SLP 532 Midterm (complete)

psycholinguistics

the study of the psychological processes involved in language

Why do SLPs care about psycholinguistics?

Knowledge of normal supports understanding of disorders, examples and information gained from disorders (ex. "language in exceptional circumstances") reveals info for normal

language

a system of symbols and rules that enable us to communicate, unique to humans

structuralism

attempts to describe the units of language, categories and relationships, particularly of grammar

behaviorism influence

stimulus-response, associations

information theory influence

probability/redundancy in language, telecommunications and relationship to cognitive psychology, which has now essentially absorbed field of psycholinguistics

boxology

information processing represented in flow diagrams, flow diagrams often include levels of processing, "computational" metaphor

Cognitive Science

draws from all of the following, psychology-adult and developmental, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and AI

assist, interfere

Things that are related in processing will either ___ or ___ with one another

localization of function

Neurology and neuropsychology have been concerned with _______

Wernicke-geschwind model

language processes flow from back of left hemisphere to the front

Wernicke's area

high level planning and semantic processes toward the back

Broca's area

low level retrieval and articulation more forward

Connected by arcuate fasiculus

Wernicke's area and Broca's area is connected by _____

Double dissociation

pattern in which two patients show opposite profiles, one patient can do one task but not another, and the second patient cannot do the first task but can do the second, conclusion= different processes underlie each task, and evidence of differing brain lesions can support this

Limitations of double dissociation

assuming modularity or separate routes because of evidence of double dissociation is not accurate, problem of inferring normal from disordered, and clinical categories are not "pure" or distinct in patients, as often implied in descriptions/labels

neuroimaging

some techniques measure electrical activity of the brain ex. EEG and ERP

temporal, spatial

Both EEG and ERP have good "_____" or timing info for behaviors of interest no very good "____" information i.e., regions of brain involved

MEG-magnetoencephalography

new technique to measure magnetic activity, need superconductors (SQUIDS), good spatial and temporal info, and expensive, not available

CAT - computerized axial tomography

uses integrated x-ray pictures, medium resolution

MRI - magnetic resonance imaging

uses radio frequency waves instead of x-rays, higher resolution

PET-positron emission tomography

radioactive glucose injected into the blood stream, measures glucose uptake in the brain, and results indicate brain regions that most active during various tasks

fMRI-functional magnetic resonance imaging

detects the brain regions with the most blood and oxygen based on hemoglobin molecules, temporal and spatial resolution is better than PET

TMS-transcranial magnetic stimulation

magnets stimulate cortex and participant's response-behavior or experience-is assessed

clinical applications of neuroimaging: disadvantages

many procedures remain expensive or not available, not easily interpretable-validity, reliability

clinical applications of neuroimaging: advantages

identify damage/lesions for brain injuries, anticipate future use of assessment and treatment

modularity

a module is a self-contained set of processes, the idea that the mind is built from separate modules, and the processes in each module are independent or autonomous from the processes in other modules

interactive models

involve influence from one module to another or from some processes to other processes

bottom-up processing

data driven, processing flows from the sensory system to the higher level mental representations

modular models

tend to be simpler than other models of language processing, belief that evolution favors this, provide a fixed framework for studying the mind, Pinker and Fodor support this model, also tend favor models of language that are heavily innate

neural correlates

there may be _____ to fit modularity ex. Wernicke's and Broca's

innateness, modularity, rules, and language-specific

_____,____,____, and _____ processing are all part of one "camp" in the debate regarding what is language

connectionism

an approach to cognition that involves computer simulations with many simple processing units, and where knowledge comes from learning statistical regularities rather than explicitly stated rules (away from Chomsky’s theories of innate)

inflectional morphology

doesn’t change the meaning of the word or part of speech (-ed, -s,)

derivational morphology

changes the meaning of the word or part of speech (develop to development)

word

the smallest unit of grammar that can stand alone

lexicon

our mental dictionary

activation

can be thought of as the amount of energy possessed by something

priming

affecting a response to a target by presenting a related item prior to it; can have either facilitatory or inhibitory effects

semantic priming

usually facilitatory, obtained by the prior presentation of a stimulus related in meaning

facilitation

making processing faster, usually as a result of priming

inhibition

this has two uses, in terms of processing it means slowing processing down. in terms of networks it refers to how some connections decrease the amount of activation of the target unit

EEG - electroencephalography

a means of measuring electrical potentials in the brain by placing electrodes across the scalp

ERP - event related potential

electrical activity in the brain after a particular event, is a complex waveform related in time to a specific event, measured by EEG

discrete model

a processing model where information can only be passed to the next stage when the current on has completed its processing

cascade model

a type of processing where information can flow from one level of processing to the next before the first has finished processing

top-down processing

involves the knowledge coming from higher levels (such as predicting a word from the context); starts at the mental representation or concept and processing can flow down to the lower level of sound representation

inner speech

that voice we hear in our head; speech that is not overtly articulated

working memory

in the USA, often used as a general term for short-term memory. According to the British psychologist Alan Baddeley, working memory has a particular structure comprising a central executive, a short-term visual store, and a phonological loop

sentences

a group of words that expresses a complete thought, indicated in writing by the capitalization of the first letter, and ending with a period (full stop); contains a subject and a predicate

grammar

the set of syntactic rules of a language

competence

our knowledge of our language, as distinct from our linguistic performance

performance

our actual language ability, limited by our cognitive capacity, distinct from our competence

generative grammar

a finite set of rules that will produce or generate all the sentences of a language (but no non-sentences)

class

the grammatical class of a word is the major grammatical category to which a word belongs—e.g., noun, adjective, verb, adverb, determiner, preposition, pronoun.

nouns

the syntactic category of words that can act as names and can all be subjects or objects of a clause

adjectives

a describing word (ex. red)

verbs

a syntactic class of words expressing actions, events, and states, and which have tenses

adverbs

a type of word that modifies a verb (ex. quickly)

determiners

a grammatical word that determines the number of a noun (ex. "the", "a", "an", "some")

prepositions

a grammatical word expressing a relation (ex. "to," "with," "from")

conjunctions

a part of speech that connects words within a sentence (ex. "and", "because")

pronouns

a grammatical class of words that can stand for nouns or noun phrases (ex. "she", "he", "it")

content words

one of the enormous number of words that convey most of the meaning of a sentence - nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. same as open-class words

function words

one of the limited numbers of words that do the grammatical work of the language (ex. determiners, prepositions, conjunctions - such as "the," "a," "to," "in," "and," "because")

open class words

same as content word

closed class words

same as function word

phrases

a group of words forming a grammatical unit beneath the level of a clause (ex. up a tree); does not contain both a subject and a predicate

noun phrases

a grammatical phrase based on a noun (ex. the red house)

clauses

a group of related containing a subject and a verb

subject

the word or phrase that the sentence is about - the clause about which something is predicated (stated). the thing about which something is stated

predicate

the part of the clause that gives information about the subject (ex. "The ghost is laughing," "the ghost" is the subject and "is laughing" is the ____)

constituents

a linguistic unit that is part of a larger linguistic unit

object

the person, thing, or idea that is acted on by the verb. in the sentence "The cat chased the dog," "cat" is the subject, "chased" the verb, and "dog" is the ____.

transitive verbs

a verb that takes an object (ex. "The cat hit the dog")

intransitive verbs

a verb that does not take an object (ex. "The man laughs")

themes

the thing that is being acted of or being moved

transformations

a grammatical rule for transforming one syntactic structure into another (ex. turning an active sentence into a passive one)

transformational grammar

a system of grammar based on transformations, introduced by Chomsky

auxiliary verb

a linking verb used with other verbs (ex. in "You must have done that," "must" and "have"

Maturation

the sequential unfolding of characteristics, usually governed by instructions in the genetic code.

Hemidecortication

complete removal of the cortex of one side of the brain.

Sucking habituation paradigm

a method for examining whether or not very young infants can discriminate between two stimuli. The child sucks on a special piece of apparatus; as the child habituates to the stimulus, their sucking rate drops, but if a new stimulus is presented, the sucking rate increases again, but only if the child can detect that the stimulus is different from the first.

Nativist

the idea that knowledge is innate.

Telegraphic speech

a type of speech used by young children, marked by syntactic simplification, particularly in the omission of function words.

Child directed speech (CDS)

the speech of caregivers to young children that is modified to make it easier to understand (sometimes called "motherese").

Language acquisition device

Chomsky argued that children hear an impoverished language input and therefore need the assistance of an innate device in order to acquire language

Universal grammar

the core of the grammar that is universal to all languages, and which specifies and restricts the form that individual languages can take.

Pidgins

a type of language, with reduced structure and form, without any native speakers of its own, and which is created by the contact of two peoples who do not speak each other's native languages.

Creole

a pidgin that has become the language of a community through an evolutionary process

Specific language impairment

a developmental disorder affecting just language.

Distributional information

information about what tends to co-occur with what; for example, the knowledge that the letter "q" is almost always followed by the letter "u"

Babbling

an early stage of language, starting at the age of about 5 or 6 months, where the child is repetitively combining consonants and vowels into syllable-like sequences (e.g., "bababababa").

Ostensive

you can define an object by pointing to it.

Basic level

the level of representation in a hierarchy that is the default level (e.g., "dog" rather than "terrier" or "animal").

Bootstrapping

the way in which children can increase their knowledge when they have some—such as inferring syntax when they have semantics.

Overextensions

when a child uses a word to refer to things in a way that is based on particular attributes of the word, so that many things can be named using that word (e.g., using "moon" to refer to all round things, or "stick" to all long things, such as an umbrella).

Semantic feature

a unit that represents part of the meaning of a word.

Prototype

an abstraction that is the best example of a category.

Agent

the thematic role describing the entity that instigates an action.