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PSYC 258 - Cognitive Psychology > Chapter 11: Language > Flashcards

Chapter 11: Language Flashcards

1
Q

Language

A

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

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2
Q

Creativity of Human Language: The Hierarchical Nature of Language

A
  • Language consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units
  • Words - Phrases - Sentences - stories
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3
Q

Creativity of Human Language: The Rule-Based Nature of Language

A
  • Components of language can be arranged in certain ways, but not others
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4
Q

Studying Language: Skinner, Chomsky, & Psycholinguistics

A
  • Psycholinguistics: The field concerned with the psychological study of language
  • Skinner thought it was all behaviour & conditioning (classic) but Chomsky believed it was more generative and therefore a part of the mind
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5
Q

Studying Language: The 4 Main Concerns of Psycholinguistics

A
  1. Comprehension
  2. Representation
  3. Speech Production
  4. Acquisition
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6
Q

Language Comprehension: Lexical Semantics

A
  • The meaning of specific words
  • Combines lexicon (words you know) with semantics (meaning of language in general)
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7
Q

Language Comprehension: The Word Frequency Effect

A
  • Refers to the fact that we respond more rapidly to high-frequency words
  • A words frequency influences how we process it!
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8
Q

Language Comprehension: Lexical Decision Task

A
  • P’s are asked to decide as quickly as possible whether or not they see a word or nonword
  • Higher-frequency words are typically way faster
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9
Q

Language Comprehension: Speech Segementation

A
  • The perception of individual words even though there are often no pauses between words
  • Largely dictated by our understanding of the context (i.e., big girl vs big earl)
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10
Q

Language Comprehension: Lexical Ambiguity

A
  • Words can often have more than one meaning!
  • When ambiguous words come around, we gotta look to the context or we’re fucked!
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11
Q

Language Comprehension: Lexical Priming (experiment)

A
  • Priming a participant by showing them a word that is similar in meaning to another one (rose & flower)
  • Tanenhaus did this by showing p’s 2 sentences with rose as a noun or a verb, and p’s responded way faster to the word flower after seeing rose as a noun than as a verb
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12
Q

Language Comprehension: Meaning Dominance

A
  • The meaning of a word can also be influenced by how often the word is used with one meaning vs. another
  • i.e., higher frequency words are more likely to be used
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13
Q

Language Comprehension: Biased Dominance vs Balanced Dominance

A
  • Biased dominance occurs when one meaning is used way more frequently than another (dog as animal rather than dog as sex fiend)
  • Balanced dominance occurs when meanings are equally frequent (balls as golf balls vs testicles)
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14
Q

Understanding Sentences: Syntax

A

The structure of a sentence

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15
Q

Understanding Sentences: Parsing

A
  • The process of grouping words within a sentence to understand the meaning of the sentence as a whole
  • I.e., (Asher went home after a long day) – (and then drank himself under the table)
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16
Q

Understanding Sentences: Garden Path Sentences

A
  • Sentences which appear to mean one thing but then end up meaning something else
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17
Q

Garden Path Sentences: Temporary Ambiguity

A
  • These sentences lead to temporary ambiguity by misleading the reader, who must then correct their parsing of the sentence
18
Q

Understanding Sentences: The Garden Path Model of Parsing

A
  • Posits that people parse words into phrases based on processing mechanisms called ‘heuristics’
19
Q

The Garden Path Model of Parsing: Heuristics

A
  • Heuristics are rules that are rapidly applied to make a decision, and can sometimes lead to errors because they’re so fast and largely unconscious
20
Q

Understanding Sentences: Late Closure

A
  • A parsing mechanism where every new word a person reads is added to the current phrase
  • Explains why we garden path ourselves - keep adding words until it becomes clear that our parsing has been done incorrectly
21
Q

Understanding Sentences: The Constraint-Based Approach to Parsing

A
  • The idea that information in addition to syntax participates in processing as a person reads or hears a sentence
  • Garden path model was pure syntax all day, while this one includes information
22
Q

The Constraint-Based Approach to Parsing: Visual World Paradigm (technique)

A
  • Shows how visual information can affect the parsing of a sentence
  • Measured the eye movements of p’s and found that their eyes moved along with the sentence, actually making errors when the sentence misled them!
23
Q

Understanding Stories: Narrative

A
  • Texts in which there is a story that progresses from one event to another, although stories can also include flashbacks of events that happened earlier
24
Q

Understanding Stories: Coherence

A
  • The representation of the text in a person’s mind that creates clear relations between parts of the text and the main topic of the story
25
Q

Understanding Stories: Inferences

A

We use our knowledge to go beyond the information in the text to determine its meaning

26
Q

Understanding Stories w/ Inferences: Anaphoric Inference

A
  • Inferring that a word like ‘he’ or ‘she’ is used to avoid repetition and refers to a word used earlier in the sentence!
  • Even when used incorrectly, we can usually infer what words like this are referring to!
27
Q

Understanding Stories w/ Inferences: Instrument Inference

A
  • We often infer what instruments people are using even if they’re not explicitly mentioned!
  • i.e., john pounded margarette until she came (with his penis is inferred)
28
Q

Understanding Stories w/ Inferences: Causal Inference

A
  • We often infer what caused the effect, even if it is not explicitly stated!
  • i.e., john took his shirt off, margarette got wet as fuck (cause is inferred here!)
29
Q

Understanding Stories: Situation Model

A
  • Describes the way we picture a situation in our head while reading
  • Simulates the perceptual and motor characteristics of the objects and actions in a story
30
Q

Having Convos: The Given-New Contract

A
  • States that a speaker should construct sentences so that they include two kinds of info
    1. Given Information: Info that the listener already knows
    2. New Information: Info that the listener is hearing for the first time
31
Q

Having Convos: Common Ground

A
  • The mental knowledge and beliefs shared among conversational parties
  • As we chat, we learn what the other person knows about and factor that into our conversation
  • I.e., John finds out that Margrette also enjoys c&b torture so now he can discuss apparatuses with her
32
Q

Having Convos: The Referential Communication Task

A
  • 2 P’s have cards with fuckin weird shit on them
  • They have to communicate what the shit looks like, and they make names for the funky shit
  • This means they’ve established common ground and they can communicate easily about the weird shit
33
Q

Having Convos: Entrainment

A
  • Synchronization between two conversational partners
  • The process of creating common ground
34
Q

Having Convos: Syntactic Coordination

A
  • How conversational partners can end up coordinating their grammatical constructions
  • We often use the same wording or phrasing as the people we’re talking to
35
Q

Having Convos: Syntactic Priming

A
  • Hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction
36
Q

Having Convos: Theory of Mind

A
  • The ability to understand what others think, feel, or believe
  • Helps us have conversations because we can infer things about what people be thinking
37
Q

Music & Language: Prosody

A
  • The pattern of intonation and rhythm in spoken language
  • Often responsible for emotion in language
  • Actors often utilize prosody in order to convey emotion in their lines
38
Q

Music & Language: Broca’s Aphasia

A
  • Difficulty in understanding sentences with complex syntax
  • Patients did worse in language trials (syntax) and in music trials (off-key chords)
  • May show a connection between brain mechanisms involved in music & language!
39
Q

Music & Language: Congenital Amusia

A
  • Patients who are born with problems in music perception (can’t recognize simple melodies or common tunes)
  • Typically good language-wise
  • Shows that music and language also use different mechanisms
40
Q
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PSYC 258 - Cognitive Psychology (4 decks)

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