Psycholinguistics Midterm

What is not one of the main areas of psycholinguistics: acquisition of language, mental processes, neurolinguistics, or comparative linguistics

Comparative linguistics

What does psycholinguistics try to explain?

• How people (children) acquire language

• How people use language

• How language is represented and processed in the brain 

What is the use of language?

To communicate, to express emotions, for social interactions, to make use of its sounds, to attempt to control the environment, to record facts, to think

What is communication?

The transmission of a signal that conveys information

What is a signal?

(the form) the means that convey the information 

What is language?

a structured system of symbols taht contain a lexicon (the collection of words you know) and combinatorial principle (rules)

What is communication through language?

Communication without speech (texting)

What is speech?

the use of the human voice to produce acoustic signals that represent linguistic structures 

What are some examples of non-linguistic communication?

Body positions, facial expressions, conventional gestures

What are some examples of non-speech communication?

Written language and sign language

What is linguistic communication composed of?

Spoken (verbal) communication and non-speech communication

Which of the following is a repertoire: the lexicon, the morphology, the phonology, the syntax

The lexicon

What is a formal system for pairing signals with meanings?

Language

What is grammar?

The set of rules that create sentences in a language

What is the set of words of a language?

lexicon

What is the mental lexicon?

An internalized dictionary consisting of all the words a person knows and the linguistic information connected with each.

• lexical semantics

What is lexical semantics?

The meaning of words

What is semantic information?

The information that we know about a word

• a cat has fur, has four legs, etc

What is formational information?

The phonemes necessary to form a word

What does lexical access indicate?

It is fast and indicates that language users have an efficient lexical organization

What does the phonological rule describe?

The sound pattern of the language — makes words, intonation, and rhythm

What does the morphological rule relate?

How meaningful combinations of sounds are formed

What does the syntactic rule involve?

The structural organization of words and sentences

What are acoustics?

The physical characteristics of sounds (a physical science)

What are phonetics?

The production and perception (physical characteristics) of speech sounds

Which one describes the physical characteristics of sounds: acoustics, phonetics, or phonology

acoustics

What is phonology?

The sound system of a language (which sounds go together, which sounds do not)

What are the characteristics of acoustic sound?

Frequency and amplitude (measurable)

What is the nature of sound?

A disturbance in a medium (air) that produces a wave that travels through space

What is a phoneme inventory?

The sounds of english are not the same as the sounds of mandarin

What is a phoneme combination?

Each phonology dictates which combinations are possible

What do phonemes combined produce?

Morphemes, otherwise they are meaningless

What is a morpheme?

The smallest unit of language that have meaning

What is inflectional morphology?

The study of inflections

What is derivational morphology?

The study of derivational inflections

What is syntax?

The rules and way that words with different word orders convey different meanings

What does syntax teach us?

When we hear or read a sequence of words, we are not only matching the words with their meaning, but we are also matching the sequence with a structure

What is linguistic competence?

The intuitive knowledge of a language user that enables the creative production and understanding of all sentences

What is linguistic performance?

The use of knowledge in the actual processing of sentences, together with skills and factors such as planning, attention, and memory

What is meta-linguistic awareness?

The ability to think consciously about language and linguistic objects (sounds, words, sentences) apart from their use in ordinary communication

• snake — butterfly “which one is the longest word” < difficult for children to think of spelling and not the actual object

What is the discipline that tries to understand how the brain processes language?

Neurolinguistics

What is thought?

The distinction between thought and language becomes clear when we consider the people who think but cannot communicate through language (babies)

How much of thinking is linguistic?

Thinking is the root of linguistics, so a lot

• thinking>;language>speech

Explain the production of language…

Thought – linguistic encoding – speech >> hearing — linguistic decoding – understanding

Explain the perception of language…

phonological decoding – lexicon – syntactic decoding – understanding 

What does psycholinguistics focus on?

Language acquisition, language processing, organization of language in the brain

What is the nativist view of language? (steven pinker)

Humans are born with language (“the language instinct”)

What is the anti-nativist view of language? (Daniel Everett)

Language is a tool that is developed by humans everywhere

Theories that posit that humans are pre-programmed with some expectation of language structure are: anti-nativist, nativist, empirical, behavioristics

Nativist

What is a vocal-auditory channel to Hockett?

Language is produced in the vocal tract and transmitted as sound'; its perceived through the auditory channel (incorrect)

What is arbitrarinesss to Hockett?

The meaningful associations between language and the world are arbitrary (incorrect)

What is discreteness to Hockett?

The units of language are separate and distinct from one another rather than being part of a continuous whole

What is the duality of patterning to Hockett?

Many meaningful units (words) are made by the combination of a small number of elements (sounds) into various sequences. (pat, tap, and apt use the same sound elements combined in different ways to make different word units)

The units of language are separate and distinct from one another rather than being part of a continuous whole. What is this feature?

Discreteness

What is animal communication based on?

codes BUT it is limited in its repertoire? (symbolic codes - for a bee this is waggle dancing)

Are human or animal communication rules generative?

Human communication. Animal communication rules are not generative

Who discovered and described the “dance language” of bees?

Karl Van Frisch

In many cases, what is animal communication based on?

Mimicry

What is the advantage of having a language like humans have?

It requires a major brain investment yet there are tensions between the benefits of sharing and benefits of individual competition

The impression that animals understand verbal instructions while, in fact, they are responding to non-verbal cues, is called

The Clever Hans effect

How related is the homo sapien to the chimpanzee?

Not that close, like distant cousins

Can primates learn linguistic symbols?

Yes, they can learn to understand and produce some, but they display no (or extremely little) evidence of using these skills in a natural environment

The work with apes like Washoe indicates that

Chimpanzees can learn some manual signs to communicate

In child development ___, ___, and ___ are intertwined.

reaching, labeling, and communication

What animals understand pointing?

Dogs understand pointing

What is joint attention?

To develop language, you need cooperation (development of commenting and labeling), based on a complex set of implicit rules

Chimps show to have some of the skills that are needed for the use of language, such as

cooperation

The shared focus of two individuals on an object is called

joint attention

If a non-speech modality (manual signs, lexigrams) is used, some chimps have shown to be able to learn and use

More than hundred communication symbols.

Recent studies show that chimps can have

Some theory of mind

Chimps and children both display imitative behavior, but

children imitate more

What are phonotactics?

The rules of combination (those of the phonology)

What did Noam Chomsky do?

He challenged the traditional view of language (which focused on vocal behavior)

He argued that SPEECH should NOT be the object of study for those who want to understand language. Instead, we should study the UNDERLYING RULES that are not observable (in the mind)

What is the universality of human language?

The idea is that although there are thousands of languages across the world, they have common aspects:

• All are used to convey information

• All have grammar

• All have lexicon

• All have an infinite number of possible combinations

What is the language acquisition device?

the portion of the brain that endows it with a predisposition for acquiring language (“im going to find language in my environment"“)

LAD stands for?

Language acquisition device

What is another word for “God’s truth” linguistics?

biolinguistics

What are the factors in Noam Chomsky’s understanding of language?

1. Innate endowment- map external data into linguistic experience

2. External environment

3. Neurological properties/learning principles- evolutionary linguistics (development of a cognitive linguistic system)

What was universal grammar LATER used to suggest?

Child were born with a pre-knowledge (or sensitivity) for no-specific (universal) language structure

What is the hypothesis of where language came from?

Language evolved as an adaptation shaped by natural selection

What is Chomsky’s argument regarding language?

It is infinite and always new (generative) while behaviorism suggests a finite number of behaviors

When do children start using their speech organs?

During their first year of life

What is babbling?

Exploring the vocal apparatus

When do children begin to babble?

around 6-10 months, children begin to babble repetitively, combining consonants and vowels into syllable-like sequences

What is reduplicated babble?

repetition of consonant-vowel syllables, often producing the same pair for a long time (ba-ba-ba-ba)

What is non-reduplicated/variegated babble?

Strings of non-repeated syllables (ka-da-bu-ba-mi)

Which of the following is an indication of more advanced babbling

MABADAGA

What is the continuity hypothesis?

babbling is a direct precursor of language

What is the discontinuity hypothesis?

babbing bears no simple relation to later development (it is pure motor practice)

Which of the following posits that babbling does not contribute to the acquisition of speech?

Discontinuity hypothesis

What did Condillac believe about language?

That it must have EVOLVED over time. A gradual development of a semiotic system out of calls and gestures.

• john locke, adam smith and others agreed

What is the discontinuous view of language today?

there was a linguistic “big bang”

What is the continuous view of language today?

that language is evolutionary

The discipline that explores evolutionary trends in the emergence and development of language through the ages…

evolutionary linguistics

In 1866, who banned the debate about the evolutionary origins of language?

The Paris society of linguistics

What is an alternative hypothesis to where language came from aside from the original idea of adaptation in Africa?

It arose as a side effect of something else (increase in brain size, increase in general intelligence)

How long has the Broca area of the brain been present?

2 million years ago, it was present in the brains of hominids

What did Susan Goldin-Meadow discover about deaf children and gestures?

Deaf children without a (manual) signing model can develop their own manual signs

• emphasizes the strong need for humans to attempt to communicate and find the best system

Blind people…

use gestures in their communication

Give an example of a metaphorical gesture.

Opening my arms to gesture a “big idea”