PSYC of Language Midterm

What is communication?

exchange of ideas between a sender and reciever, reveal feelings/info

Sociolinguistics:

study of how variables (culture, setting, participants) influence communication

Six Design Features of Language

1. Rule Governed

2. Generative

3. Displacement

4. Arbitrary:

5. Dynamic

6. Socially Shared

1. Rule Governed

how sounds are combined into words, how words are arranged into sentences

Recursion (part of Rule Governed)

capacity of any one component (phrase or sentence) to contain any number of similar components (allows complex concepts to bee expressed in one sentence)

3. Generative

language create a very large (maybe infinite) number of messages tha can be created by combining symbols in different patterns

4. Displacement

can refer to events not present in space and time (outside of here and now, past/future tense; things that are not here and now)

5. Arbitrary

symbols that beaar no resemblance to what it refers to

6. Socially Shared

language is not just words, cultures/traditions/unification

Components of Voice:

- pitch, loudness, quality

Non verbal communication

- artifacts/environment (music, clothing, furniture)

- kinesics (body language)

Mental Lexicon

- dictionary in our head made up of about 20,000 words

What is naturalistic observation?

the process of observing and describiing a phenomenon (real world settings)

What is experimental observation?

a means for systematically testing a hypothesis in controlled situations

What are behavioural techniques used?

1. lexical decision: respond as quickly as possible if word is real or not

2. word association:

3. shadowing (repetition of flow of speech out loud)

4. gating: presented increasingly longer increments of a word

5. latency: a measure of the difference in time between presentation of stimulus and response

6. accuracy: percentage of correct responses

Competence Vs Performance

Competence: internalized linguistic knowledge

Performance: how individuals use that knowledge

Two Approaches to Language

1. Prescriptive: the shoulds and should nots of language

2. Descriptive: study and characterize the actual language of specific groups of people in a range of situations

Two basic ways of analyzing speech sounds/phones

- articulatory phonetics: physiological mechanisms of speech production

- acoustic phonetics: measuring physical properties of sound waves

Phonemes

- mental representation of a sound (not a letter) abstract, replacing one with the other creates different words

Phones:

the basic unit of speech and sound

- they are what we hear, concrete

Allophone:

phone that is one possible relization of a phoneme

- if we replace one with another, it is still the same word

Morhpology:

structure of words and the component of grammar that includes the rules of word formation

- words are made out of morphemes

Morpheme:

smallest unit that carries information about meaning

How is a morpheme different from a phoneme?

- a phoneme in English is 'b', these dont mean anything

- a morpheme is a chunk of a word that means something (box vs boxes)

how is a morpheme different from a word?

- a word must have at least one morpheme, and a word must be able to stand on its own

- a morpheme does not have to occur in isolation

- a single word can be composed of one or more morpheme (complex)

Allomorphs

- a morpheme that has variants

(catssss, laptopsss) (dogz, dormz)

Affixation:

the process which morphemes attach to other morphemes or words (affixes are bound to morphemes)

Two Types of Affixes:

- Derivational: attach to another morph/word that has a different meaning from base

- inflectional: do not change categoy of base they attach to, express grammatical information (book-s)

Semantics

the meaning/content of language

- Senses: dictionary definition

- Reference: what words refer to

Pragmatics:

how and why we use language (social communcation)

Word associations

- we use these to learn about what words mean and which ones are central in the human mind

Types of speech errors:

1. spoonerism: exchanges of initial consonants between words in sentence

2. malapropisms: inappropriate sub of word in sentence

3. semantic substitution errors; 'cat' for 'dog'

4. sound exchanges

Two Basic Stages of Spoken Word Production

lexical selection; concept to abstract word form

phonological encoding; abstract word form to phonolgical representation

Levelt Feetforward Model (6 Stages)

1. Conceptual Preparation

2. Lexical Selection

3. Morphological Encoding

4. Phonological Encoding

5. Phonetic Encoding

6. Articulation:

Levelt Feetforward Model (6 Outputs)

1. lexical concept: a concept that can be expressed by a word, no one to one correspondence

2. lemma: abstract word form

3. morpheme; units of meaning

4. phonological word

5. gestural score: general motor plan to articulate

6. sound wave

Dell Interactive Model (3 Layers)

1. Top: semantic; concepts are distributed across a network of feature nodes

2. Middle; one node for each lemma

3. Bottom: phoneme (different nodes for each speech sound)

The interactive Model shows...

evidence for feedback: lexical bias effect, mixed errors

Speech Perception

to infer intended phonemes and word boundaries on the basis of multiple cues within the speech streaam

Co-articulation

process of overlapping phonemes in the speech stream

- takes time for tongue , jaws and lips to move positions

phonemic restoration

when portions of speech streams are blotted out by noise, speech processing system fills them in w best guess

McGurk Effect:

- the auditory info for one speech sound is combined with the visual info for another speech sound to produce the perception of a third speech sound

(visual information overrides conflicting auditory information)

New Motor Theory

- object of speech perception is intended vocal gestures, not acoustic signal, thus ACTION drives potentiaal

- rejects idea that speech is special!!

- disocvered mirror neurons

Challenges for speech perception

- coartiticluations

- variability (between speakers)

- lack of invariance

General Auditory Framework:

perception proceeds by taking advantage of all available information to make good guesses about the content of the message carried in the acoustic signal

Mirror Neurons:

neurons in the brains of primates that fire not only when the primate performs an action but also when it observes someone else performing the action

- linking perception and action as well

Is recognition, or recall easier?

- recognition!! (it is largely automatic, fast/accurate)

Recognition:

ability to distinguish something as having been experienced before, familiarity with something

recall:

the intentional retrieval of of information from long term memory

what is spoken word recognition?

The process of extracting phonological word forms from the speech stream and linking them by way of the mental lexicon to their semantic representations

Three Stages of Spoken Word Recognition:

1. lexical access:

2. lexical selection

3. lexical integration

1. lexical access:

- The process of matching acoustic signal of the speech stream to candidate phonological representations stored in the mental lexicon

2. lexical selection

Process of choosing the best fitting word match to the acousitic input

3. lexical integration

The process of linking the selected word form to the overall semantics and syntax of the utterance (understand how word meanings aare related to eachother)

Cohort Model:

- set of all words that begin with the same sequence of phonemes

Two points of Cohort Model

1. Uniqueness Point: point where word no longer overlaps with other words in the initial cohort

2. Recognition Point: point where phonemes provides enough evidence for identifying a word

Competition

- has negative impact (inhibitory) impact on activation levels of competitor words

Neighbourhood Density:

- number of phonologically similar words in the lexicon (rink; sink, ring, rank)

Which neighbourhoods are repsonsed to quicker? Dense, or sparse?

Words with sparse neighborhoods (low-frequency neighbors) are responded to more quickly and accurately than words with dense neighborhoods (high-frequency neighbors)

is there one to one correspondance between sounds and spelling in English?

NO!

- rough, through, though

Orthography:

set of rules for writing words of language

- Shallow: spelling/pronunciation are closely matched (German, Italian)

Deep: spelling/pronunciation are poor matches (English, french)

Visual Word Recognition Routes

Direct: going straight from written word to meaning [familiar, irregular (yacht)]

Indirect: process of assessing the meaning of a written word by first reconstructing its pronunciation (less familiar words)

The Dual Route Model of Visual Word recognition

- both routes process eachword

- Horse race: direct route will win when word is highly familiar or indirect route does not recognize spoken word form

- for new words, indirect process will still pronounce word form but direct route wont access meaning

Acquired Dyslexia

impairment in reading aability due to brain damage in a person who had previously been a skilled reader

Surface Dyslexia

ability to read regularly spelled words and pseudowords is spared while the ability to read irregularly spelled words is lost

Phonological Dyslexia

reading is relatively spared with the exception that the ability to sound out unfamiliar words is lost

Saccades

rapid jerky movement eye makes as it scans image

Regressions

right to left movements of eyes during reading, directing to previously read texts