language

Question 1

language

Answer 1

a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enable us to express our feelings thoughts ideas and experiences

Question 2

the hierarchical nature of language

Answer 2

small components that can be combined to form larger unitsq

Question 3

rule based nature of language

Answer 3

components can be arranged in certain ways but not in other ways

Question 4

language is universal

Answer 4

language is universal because it happens wherever there is people

• deaf children invent sign language
• all cultures have a language
• language development is similar across cultures

Question 5

language is unique but the same

Answer 5

diff words sounds and rules for language bu they all use verbs, nouns, tenses etc.

Question 6

B. F Skinner

Answer 6

B. F Skinner 1957

• the main proponent of behaviourism
• language is learned through reinforcement.
• children learn language by being rewarded for using correct language and punished (or not rewarded) for using incorrect language.

Question 7

Noam Chomsky

Answer 7

Noam Chomsky

• linguist –> human language is coded in the genes.
• criticised behaviorism –> changing the focus of the young discipline of psycholinguistics
• children produce sentences that they have never heard and that have never been reinforced. (“I hate you, Mommy.”)

Question 8

psycholinguistics

Answer 8

the field concerned with the psychological study of language.

-The goal is to discover the psychological processes by which humans acquire and process language

Question 9

psycholinguistics, the 4 major concerns

Answer 9

1) Comprehension: How do people understand spoken and written language?
2) Speech production: How do people produce language? physical processes of speech production and the mental processes)
3) Representation. How is language represented in the mind and in the brain? ( how people group words together & make connections between different parts of a story)
4) Acquisition. How do people learn language?

Question 10

timeline of children learning language

Answer 10

Children produce their first words during their second year (sometimes a little earlier, sometimes later) and, after a slow start, begin adding words rapidly until, by the time they have become adults, they can understand more than 50,000 different words

Question 11

lexicon

Answer 11

all words a person understands

Question 12

phoneme

Answer 12

shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of the word

• The ‘m’ sound, often written as /m/, is an example of a phoneme.
• For example, if you say the word ‘sun,’ you will hear that there are three sound units, or phonemes, in that word: /s/ /u/ /n/.

Question 13

morphemes

Answer 13

smallest units of language that have a definable meaning or a grammatical function.
- “truck” consists of a number of phonemes, but only one morpheme, because none of the components that create the word truck mean anything.

bedroom” has two syllables and two morphemes, because each syllable, “bed” and “room,” has a meaning.

endings such as “s” and “ed,” have no meanings in themselves, they are considered morphemes because they change the meaning of a word.

Question 14

speech segmentation

Answer 14

Our ability to perceive individual words even though there are often no pauses between words

• knowing the meanings of words helps us perceive them..
• that certain sounds are more likely to follow one another within a word // some sounds are more likely to be separated by the space between two words.

Question 15

Word superiority effect

Answer 15

letters are easier to recognise when they are contained in a word than when they appear alone or are contained in a nonword.

Question 16

Neuropsychology:

Answer 16

the study of brain- damaged patients syntax and semantics are processed in different areas of the brain.

• brocas aphasia and wernickes aphasia

Question 17

brocas aphasia/area

Answer 17

brocas area in frontal lobe and linked to syntax (structure of sentences)
had difficulties producing speech (slow, laboured, ungrammatical speech) and often trouble understanding

Question 18

wernickes aphasia/area

Answer 18

• area in the temporal lobe (Wernicke’s area) involved in language comprehension (semantics)
• produced speech that was fluent and grammatically correct but tended to be incoherent and unable to understand speech and writing.

Question 19

semantics

Answer 19

meanings of words and sentences;

Question 20

syntax

Answer 20

specifies the rules for combining words into sentences.

Question 21

Parsing

Answer 21

• the grouping of words into phrases
• central process to determining the meaning of a sentence
• As we read or listen to a sentence, we encounter a series of words, one following another. As this happens, the meaning of a sentence unfolds

Question 22

garden path sentences

Answer 22

• Sentences which begin appearing to mean one thing but then end up meaning something else ( “leading a person down the garden path,” which means misleading the person.)

Question 23

temporary ambiguity

Answer 23

Garden path sentences show temporary ambiguity

• initial words of the sentence are ambiguous—they can lead to more than one meaning—but the meaning is made clear by the end of the sentence.

Question 24

THE SYNTAX -FIRST APPROACH TO PARSING – Lynn Frazier

Answer 24

grouping of words into phrases is governed by a number of rules that are based on syntax

Question 25

late closure

Answer 25

when a person encounters a new word, the person’s parsing mechanism assumes that this word is part of the current phrase, so each new word is added to the current phrase for as long as possible

Question 26

late closure

Answer 26

when a person encounters a new word, the person’s parsing mechanism assumes that this word is part of the current phrase, so each new word is added to the current phrase for as long as possible

• late closure is useful because it often leads to the correct parsing.
• other factors in addition to syntax may be influencing parsing right from the beginning, rather than waiting until halfway through the sentence.
• reparse the sentence so “the piano” is not added to the first phrase. Instead, it becomes part of the second phrase to create the grouping
• [After the musician played] [the piano was wheeled off the stage].
• late closure is useful because it often leads to the correct parsing.

Question 27

interactionist approach to parsing

Answer 27

information provided by both syntax and semantics is taken into account simultaneously as we read or listen to a sentence

• how the meaning of words in a sentence can influence parsing right from the beginning.
• some sentences that have the same structure but depend on the meanings of the words, can be either ambiguous or not ambiguous.

Question 28

visual world paradigm

Answer 28

determining how subjects process information as they are observing a visual scene.

Question 29

visual world paradigm apple experiment

Answer 29

• subjects’ eye movements were measured as they saw objects on a table, (the two-apple condition) or (the one-apple condition).
• Told to carry out the following instructions:
• Place the apple on the towel in the box.
• The beginning of this sentence, “Place the apple on the towel,” can be initially interpreted in either of two ways:
• Interpretation 1: The relevant apple is the one on the towel.
• Interpretation 2: Move the apple onto the towel.
• The interactionist approach to parsing predicts that when there are two apples in the scene and listeners hear “Put the apple,” they’ll expect the speaker to immediately include information to let them know which apple he or she is talking about and so will pick Interpretation 1.
• To determine if this occurred, Tanenhaus measured subjects’ eye movements as they were listening to the instructions.
• Many subjects looked first at the apple on the napkin in response to “Put the apple” (eye movement 1), and then moved to the apple that is on the towel in response to “on the towel” (eye movement 2). This means the subject is interpreting the beginning of the sentence as identifying which apple is to be moved, as predicted by the interactionist approach.
• Then, upon hearing “in the box” the eyes moved to the box (eye movement 3).

*****The important result of this experiment is that the way subjects interpret the sentence, as indicated by their eye movements, is determined by the scene they are observing.

Question 30

Making predictions based on knowledge about the environment

Answer 30

Visual paradigm= we aren’t actively interacting with the environment but continually using our knowledge of the environment to make predictions about what we are about to read or hear.

• we take the “statistics” (our knowledge of what is most likely to occur) of the environment to determine meaning.
• knowledge of the environment affects sentence understanding goes beyond just individual words.

Question 31

readers also make predictions based on their knowledge of how their language is constructed.

Answer 31

• a verb like “warned” can occur either as a main verb (MV) in a sentence, as in [11], or be contained in a relative clause (RC), as in [12]
• According to corpora of the English language (corpora is the plural of corpus) the MV construction in [11] is more likely.

Question 32

ambiguity effect

Answer 32

• words in the ambiguous sentences took longer to read than the same words in the unambiguous sentences.
• The longer time for the RC ambiguous sentences, compared to the unambiguous RC sentences, is the ambiguity effect.

**the role of experience in language processing by showing that the subjects adjusted their expectations about the RC sentences so that these structures eventually became easier to process.

Question 33

intereferences

Answer 33

• determining what the text means by using our knowledge to go beyond the information provided by the text.
• In stories, sentences in one part of the story are related to sentences in other parts of the story
• reader must be able to understand these relationships to create a coherent, understandable story.

Question 34

coherence

Answer 34

coherence—the representation of the text in a person’s mind so that information in one part of the text is related to information in another part of the text.

Coherence can be created by a number of different types of inference.

Question 35

anaphoric intereference

Answer 35

• Inferences that connect an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence are called anaphoric inferences.
• Riffifi, the famous poodle, won the dog show. She has now won the last three shows she has entered.
• not very difficult

Question 36

instrument interference

Answer 36

• Inferences about tools or methods that were used in language are instrument inferences.
• when “William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet while he was sitting at his desk,” we infer from what we know about the time Shakespeare lived that he was probably using a quill pen (not a laptop computer!) and that his desk was made of wood.

Question 37

causal intereference

Answer 37

• Inferences that the events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous sentence are causal inferences
• Sharon took an aspirin. Her headache went away. we make an anaphoric inference that “Her” refers to Sharon, and we make a causal inference that taking the aspirin caused the headache to go away (Singer et al., 1992).

Question 38

situational model approach

Answer 38

• is a mental representation of what a text is about
• This approach proposes that the mental representation people form as they read a story does not consist of information about phrases, sentences, or paragraphs; instead, it is a representation of the situation in terms of the people, objects, locations, and events being described in the story

Question 39

the given new contract

Answer 39

speaker should construct sentences so that they include two kinds of information:

(1) given information—information that the listener already knows;
(2) new information—information that the listener is hearing for the first time

Question 40

joint action

Answer 40

a form of joint action,” Clark proposes that understanding this joint action involves considering both the content of a conversation, in terms of given and new information, and the process by which people share information.

Question 41

when we don’t use given new contract…

Susan Haviland and Herbert Clark (1974)

Answer 41

presented pairs of sentences and asking subjects to press a button when they thought they understood the second sentence in each pair.

took longer for subjects to comprehend the second sentence in pairs like this one:
We checked the picnic supplies. The beer was warm.

it did not take as long to comprehend the second sentence in pairs like this one:

We got some beer out of the trunk. The beer was warm.

• the second sentence in the first pair takes longer is that the given information (that there were picnic supplies) does not mention beer –> reader has to make inference that beer was among the picnic supplies.
• This inference is not required in the second pair because the first sentence includes the information that there is beer in the trunk.
• The idea of given and new captures the collaborative nature of conversations. Herbert Clark (1996) sees collaboration as being central to the understanding of language.

Question 42

common ground

Answer 42

• the speakers’ mutual knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions
• mutual: for a conversation to be successful, each person needs to understand the knowledge that the other person brings to the conversation.
• Ellen Isaacs and Clark (1987) illustrate this idea with the example of how doctors usually assume that their patients have limited knowledge of physiology and medical terminology.
• establish common ground is through the back-and-forth exchanges during the conversation.

Question 43

syntatic coordination

Answer 43

Syntactic Coordination

- The process by which people use similar grammatical constructions is called syntactic coordination.

Question 44

syntactic priming

Answer 44

• When two people exchange statements in a conversation, it is common for them to use similar grammatical constructions.
• This copying of form reflects a phenomenon called syntactic priming—hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction.
• Syntactic priming is important because it can lead people to coordinate the grammatical form of their statements during a conversation.

Question 45

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:

Answer 45

language influences thought

Question 46

goluboy, and siniy russian colours

Answer 46

According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the nature of a culture’s language can affect the way people think
- colours will be perceived as different, this effect does not occur for English-speakers because all of the colours are simply called blue. These results, therefore, support the Sapir-Whorf idea that language can affect cognition.

goluboy - light blue is a different colour from siniy (dark blue)