Language - PSYC 224 - EXAM III

Arbitrary

language characteristic: made up of learned symbols

Structured

language characteristic: governed by a system of rules

Generative

language characteristic: expresses limitless meanings

Phonology (Phoneme)

language level: sounds and how to combine them

Morphology

language level: parts of words that have “meaning” (-s, -ed, -ing)

Syntax

language level: grammatical structure

Semantics

language level: understanding what words and sentences refer to in memory

Pragmatics

language level: undestanding what people mean by what they said

Serial Bottom-Up Solution

Type of Ambiguity: we process language using default rules (heuristics)

Interactive Solution

Type of Ambiguity: language is always processed using multiple sources of available information, including context and non-linguistic information

Phonemic Restoration Effect

Top-Down Processing of Sounds: people hear no gap sentence where sound has been replaced by a noise

Cohort

set of words consistent with first syllable

Cohort Model

1. words consistent with input become active

2. words in the cohort are eliminated when they become inconsistent with input

3. other words eliminated due to contextual incongruity

4. processing ends when there is one word left in cohort

Syntactic (Attachment) Ambiguity

sentences or phrases that have more than one interpretation or “parse”

"ex. “the woman in the chair with the broken leg” → who has a broken leg, the woman or the chair

Elaborative Inferences

filling in missing details using context

ex. “he pounded the nail in.” → with a hammer or a shoe?

Sound Exchanges

“rack pat”

• occur mostly between nearby words

• tend NOT to occur across phrases

• do not respect grammatical category or function

Word Exchanges

“write a mother to my letter”

• span some distance

• respect grammatical category and function

Anticipation Errors

Perseveration Errors

Blends

Discrete

Two-Step Model

1. message (stimuli)

2. semantic/syntactic retrieval (what the word looks like)

3. phonological encoding (what the word sounds like)

4. articulation (spoken word)

Interactive Activation Model

PDP model with layers of nodes corresponding to semantic features, words, and phonemes

Lexical Bias

tendency for errors to create words rather than non-words

“hold card cash (cold hard cash)” v. “weautiful boman (beautiful woman)”

Mixed Errors

errors can be semantic, (non-)lexical, phonological, or any combination

Non-Lexical Error

error: speaking the wrong sounds that don’t form a word instead of a word

“gat” instead of “cat”

Lexical Phonological Error

error: saying another word instead of the correct word

“mat” instead of “cat”

Semantic Errors:

error: speaking the wrong word associated with memories of the correct word

“dog” instead of “cat”

Mixed Phonological and Semantic Errors

“rat” instead of “cat” - rhyming (activating the same phonemes) and associated (both pets)

Sound Error

Level 1 Slip: “rack pat v. pack rat”

Morpheme Error

Level 2 Slip: “self-destruction instruct v. self-destruct instruction”

Word Errors

Level 3 Slip: “writing a mother to my letter v. writing a letter to my mother”