Language and Psycholinguistics Notes

Language: A Vital Cognitive Ability

  • Imagine life without language: survival possible, but quality of life significantly reduced.
  • Language allows creation of meanings, complex descriptions, thoughts, stories, and conversations.
  • Chapter plan: from basic units (sounds, words) to larger units (sentences, stories, conversations).

What is Language?

  • Definition: a system of communication using sounds or symbols to express feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.
  • Limitation: definition could include animal communication.
  • Animal communication examples: cat's meow, monkey calls, bee's waggle dance.
  • Human language goes beyond fixed signals unlike animal communication.

Unique Properties of Human Language

  • Creativity: arranging sequences of signals (sounds, letters, signs) to transmit information.
  • Examples: simple statements to novel, complex messages.
  • Structure: hierarchical and rule-based.
    • Hierarchical: small components combined into larger units (words → phrases → sentences → stories).
    • Rule-based: components arranged in specific ways (grammatical vs. ungrammatical sentences).

Universality of Communication with Language

  • Primary use: communication with others.
  • Evidence of universality:
    • Deaf children invent sign language in the absence of conventional language models.
    • All humans with normal capacities develop and learn a language, even without explicit awareness of its rules.
    • Language exists in all cultures (7,000+ languages).
    • Language development is similar across cultures (babbling at 7 months, words at 1 year, multiword utterances at 2 years).
    • Languages are "unique but the same" - different words/sounds/rules, but all have nouns, verbs, negation, questions, past/present references.

Studying Language

  • Historical roots: ancient Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle).
  • Modern scientific study: began in the 1800s with Broca and Wernicke identifying brain areas for language.
  • 1950s: behaviorism vs. Chomsky's linguistic theory.
    • Skinner (behaviorism): language learned through reinforcement.
    • Chomsky: language is coded in the genes; humans are programmed to acquire it; universal underlying basis.
      • Chomsky proposed a specific language module, which is not agreed by other researchers, in the cognitive system.
    • Chomsky's critique of Skinner: children produce novel sentences not explicitly taught or reinforced.
      • Example: "I hate you, Mummy."
  • Psycholinguistics: the psychological study of language.

Four Major Concerns of Psycholinguistics

  1. Comprehension: understanding spoken and written language.
  2. Speech production: how people produce language.
  3. Representation: how language is represented in the mind and brain.
  4. Acquisition: how people learn language.

Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition

  • Language structure emerges from language use.
  • Children learn language from conversations and cultural context.
  • Cultural-specific language development is enabled by innate cognitive skills.
  • General cognitive abilities (pattern finding) help form linguistic categories.
  • No one is born with specific language components, they are derived via a general learning mechanism.

Language Components and Processing

  • Smaller components (sounds, words) to larger components (sentences, stories).
  • Factors in participating in and understanding conversations.
  • Cross-cultural research and how it affects thought and language.

Perceiving Phonemes, Words, and Letters

Vocabulary Size

  • Children produce first words during their second year, vocabulary increases rapidly.
  • Adults understand 42,000 to 50,000 words.
  • Variability in estimates due to: definition of separate words and task used to test vocabulary size.
  • Vocabulary increases with age and education.
    • Study of 220,000 individuals: native English speakers know ~42,000 words by age 20 and ~48,200 by age 60.
    • Adults add one new word every two days.

Components of Words

Phonemes

  • Smallest units of language are sounds called phonemes and meanings called morphemes.
  • A phoneme is the shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word.
  • Example: changing /b/ in "bit" to /p/ makes “pit”.
  • Phonemes are sounds, not letters (the letter “e” has different sounds).
  • Different languages have different numbers of phonemes.

Morphemes

  • Smallest units of language with definable meaning or grammatical function.
  • Example: "truck" has one morpheme; "bedroom" has two ("bed" + "room").
  • Endings like "s" and "ed" are morphemes because they change a word's meaning.

Perceiving Sounds and Letters

Phonemic Restoration Effect

  • Phonemes are perceived in speech even when covered by extraneous noise.
  • Warren (1970) experiment:
    • Participants heard "The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city."
    • The first /s/ in "legislatures" was replaced with a cough.
    • Participants couldn't identify the cough's location and perceived /s/.

Perceiving Individual Words in Sentences

Challenges

  • Word perception is challenging because of variations in accents, speech speeds, and pronunciation.
  • Example: The analysis of how people actually speak determined that there are 50 different ways to pronounce the word the (Waldrop, 1988).

Speech Segmentation

  • Ability to perceive individual words despite lack of pauses in the speech signal.
  • Aided by knowledge of language.
  • Meaning of words helps in perception.
  • Listeners learn that certain sounds are more likely to follow one another within a word, and some sounds are more likely to be separated by the space between two words.
  • Example: pretty baby.

Reading: The Word Superiority Effect

  • Letters are easier to recognize in a word than alone or in a non-word.
  • Reicher's experiment: letters identified more quickly when part of a word.
  • Letters in words are not processed one-by-one but are impacted by the context.

Understanding Words

Lexicon

  • People have lexicons of 42,000 to 50,000 words.
  • A corpus of a language indicates the frequency with which different words are used and the frequency of different meanings and grammatical constructions in that language.
  • Language comprehension relies on prediction of meaning based on knowledge of language properties.

Word Frequency Effect

  • High-frequency words (e.g., home) are recognized faster than low-frequency words (e.g., hike).
  • Demonstrated using the lexical decision task.

Lexical Ambiguity

  • Words often have multiple meanings (e.g., bug, bank).
  • Meaning dominance: some meanings are more likely than others.
    • Biased dominance: meanings have different frequencies (tin as metal vs. container).
    • Balanced dominance: meanings are equally likely (cast as members of a play vs. plaster).
  • Eye-tracking experiments demonstrate different processing times based on meaning dominance.

Role of Context

  • Context influences which meaning is accessed.
  • Accessibility is determined by the word's frequency and the combination of meaning dominance and context.

Understanding Sentences

Semantics and Syntax

  • Semantics: meanings of words and sentences.
  • Syntax: rules for combining words into sentences.

Brain Processing

  • Broca's area (frontal lobe): syntax (sentence structure).
  • Wernicke's area (temporal lobe): semantics (understanding meaning).

Broca's Aphasia

  • Slow, labored, ungrammatical speech due to frontal lobe damage.
  • Difficulty processing connecting words, impacts comprehension.

Wernicke's Aphasia

  • Fluent, grammatical but incoherent speech due to temporal lobe damage.

Understanding Sentences: Parsing

Parsing

  • Grouping words into phrases to determine sentence meaning.
  • Garden path sentences: begin with one meaning but end with another.

Syntax-First Approach to Parsing

  • Initial parsing based exclusively on syntactic rules.
  • Late closure: new words are assumed to be part of the current phrase.

Interactionist Approach to Parsing

  • Syntax and semantics are considered simultaneously.
  • Readers anticipate words based on sentence structure, word meaning, and environment.

Meaning of Words in a Sentence

  • Meaning of words influences parsing from the beginning.
  • Sentences with the same structure can be ambiguous or unambiguous depending on word meanings.

Information in a Visual Scene

  • The visual world paradigm: how observing a scene influences sentence interpretation.

Making Predictions Based on World Knowledge

  • Continually using knowledge to make predictions about what will be read or heard.

Making Predictions Based on Knowledge of Language Constructions

  • Readers make predictions based on how their language is constructed.

Understanding Text and StoriesMaking inferences

Inferences

  • Determining what text means by using knowledge to go beyond provided information.

Coherence

  • Representation of text in a person's mind so that information in one part of the text is related to the other part of the text.
Different Types of Inference
  1. Anaphoric: connecting objects/people across sentences.
  2. Instrument: inferences about tools or methods.
  3. Causal: inferences that events in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a a previous sentence.

Situation Models

  • Mental representation of what a text is about (people, objects, locations, events).

Mental Representations as Simulations

  • A person simulates perceptual and motor characteristics of objects and actions in a story.

Discourse Associated Processing

  • Linking sentence meanings together and relating this to a wider topic at hand.

Producing Language: Conversations

Conversations

  • Taking the other person into account, each person needs to take into account not only what other people are saying but also what the other person or people know about the topic that is being discussed (Pickering & Garrod, 2004).
    • When people are talking about a topic, each person brings their own knowledge to the conversation.
  • Conversations go more smoothly when the participants bring shared knowledge.
  • People guide their listeners through the conversation by following the given- new contract which states that a speaker should construct sentences so that they include two kinds of information:
    • Given information - information that the listener already knows.
    • New information— information that the listener is hearing for the first time.
  • Common Ground: the speakers' mutual knowledge, beliefs and assumptions (Clark, 2015; Isaacs & Clark, 1987).
    • How do people having a conversation establish common ground? Through the back-and-forth exchanges during the conversation.

Syntactic coordination

  • When two people exchange statements in a conversation, it is common for them to use similar grammatical constructions.
  • Syntactic priming is important because it helps people to coordinate the grammatical form of their statements during a conversation.