Frequency

Ambiguities and Word Frequency

• Ambiguous words have more than one meaning.

• When there is no context, we guess the meaning.

• Some guesses are more likely because of word frequency.

Example:
“The port was a great success.”

• Most people think port = seaport

• Fewer people think port = alcoholic drink

Why?

• People usually choose the more common meaning first.

Word frequency:

• How often a word or meaning is used in everyday language.

Using Eye Movements to Study Ambiguity

Using Eye Movements to Study Ambiguity

• Researchers use eye trackers to see where people look while reading.

• Eye movements show when a sentence is easy or confusing to understand.

Ambiguous Word Example: “Port”

Sentence 1:
“The port was a great success for merchants relying on tourism.”

• Most people read port as seaport.

• This meaning fits with merchants and tourism.

• No confusion, so the eyes keep moving forward.

Sentence 2:
“The port was a great success when served at the dinner party.”

• People first read port as seaport because it is more common.

• But “served at the dinner party” makes that meaning wrong.

• The reader then looks back and changes the meaning to port = alcoholic drink.

Regression

• Regression = when your eyes move back to an earlier word.

• This happens when the sentence stops making sense.

• It helps the reader fix or reinterpret the sentence.

Why Eye Tracking Matters

• Eye tracking helps study:

  • Word frequency

  • Lexical ambiguity = words with multiple meanings

  • Sentence repair

  • Syntactic ambiguity = grammar structure can be read in more than one way

Syntactic Ambiguity Example

“Teacher strikes idle kids.”

This can mean:

• Teacher strikes = teachers who are protesting
  and idle = doing nothing

OR

• Teacher = a person
  strikes = hits
  idle kids = lazy kids

Main Idea:

Eye tracking shows how people deal with confusing words or sentence structures while reading.