MM

Chapter 10 psych340

Chapter 10 Language 

  1. THE DECLINE OF BEHAVIORISM

    1. A sentence is merely part of “a behavior chain, each element of which provides a conditional stimulus for the production of the succeeding element”.

    2. The probability of a verbal response is contingent on:

      1. Reinforcement

      2. Stimulus control

      3. Deprivation

      4. Aversive stimulation

  2. Noam Chomsky

    1. Criticized behaviorism's view of language acquisition, particularly B.F. Skinner's theory.

    2. Argued that behaviorist theories couldn't fully explain the complexity and creativity of human language.

    3. Proposed the idea of a "universal grammar," suggesting that humans are born with an innate ability to understand and produce language.

    4. Challenged the behaviorist notion that language development is solely a result of environmental conditioning, emphasizing the role of innate cognitive structures.

      1. Behaviorism could not explain how language is learned

      2. The complexity of language is built in the brain, and it runs on rules and

      3. principles that transcend all people.

  3. Organization of language

    1. Hierarchical Organization: Language is structured hierarchically, with units arranged from smallest to largest.

    2. Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound that can change the meaning of a word.

    3. Morpheme: The smallest meaningful unit of language, such as prefixes, suffixes, or root words.

    4. Word: A combination of morphemes that represents a distinct lexical meaning.

    5. Sentence: A grammatically complete unit of language, composed of words organized in a specific order to convey meaning.

    6. Rule-based Nature: Language follows rules and constraints governing how its components can be arranged.

      1. Example: In English, the sentence "My car is over there." is grammatically correct, while the rearrangement "There over my car is." violates the rules of English syntax and sounds awkward or nonsensical.

  4. PHONEME PERCEPTION

    1. Warren (1970) study: Participants presented with sentence missing a phoneme replaced by a cough.

    2. Example: "the state governors met with their respective legi/ /latures concerning...."

    3. Participants incorrectly identified cough as part of word "legislatures."

    4. No notice of absence of phoneme "s" in "legislatures."

    5. Illustrates :

      1. Phonemic Restoration Effect: Automatic filling in of missing phonemes based on context.

      2. Top-down processing: Brain utilizes contextual cues to reconstruct missing phoneme, facilitating comprehension in speech perception.

  5. WORD PERCEPTION

    1. Speech Segmentation: Process of identifying words in speech.

      1. Influenced by Meaning: The understanding of the meaning of words can aid in their segmentation.

      2. Influenced by Part of Speech and Context: The part of speech of a word and its surrounding context can also influence how it is segmented.

        1. Example: "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream." In this sentence, the familiar phrase "ice-cream" is easily segmented due to its meaningful and distinct context.

        2. Example: "Stuffy nose" vs "Stuff he knows". In the first phrase, "stuffy" is perceived as part of a compound word "stuffy nose," while in the second phrase, "stuff" is perceived as a standalone word due to the context provided by "he" and "know".

    2. Pollack & Pickett (1964)

      1. Recorded conversations, cut out words, and played back to participants

      2. People incapable of recognizing their own speech!

  6. Lexical Decision Task: how fast can you identify whether a string is a word or not?

    1.  A way to gain insight into the mental lexicon

      1. Yes/no: is [stimulus] a real word?

      2. Reaction time (RT) is related to the amount of time needed to “look up” the word in our lexicon (lexical access)

    2. Factors that influence the speed of lexical access

      1. 1. Word Frequency

      2. 2. Semantic Priming

    3. WORD FREQUENCY

      1. It takes longer to recognize low-frequency words than it does to recognize high-frequency Words

    4. SEMANTIC PRIMING

      1. We are faster to recognize a word if we have recently encountered a word that is semantically related

    5. Spreading Activation Model

      1.  Concepts are represented as nodes

      2.  Nodes that are semantically related are linked