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PL3103: Cognitive Psychology > L8: Language > Flashcards

L8: Language Flashcards

1
Q

What is a language?

A

A system of arbitrary symbols and rules used to manipulate them

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2
Q

What kind of errors does the Spreading Activation Model cause in speech? 3 types

A
  1. Anticipatory errors
    - Sun is in the sky -> Sky is in the sun
  2. Perseveratory errors
    - Beef noodle -> Beef Needle
  3. Exchange errors
    - I need to buy a new watch -> I need to buy a new botch
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2
Q

Are languages rule-based?

A

Yes, its system of rules forms a grammar or syntax.

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2
Q

What is preformulation?

A

The cognitive processes that occur before the actual articulation of speech sounds - preparation and planning of linguistic units, such as words. The production by speakers of phrases used frequently before; to reduce the demands of speech production.

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2
Q

How do we simplify speech production? 3 things

A
  1. Preformulation
  2. Underspecification
  3. Syntactic Priming
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3
Q

What is underspecification?

A

Certain aspects of meaning or structure in a linguistic expression are left unspecified.

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4
Q

What is syntactic priming?

A

Exposure to a particular syntactic structure in one context influences the production of similar syntactic structures in subsequent contexts. The tendency for the sentences produced by speakers to have the same syntactic structure as sentences they have heard or read shortly beforehand.

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5
Q

What are the 4 levels of spreading activation model?

A
  1. Semantic -> abstract representation of ideas
  2. Syntactic -> Outline, like grammar
  3. Morphological -> Structure of words using morphemes
  4. Phonological -> Pronunciation
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6
Q

What causes errors in the spreading activation model?

A

Because there is spreading activation, numerous nodes are all activated at the same time. If an incorrect item is activated more strongly than the correct item, it may get selected instead.

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7
Q

What is the lexical bias effect?

A

Proves that speech errors are not random, and errors generally form words rather than non words.

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8
Q

What is spoonerism?

A

Initial sounds or syllables of two words are swapped to create new words or phrases. ie. Deep cot -> Keep dot

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9
Q

Why do good speakers make more anticipatory errors?

A

Good speakers plan ahead more than novice speakers, so what they are planning to say gets more highly activated than what they are supposed to say.

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10
Q

What is aphasia?

A

Language problems caused by detectable brain damage.

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11
Q

What are the steps taken in spoken word recognition?

A
  1. Decoding speech involves breaking continuous speech into discrete phonemes.
  2. Then you have to identify words.
  3. Then you need to extract the meaning of the word for comprehension.
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12
Q

What is the TRACE model?

A

Operates on the principle of interactive activation and consists of three levels: feature, phoneme, and word.

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13
Q

How does the TRACE model work?

A

At the feature level, distinctive acoustic features of speech sounds are represented. These features activate phoneme units at the phoneme level, which in turn activates word units at the word level.

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14
Q

Evidence that speech perception is multimodal

A

People recognise auditory words more slowly when they are spelling-to-sound consistent (ie. kiss) vs spelling-to-sound inconsistent (ie. pint). This suggests that orthographic codes are also activated during spoken word recognition. McGurk effect also shows that what we “hear” involves an integration of visual (expression, movement of lips) and auditory information.

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15
Q

What is pure word deafness?

A

Severely impaired speech perception, but intact speech production, reading, writing and perception of non-speech sounds.

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16
Q

What does eye-tracking show? 3 things

A

Eyes don’t move smoothly. Readers spend more time fixating on content words, but less on function words. Readers also tend to skip short, predictable and common words.

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17
Q

How do we comprehend sentences? 2 ways

A
  1. Parsing
  2. Analysis of Meaning
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17
Q

What is parsing?

A

Analysing the grammatical structure of a sentence. Involves breaking the sentence down, and figuring out what the subject, verb and object is. Based on a language’s grammar

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18
Q

What is analysis of meaning?

A

After parsing, you need to extract meaning from the sentence.

19
Q

What parsing models are there?

A
  1. One stage
  2. Two stage
20
Q

What is the garden-path model?

A

It is a 2-stage model that says that when we see a sentence, we parse it using the simplest possible syntactic structure, using grammatical principles, without consideration of the sentence’s meaning.

21
Q

What is the constraint-based theory?

A

One-stage model that assumes that sources of information are processed at the same time when trying to understand a sentence.

22
Q

How does the constraint-based theory work?

A

Syntactic structure receiving the most support from various sources of information will be most highly activated and ranked. Confusion occurs when incorrect syntactic structure is activated more than the correct one.

23
Q

Why are people so prone to errors?

A

People may be relying on heuristics to simplify task of understanding sentences. One such heuristic is that the subject of a sentence is the agent of some action.

24
Q

What are different types of inferences? 3 types

A
  1. Logical Inferences
  2. Elaborative Inferences
  3. Bridging Inferences
25
Q

What is pragmatics?

A

Focuses on intended rather than literal meaning of speakers. Using the social context and other information to work out the intended meaning of what is said.

26
Q

Which groups of people are less likely to to make use of common ground during communication?

A
  1. Speakers with low inhibitory control
  2. Speakers with autism spectrum disorder
27
Q

What is a morpheme?

A

Unit of meaning; words consist of one or more morphemes.

28
Q

What is a phoneme?

A

Meaningful sound in a spoken language; part of the phonology of a word.

29
Q

What is the tip-of-the-tongue state?

A

The frustration experienced by speakers when they have an idea or concept in mind but can’t find the appropriate word to express it.

30
Q

What is a clause?

A

A group of words within a sentence that contains a subject and a verb.

31
Q

What is spreading activation?

A

The notion that activation of a word or node within the brain causes some activation to spread to several related words or nodes.

32
Q

What is agrammatism?

A

A condition in which speech production lacks grammatical structure; many function words and word endings are omitted.

33
Q

What is the word superiority effect?

A

The finding that a target letter is detected faster when presented in words than in non-words.

34
Q

What is the lexical decision task?

A

When strings of letters are presented and the task is to decide as rapidly as possible whether each string is a word or a non-word.

35
Q

What are saccades?

A

Rapid eye movements that are separated by eye fixations - movements during reading when the eyes remain still and information is picked from the text.

36
Q

What is a grapheme?

A

Basic unit of written language that corresponds to a phoneme; a word consists of one or more graphemes.

37
Q

What is the word frequency effect?

A

The finding that words often occurring in a language are processed more easily than words rarely occurring in the language.

38
Q

What is the age-of-acquisition effect?

A

The finding that words learned early in life are easier to process than words learned later in life.

39
Q

What is semantic priming?

A

The finding that a target word is identified faster after a semantically related prime word than after an unrelated prime.

40
Q

What is the egocentric heuristic?

A

A rule of thumb in which listeners rely solely on their own knowledge when interpreting what speakers are saying rather than the common ground between them; can inhibit effective communication.

41
Q

What are the levels in speech production’s spreading activation?

A
  1. Semantic
  2. Syntactic
  3. Morphological
  4. Phonological
42
Q

Factors that increase planning in speech

A
  1. Speed of speech -> Slow speakers tend to engage in more planning
  2. Simplicity of sentence -> More planning before producing simple sentences
  3. Cognitive load -> More planning when speakers are operating under low cognitive load x
43
Q

What was Dell et al’s study?

A

Hypothesised that a high proportion of speech errors of expert speakers should be anticipatory. Assessed the effects of practice on total errors -> number of errors decreased with increased practice. However, anticipatory proportion increased. In general, negative relationship between anticipatory proportion and overall error rate.

44
Q

What levels does speech planning occur?

A

Phrase, clause, sentence.

45
Q

Why do speech errors occur?

A

When incorrect items get more activated than the correct one, but we tend to form more words than non-words.

46
Q

What is word meaning deafness?

A

A condition in which there is selective impairment of the ability to understand spoken (but not written) language.

47
Q

Pro and Con of TRACE model

A

The model’s emphasis on top-down processes allows it to account for the word superiority effect. However, the model exaggerates the importance of top-down processes and ignores the role played by orthographic information in speech perception.

48
Q

What does the distributed cohort model show?

A

Shows that monosyllabic spoken words can also be processed with distributed representations, in which individual nodes no longer represent meaningful information, but in which information is encoded by activation patterns across a whole layer. This model can simulate human performance without the need of semantic top down processes.

49
Q

How do we recognise words with inconsistent letter-sound correspondences?

A

We have orthography-based word recognition (that’s why we can pronounce “yacht”)

50
Q

What is the good enough hypothesis?

A

Hypothesis that people will often misunderstand details of syntactically complex sentences if they are not motivated to process the sentence in full detail.

PL3103: Cognitive Psychology (12 decks)

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