Language Flashcards
(38 cards)
State the 4 aspects of language.
Phonology.
Syntax.
Semantics.
Pragmatics.
What is phonology?
Languages have phonemes as their basic auditory unit. This is difficult for adults to re-learn.
What is syntax?
This is how utterances are made.
Word order is fairly fixed in English but more flexible in languages like German.
Explain the Garden Path effect.
This is where even though a sentence is grammatically correct, the reader is still likely to get its meaning wrong. It is usually necessary to re-read the sentence and add a word.
What are semantics?
Semantics is the study of meaning.
What are pragmatics?
Why people say certain things.
Name the 3 Gricean maxims of pragmatics and what each of them means.
Maxim of quality - making a contribution which is true.
Maxim of quantity - making a contribution which is as informative as required.
Maxim of relation - making a contribution which is relevant.
These maxims may not be consistent over countries.
What is bottom-up?
Perceiving what is already out there in the world.
What can effect the pronunciation of phonemes?
The context.
What is the phonemic restoration effect (top-down effect)?
Although a sentence is interrupted, people still fill in the word. The brain fills in the missing phoneme. This is usually filled in correctly.
What is the McGurk effect?
This effect illustrates the multimodal nature of perception.
E.g. what we hear is affected by our visual perception.
What is the TRACE speech perception model (McClelland & Elman)?
This model explains the relationships among auditory features, phonemes and words.
It is an explicit connectionist model.
Name a strength and a weakness of the TRACE speech perception model.
Strength: the model is very explicit.
Weakness: the model can be hard to interpret.
Briefly explain how we read new words in English.
Over 90% of words in English are pronounced with the same grapheme-phoneme rules as known words.
If the new word has similar regular and irregular words this is harder to read.
When is language first learnt?
In the womb.
What is one of the first aspects of language to be learnt?
The language’s parameters (e.g. subject-verb-object).
Briefly explain what the critical period vs sensitive period of a language is.
The critical period of a language suggests that language is learnt when a specific event/stimulus occurs in a very specific time frame.
The sensitive period of language suggests that there is a period of maximal sensitivity but we can still learn a new language past this period, although less efficiently.
What was Noam Chomsky’s view on language?
Chomsky believed that children were born with a lot of knowledge (nature view). Children only need a small number of presentations to link the concept to the word.
Define poverty of stimulus (Chomsky).
Language is not learnt solely through experience as children are not exposed to every feature of their language (there is not enough rich data in their linguistic environments).
Which models show us how it is possible to learn from very little data?
Bayesian models (e.g. tufas example).
Name some language characteristics which are unique to humans.
Vocabulary size, grammatical complexity, recurvisity, rich and systematic language that develops with the help of children from impoverished situations, transmission from one generation to the next.
Language doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Name some concepts that build on language.
Auditory perceptual abilities, visual abilities, long-term memory abilities, spatial abilities, working memory abilities.
Name at least 5 methods for studying language.
Mistakes humans make, brain imaging, language perception in brain damaged patients, temporarily damaging/enhancing brain areas (TMS), machine translation systems, questionnaires, cross-cultural studies, eye movement studies of reading.
What can eye movement studies tell us about written language perception?
Boundary technique, moving window technique, gaze contingent technique (what the viewer experiences), computational models that predict next fixation.
