Cog Final: Language

Brocas, Wernicke’s aphasia

Broca: intact language comp but impaired speech (left inferior frontal gyrus)

• patient tan

Wernicke: posterior superior lobe damage- fluent but no coherent thought or meaning

Paraphasias: verbal, phonemic, neologic

verbal: subbing word w related word

phonemic: swapping, adding sounds

neologisms: inventing words

Conduction aphasia- between brocas and wernickes

• Shows language depends on a network of brain regions

• Can read write speak, difficulty finding words, can’t repeat words, sentences.

brain lateralization

language is left brain

• however it pulls from the right for pitch, mood, attitude

language acquisition nurturists

language learning like skill learning

• trial and error reinforcement

naturists

born w innate capacity to learn language

• not stim dependent

• we can understand and speak stuff we’ve never learned

Innateness hypothesis: universal grammar

we’re born w the grammar we put words on

• grammar separate from meaning

• babies learn at the same pace across languages

Poverty of stim argument

supports naturism- we don’t have enough learning material in the environment but we learn

psycholinguistics

Building blocks of language

• phonemes: smallest ling unit

• morphemes: smallest meaningful unit

• semantics: meaning

phonological ambiguity

when the smallest unit (sound) changes the meaning- resolved by top-down context

lexical ambiguity

word w multiple meanings

• cross-modal priming shows that we initially process both meanings, then filter to just have the right one

Parsing and syntactic ambiguity

parsing is that ling things, syntactic ambiguity is because we hear sentences incrementally there is more than one way to parse a sentence

1. we make sentences in one direction and go back if we mess up

2. Constraint based- we use no gramm info like expectation and context too

linguistic universalism

language and thoughts are independent

linguistic relativity

language changes how we think and percieve- ppl who speak diff think diff

surface dyslexic

cant match words to mental dict- cant produce irregular words (silent letter) bc they j read letter by letter

phonological dyslexic

cant read letter by letter, sound out, recognize phonemes- cant read new words or switch sounds