Chapter 10 psych340

Noam Chomsky

1. Criticized behaviorism's view of language acquisition, particularly B.F. Skinner's theory.

2. Argued that behaviorist theories couldn't fully explain the complexity and creativity of human language.

3. Proposed the idea of a "universal grammar," suggesting that humans are born with an innate ability to understand and produce language.

4. Challenged the behaviorist notion that language development is solely a result of environmental conditioning, emphasizing the role of innate cognitive structures.

   1. Behaviorism could not explain how language is learned

   2. The complexity of language is built in the brain, and it runs on rules and

   3. principles that transcend all people.

The probability of a verbal response is contingent on:

1. Reinforcement

2. Stimulus control

3. Deprivation

4. Aversive stimulation

Hierarchical Organization

Organizational structure where entities are ranked based on authority levels from bottom to top ensuring clear communication and decision-making processes.- : Language is structured hierarchically, with units arranged from smallest to largest.

Kids eat first on Bufay line then let the adults eat

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound that can change the meaning of a word

Morpheme

1. The smallest meaningful unit of language, such as prefixes, suffixes, or root words.

Word

1. A combination of morphemes that represents a distinct lexical meaning.

sentance

1.  grammatically complete unit of language, composed of words organized in a specific order to convey meaning.

Rule-based Nature:

1. Language follows rules and constraints governing how its components can be arranged.

   1. Example: In English, the sentence "My car is over there." is grammatically correct, while the rearrangement "There over my car is." violates the rules of English syntax and sounds awkward or nonsensical.

1. PHONEME PERCEPTION

1. Warren (1970) study: Participants presented with sentence missing a phoneme replaced by a cough.

2. Example: "the state governors met with their respective legi/ /latures concerning...."

3. Participants incorrectly identified cough as part of word "legislatures."

4. No notice of absence of phoneme "s" in "legislatures."

5. Illustrates Phonemic Restoration Effect

6. Top-down processing:

Phonemic Restoration Effect

1. : Automatic filling in of missing phonemes based on context.

Top-down processing:

1. Brain utilizes contextual cues to reconstruct missing phoneme, facilitating comprehension in speech perception.

WORD PERCEPTION

1. Speech Segmentation: Process of identifying words in speech.

   1. Influenced by Meaning: The understanding of the meaning of words can aid in their segmentation.

   2. Influenced by Part of Speech and Context: The part of speech of a word and its surrounding context can also influence how it is segmented.

      1. Example: "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream." In this sentence, the familiar phrase "ice-cream" is easily segmented due to its meaningful and distinct context.

      2. Example: "Stuffy nose" vs "Stuff he knows". In the first phrase, "stuffy" is perceived as part of a compound word "stuffy nose," while in the second phrase, "stuff" is perceived as a standalone word due to the context provided by "he" and "know".

Pollack & Pickett (1964)

1. Recorded conversations, cut out words, and played back to participants

2. People incapable of recognizing their own speech!

Lexical Decision Task

1.  how fast can you identify whether a string is a word or not?

   1.  A way to gain insight into the mental lexicon

      1. Yes/no: is [stimulus] a real word?

      2. Reaction time (RT) is related to the amount of time needed to “look up” the word in our lexicon (lexical access)

   2. Factors that influence the speed of lexical access

      1. Word Frequency

      2. Semantic Priming

WORD FREQUENCY

It takes longer to recognize low-frequency words than it does to recognize high-frequency Words

SEMANTIC PRIMING

1. We are faster to recognize a word if we have recently encountered a word that is semantically related

Spreading Activation Model

1.  Concepts are represented as nodes

2.  Nodes that are semantically related are linked

Swinney (1979)

1. Method: Cross-Modal Lexical Decision Task

   1. Participants heard sentences containing ambiguous words.

   2. They then performed a visual Lexical Decision Task (LDT).

   3. Context Bias:

      1. The context of the sentence always favored one meaning of the ambiguous word.

   4. Word Selection:

      1. Words presented in the LDT were related to the meaning of the ambiguous word.

   5. Objective:

      1. Investigate how contextual biases influence the processing of ambiguous words across different modalities.

PARSING

Parsing is the process of assigning each word a syntactic role in a sentence.

1. Global Ambiguity: When a sentence has two coherent meanings usually because of an ambiguous word or syntactic structure.

2. Syntax and Parsing: Syntax involves the arrangement of words to create well-formed phrases and sentences. When we read a sentence, we parse it – assign each word a syntactic role. Parsing is the process of assigning each word a syntactic role in a sentence.

   1. Example Sentence: "The dog chased the cat".

3. Garden-path sentences: Temporarily ambiguous! They begin appearing to mean one thing but end up meaning something else.

Pragmatics

Pragmatics —-> Making inferences

1. Using our outside knowledge to go beyond the information explicitly contained in language

   1. When we comprehend language, we form a situation model

   2. A mental representation of what a given segment of text or speech is about

   3. Top-down processing- perceiving things based on your prior experiences and knowledge.

   4. Participants read a sentence.

      1. Then, they are presented with a picture.

      2. The picture could be related or unrelated to the content of the sentence.

      3. Participants must indicate as quickly as possible whether the picture shows the object described in the sentence.

      4. This type of task is often used to study various cognitive processes such as attention, memory, and semantic processing. 

Given-new contract

• Statements should contain both given and new information for communication to be successful

  • Conversation is collaborative

Common ground

mental knowledge and beliefs shared among conversational parties (Brown-Schmidt & Hanna, 2011)

-Not only about what each person in the conversation knows but ALSO about what each person knows about what the OTHER person knows

Communication Task

1. Two people exchanging information in a conversation involving a ‘reference’ – identifying something by naming or describing it (Yule, 1997)

Stellman & Brennan (1993)

1.  two people given same set of cards. Person A had the cards in a specific order. Person B had to put theirs in the same order without seeing the cards of Person A

Syntactic priming

hearing of a certain syntactic construction increases the chances that the same grammatical structure will be used by the other speaker

Bilingualism

the ability to speak two (or more) languages fluently

Multilingualism

1. refers to the ability of an individual to speak, read, write, and understand two or more languages