PSYC 230: Chapter 11 Language

What is language?

System of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences

Language is considered to be which three things?

hierarchical, universal, and rule based

What does it mean for language to be hierarchical?

it consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units

Why is language universal? What are some examples?

Because we have the urgent need to communicate. It occurs wherever there are people. Its so urgent, the deaf children find them selves inventing a sign language. All humans develop a language and follow its rules. language development is similar across cultures.

what does it mean for language to be rule based?

it is the idea that there are rules in a language that specify the permissible ways for arranging words and phrases

What two aspects of language endow humans with the ability to go far beyond the fixed calls and signs of animals to communicate whatever we want to expressllow

hierarchical structure and rules

What is psycholinguistics?

psychological study of language

What is the goal of those studying psycholinguistics?

to discover the psychological processes by which humans acquire and process language.

What part of psycholinguistics seeks to understand how people understand spoken and written languages? what does it include?

Comprehension. It includes how people process language sounds, how they understand words sentences, and stories expressed in writing, speech, or sign language; and how people have conversations with one another

what part of psycholinguistics seeks to understand how language is represented in the mind? What does this include?

Representation: This includes how people group words together into phrases to create meaningful sentences and how they make connections between different parts of a story

What part of psycholinguistics seeks to understand how people produce language?

Speech production: This includes the physical processes of speech production and the mental processes that occur as a person creates speech

what part of psycholinguisitcs seeks to understand how language is learned?

Acquisition: This includes not only how children learn language but also how people learn additional language, either as children or later in life.

What are the levels of hierarchy? hint: there are five

phonemes, morphemes, words, sentences, and text/conversation

What are phonemes? what are two effects associated with them?

smallest unit of sound (chair: ch/ai/r). McGurk effect and phonemic restoration effect.

What are morphemes? provide an example?

the smallest unit of sound that has its own meaning (words, prefixes, and suffixes). cooked: cook/ed

What is a lexicon? what level of hierarchy does it belong to?

our “mental dictionary.” It is a person’s knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words. belongs to the word level.

The lexicon includes what four things?

syntax, semantics, phonology, and orthography

Syntax is…

sentence structure and language rules

semantics is… its important because.. includes…

the meanings of language. This is important for words, because each word has one or more meanings. includes lexical semantics which is the meaning of words

Phonology is to…

pronunciation

Orthography is to…

spelling

What three things effect our understanding of written words?

effects of length, frequency, and predictability

How does the effects of length impact our understanding of written words?

shorter words easier to process than longer words. Word length is the largest predictor that a word will be skipped. Longer words are fixated for longer durations than shorter words.

How does frequency impact our understanding of written words? What is an effect and task associated with frequency?

frequency with which a word appears in a language. Influences how we process the word. Word frequency effect and lexical decision task

What is the word frequency effect?

we respond more rapidly to high-frequency words like home than to low-frequency words like hike. Demonstrate how our past experience with words influences our ability to access their meaning.

What is the lexical decision task?

demonstrated slower responding to low-frequency words. Longer fixations on low-frequency words could be that the readers needed more time to access the meaning of low-frequency words.

How does predictability impact our understanding of written words?

Words that are more predictable are more likely to be skipped and are processed faster than words that are not predictable. Predictability of a word is given by its prior context.

What helps us understand spoken words?

Segmentation

What is segmentation?

the perception of individual words in speech even though there are no pauses between words; statistical probabilities that certain sounds occur together. Words are more difficult to understand when taken out of context and presented alone. Ability to perceive words in conversations is aided by the context provided by the words and sentences that make up the conversation

How do we deal with ambiguous words and their meaning?

through lexical ambiguity

What is lexical ambiguity? What does it include

It is words that have more than one meaning. We have to use the context of the sentence used to determine the meaning of the word. It includes lexical priming

What is lexical priming?

priming that involves the meaning of word. occurs when a word is followed by another word with similar meaning

When we read an ambiguous word ___ meanings are activated. However, ___ quickly disambiguates the word.

multiple; context

If a word has a ____ frequent meaning, that meaning will be easier to activate.

more

if a word has ____ frequent meanings, there will be more competition between meanings in general.

equally

Sentence includes syntax, what else does it include? What is it?

Parsing, its the grouping of words into phrases. It is the key to determining how strings of words create meaning.

What is the Garden Path model?

it states that as people read a sentence, their grouping of words into phrases is governed by a number of processing mechanisms called heuristics. Also based on syntax

What are heuristics? How many properties does it have?

rule that can be applied to make a decision. two properties

What is property 1 of heuristics?

they are fast, which is important for language which occurs at about 200 words per minute (positive)

What is property 2 of heuristics?

they sometimes result in the wrong decision (negative)

What are Garden Path sentences?

sentences inn which the meaning seems to be implied at the beginning of the sentences turns out to be incorrect based on information that is presented later in the sentence.

“Sentences which begin appearing to mean one thing but then end up meaning something else”

a situation in which the meaning of a sentence is ambiguous because a number of meanings are possible depending on how the sentence unfolds is considered?

temporary ambiguity

What is constraint-based approach to parsing?

idea that info in addition to syntax participates in processing as a person reads or hears a sentence

What 5 factors influence how we parse sentences?

word meaning, story context, scene context, memory load, and prior experience with language

What is the visual world paradigm?

it’s determining how information in a scene can influence how a sentence is processed. It can be ambiguous or unambiguous.

How we understand text/conversations/stories/etc. requires which six things?

inferences, narratives, coherence, given-new contract, common ground, and syntactic priming

What is an inference? What two types can we make?

it is determining what the text means by using our knowledge to go beyond the information provided by the text. We can make anaphoric and causal inferences

What is an anaphoric inference?

it’s an inference connecting an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence.

What is a causal inference?

it’s an inference resulting in the conclusion that the events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous clause or sentence.

What refers to texts in which there is a story that progresses from one event to another?

narrative

What is coherence?

Its an important property of narrative. Representation of the text in a person’s mind that creates clear relations between parts of the text and between parts of the text and the main topic of the story.

What does the given-new contract suggest?

suggests the speaker should construct sentences so they include two kinds of information; given information and new information

What is common ground in conversation? Why is this important?

its the mental knowledge and beliefs shared among conversational parties. Important because people talk in fragments not in complete sentences. Common ground is needed to understand what they are communicating

What is syntactic priming? Why is it important?

It is hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction. Important because it can lead people to coordinate the grammatical form of their statements during a conversation