4.2 Understanding words in spoken and written language Flashcards
Were do we commonly find ‘false friends’
These false friends are common in any pair of related languages
Cognate:
a word that has the same origin as and is very similar to the equivalent word in another language. For example, the German word ‘salat’ is a cognate of the English word ‘salad’ (German: Wein/English: ‘wine’ is another example)
False friend:
A word that looks similar to one in another language, but has a very different meaning (e.g. ‘embarrassed’ in English and
‘embarazada’ in Spanish. Also known as a ‘false cognate’.
Loan
Loan: a word that was taken from another language (e.g. ‘goulash’ in
English, or ‘déjà vu’)
Collocation
a group of words that tends to occur together in a language
(e.g. the words ‘glass’ and ‘wine’ in ‘glass of wine’).
Why can be ‘collocation’ useful when reading a text or listening to speech in another language?
. For example, ‘fish and chips’ or
in the German menu, Glas Wein. Even if you could not work out that Wein means ‘wine’ in English, the fact that it comes just after Glas might lead you to the correct understanding.
What’s the main difference between the inferencing and decoding when we read and when we listen?
the process of decoding entails different sub-skills
when processing speech and text. In text, words are normally separated from each other by spaces (although some languages, such as Thai, do not use spaces between words). If the text is written in a language that uses a different writing system, readers need to know how to decipher it. In languages that share the same alphabet, one may still need to be familiar with spelling rules in order to recognise certain words, especially when these have
been learned aurally (by ear). For example, if Shakespeare was not almost universally known, few non-native speakers would be able to work out how to say his name from seeing it in print.
Recognising words in speech presents a different set of challenges. Speech is initially perceived as a succession of sounds. The first job a listener has to do
is break up the speech into individual words. This process, which is called ‘segmentation’, is particularly difficult in a foreign language.
***Segmentation
the process of cutting up a stream of speech into individual words
give some examples of some strategies you can use to segment the one word text in activity 4.4
1-The article ‘the’ is frequently used, it stands out, it will be followed by a noun or an adjective
2-Knowing what the text is about helps you work out the words that are likely to be in it
3-Names
4-The bits that we have already decoded help us narrow down
the range of options considered as we decode the next bit. For example,
once we got ‘the statue of’, the next word was bound to be the name of
the figure.
What is an article?
A word that goes in front of a noun: e.g. the house, a statue, an error
What is a noun?
a word that refers to a thing (‘street’, happiness’), an animal, a place, or a person
What is lexicon
the list of words stored in our brain
**why is segmenting spoke language more demanding than written language?
-Segmenting spoken language
involves similar strategies. However, the process is more demanding because of the lack of written clues and the need to process speech in real time.
Language learners often report that native speakers talk so fast that they are unable to recognise even the most familiar words. This is because we need time to match the sounds we hear against our lexicon in order to recognise the words
-Unfortunately, speed is not the only difficulty that listeners come
across. Other problems are that words are never pronounced in exactly the same way, people often hesitate and make errors when they speak, and external conditions, such as ambient noise, can prevent us from hearing all the sounds that make up a word
***What do the listeners do constantly to guess the sounds that are unclear
listeners are constantly filling in
the gaps and using context in order to guess those sounds that are unclear. In other words, just like reading, listening is a complex skill that involves a combination of top-down and bottom-up processing. In bottom-up processing, a listener decodes the message by grouping sounds into words, words into
sentences and sentences into meaningful texts. A very simplified description of the process could be that the listener hears the sounds: /k/+/r/+/ɔ/+/s/+/t/ and recognises the word ‘crossed’. In the same way, they also recognise the words ‘his’, ‘arms’ and ‘are’, which enables them to put together the sentence ‘his arms are crossed’. In top-down processing, the listener begins
with a meaning hypothesis (‘what do I think this could mean?’) and infers
what the words and sounds making up the relevant sentences must be. In this example, they might hear ‘on top of his …’, look at the photograph of the statue, and figure out that the statue’s arms are crossed ‘on top of his knees’
are top-down (inferencing) and bottom-up (decoding)
processes automatic and unconscious? Give examples when one or the other are hindered
In our mother tongue, top-down (inferencing) and bottom-up (decoding) processes are normally automatic and unconscious unless something hinders one or the other. For example, decoding may be made more difficult in noisy environments or when the speaker has an unfamiliar accent, while inferencing
will be more difficult when speakers are talking about a subject that the
listener knows little about.
