Cog & Bio Language

Question 1

What is psycholinguistics?

Answer 1

Sub-discipline that deals with psychology of language
Combines cognitive psychology and linguistics

Question 2

What is naming?

Answer 2

We assign names to objects, ideas, and concepts

Question 3

What is displacement?

Answer 3

We can talk about things other than the present moment

Question 4

What is productivity?

Answer 4

Inherently novel activity, we generate sentences rather than repeat them

Question 5

What do humans have the ability to do?

Answer 5

Create a new language
Birth of new pidgin & creole languages

Question 6

How is the human brain specialised for processing language?

Answer 6

Left hemisphere
Brocas & Wernicke’s areas, sensory & motor areas for speech production and comprehension

Question 7

What is adapted to make speech sounds easily distinguishable?

Answer 7

Human vocal apparatus

Question 8

Language =?

Answer 8

A collection of symbols & rules which allow us to create an infinite set of well-formed sentences

Question 9

A grammar of a language :

Answer 9

A finite set of rules to generate sentences

Question 10

Language is organised into a hierarchy of structural levels
What are these levels

Answer 10

Sentence
Phrase
Word
Morpheme
Phoneme
Each level has its own set of rules

Question 11

What do phonological rules describe?

Answer 11

The sound structure of a language
Example - can have port, pling, or sport, but not pbort or pbing

Question 12

What is the most basic unit of sound in language? How many?

Answer 12

Phonemes
46

Question 13

What do morphological rules describe?

Answer 13

How words can be formed by combining 1 or more morphemes

Example - adding er to verb - doer of action
Adding able to verb - adjective, capable of being verbed

Question 14

Syntactic rules specify what?

Answer 14

How words are put together to form phrases and sentences
One important type specifies phrase structure of a sentence

Question 15

Semantic rules specify what?

Answer 15

Meanings of individual morphemes & of a combination of morphemes

Aim to explain properties of the meaning of words
Example - lexical ambiguity

Question 16

What do pragmatic rules specify?

Answer 16

The social interactions regarding language
How one makes a request depending on the situation

Question 17

What is Williams syndrome children

Answer 17

Language is not simply a component of general intelligence

Question 18

What is the initial step of language understanding?

Answer 18

Speech perception - the perception of the sequence of phonemes & how they are organised into syllables and words

Question 19

Why is speech perception a complex process?

Answer 19

Variability (or ambiguity) in the acoustic signal, including different instances of a particular phoneme

Question 20

What is an obvious source of variability?

Answer 20

Extraneous noises, different speakers, different speaking rates

Question 21

What are non-obvious sources of signal variability?

Answer 21

Context conditioned variation in phonemes - a result of co-articulation / parallel transmission of adjacent phonemes
Segmentation problems - patterns of sound and silence do not regularly mark word boundaries

Question 22

Overcoming variability involves what?

Answer 22

A perceptual predisposition that is modified by early experience - even eight month old infants sensitive to adjacent probabilities
Categorical perception of phonemes
Top down influences

Question 23

What does the top down processing in speech perception experiment show?

Answer 23

Experiment demonstrates phoneme restoration effect

Question 24

Efficient speech processing relies on what?

Answer 24

The combination of different kinds of cues & processing mechanisms, including top-down processing (similar to visual object recognition)

Question 25

What is mental lexicon?

Answer 25

The mental dictionary of words and their meanings

Question 26

What is morpheme?

Answer 26

Smallest unit of language that has meaning (free vs bound)

Question 27

Understanding words - accessing the lexicon:

Answer 27

Word frequency - high frequency words read faster Context effects - easier to access words that fit the meaning of the sentence

Question 28

How do you eliminate lexical ambiguity?

Answer 28

By giving examples ‘The class was held even though there were bugs like ants and roaches in the basement’

Question 29

What is parsing?

Answer 29

The process of figuring out how words should be grouped together to determine the phrase structure of a sentence - this is important because the phrase structure provides a guide to meaning relations in a sentence (who did what to who)

Question 30

What is syntax?

Answer 30

The set of rules for ordering words into acceptable, well formed sentences

Question 31

Parsing difficulties stem from what?

Answer 31

- sentences come in many different lengths and structural forms Sentences are frequently fully or temporarily ambiguous

Question 32

To deal with difficulty, we use a variety of parsing strategies, including?

Answer 32

1. Build structure as you go along (incremental strategy) 2. Assume a subject-verb-object (active voice) construction, unless there is explicit evidence to the contrary (word-order strategy) - minimal attachment build the simplest structure possible 3. Whenever possible, attach new material to the structure currently being processed (late closure principle)

Question 33

Additional parsing strategies: 2 more

Answer 33

4. Make use of semantics (and/or prior knowledge) - passive sentences are usually harder to interpret than active sentences, but not if the object of the action is inanimate ‘John was kicked by Mary’ is harder than ‘Mary kicked John’ BUT ‘the ball was kicked by Mary’ NOT harder than ‘Mary kicked the ball’ 5. Make use of visual or linguistic context - visual world paradigm

Question 34

Garden-path sentences are used as a tool to investigate what?

Answer 34

Models of sentence processing

Question 35

Syntax-first approach?

Answer 35

Assumes that grammatical category information is only source used during initial parse - semantics used later Garden path model of sentence processing Minimal attachment, late closure

Question 36

Interactionist approach?

Answer 36

Assumes that any type of relevant info can affect parsing right from the start Constraint-satisfaction approach

Question 37

What does Trueswell et al study indicate?

Answer 37

That thematic information can prevent the garden-path - but when the by-phrase was masked there was no different between the 2 conditions

Question 38

What does efficient parsing rely on?

Answer 38

Heuristic processing based on different kinds of information, likely including top-down processing

Question 39

Conversational implicatures

Answer 39

rational and cooperative

Question 40

Quantity:

Answer 40

Be informative - don’t say too much or too little

Question 41

Quality :

Answer 41

Be truthful

Question 42

Manner :

Answer 42

Be clear - avoid obscure or ambiguous expressions

Question 43

Relation :

Answer 43

Be relevant