Week 2-Language Part 1

Question 1

What is language?

Answer 1

-A uniquely human communication system compared to other animals

-finite set of elements (i.e., building blocks) + combinatorial rules (syntax, grammar, combining in different ways), allowing us to create an infinite number of utterances

Question 2

How does human language differ compared to non-human primates?

Answer 2

-Other species communicate, but this is not remotely comparable to the expressive (desires) capacities of human language

Non-human primates: message confined to here and now (i.e., present e.g., I’m hungry now)

Human language: past, future, possibility

Question 3

Where are representations stored and what is the mental lexicon?

Answer 3

-Representations are stored in the mental lexicon (ML)

-ML: A mental ‘catalogue’ of words, like a mental dictionary (The average person has about 50,000 words in their ML)

Question 4

What type of information about a word is stored in the mental lexicon? (Language building block 1)

Answer 4

1. Spelling
2. Pronunciation
3. Meaning
4. Grammatical category (verb? noun?)

Question 5

What are Phonemes? (Language building block 2)

Answer 5

-The sound units of language

-Allows the discrimination between words: /r/, /s/, and /m/ are distinct phonemes as they allow the differentiation between rat, sat, and mat

-Combining them in different ways forms different words with varying meanings e.g., from cat to mat

Question 6

Give some examples of Spoonerisms

Answer 6

1. He raised his toast to the Queen ‘The queer old dean!’
2. Glorified British farmers as ‘noble tons of soils

-These are examples of speech errors where the phonemes are shuffled around showing evidence that they are different entities

Question 7

What are Spoonerisms?

Answer 7

■ The exchange of sounds, pointing to the existence of phonemic units

Correct target: Missed history lessons
Error: Hissed mystery lessons

Question 8

How many phonemes are there across the world’s languages?

Answer 8

■ Over 100 phonemes across 40 or so in English

■ Infants can distinguish between most phonemes
but then tune in to their native language ones by the age of one (Kuhl et al, 1992) i.e., becomes specialised

Question 9

How are some phonemes more equal than others?

Answer 9

■ A book for geeks
■ A geek for books
Both end in s (Stranded-carries some meaning in itself i.e., indicates plurality)

■ Morphological stranding

Question 10

What are Morphemes?

Answer 10

■ The smallest units in the language that carry meaning

■ Words can be morphologically simple and complex (depends on the language e.g., English doesn’t carry complex morphology)

■ Complex words contain more than one morpheme

■ dog + s
■ build + er

■ Morphological overlap affects word identification

Question 11

What are Syllables?

Answer 11

■ Rhythmic unit of language

■ One vowel, with or without surrounding consonants

Question 12

What evidence is to suggest there is mental representations for forming syllables? McCarthy (1982)

Answer 12

■ Evidence from expletive infixation rule

Outrageous
Out-bloody-rageous (the main stress is on bloody)

■ “The insertion of expletive is only possible in words with multiple syllables, where the word has the main stress preceded by a secondary stress and preferably an unstressed syllable”

Question 13

What is stress in relation to language?

Answer 13

■Relative emphasis to certain syllables
■Can alter the meaning of a word

REcord reCORD
CONtent conTENT

■Some patients can correctly produce the individual phonemes but stress the wrong syllable (e.g., CV, Cappa et al, 1997) (Shows this information is encoded separately from phonemes representations)

Question 14

What is the summary of how building blocks form language?

Answer 14

Phonological and semantic features (related to word sound and meaning) (words/morphemes/phonemes)
+
Grammatical features (for building words and
sentences) (syllables/stress)

Question 15

What are the key aspects of language processing?

Answer 15

■ Progressively complex

■ Multiple levels of analysis

■ Bottom-up (increasing complexity i.e., low levels of perceptual analysis to more complex analysis e.g., grammatical rules, combining words etc.,) and top-down (naturalistic language processing i.e., what happens everyday e.g., noisy environment=misses some information BUT can figure out context based off environment e.g., you figure out if someone asked if you wanted a drink as you’re in a pub)

Question 16

Neurobiological architecture the first insights from neuropsychology: What did Paul Broca (1824-1880) find?

Answer 16

■ Patient Tan, lesion in the left inferior frontal lobe (confirmed post-mortem)

■ Impaired production, relatively intact comprehension (i.e., language impairment-could understand what was said but couldn’t produce speech apart from the word tan)

Question 17

Neurobiological architecture the first insights from neuropsychology: What did Karl Wernicke (1848-1905) find?

Answer 17

■ Lesion in the left posterior temporal lobe (confirmed post-mortem with several patients)

■ Fluent but disordered production, impaired
comprehension (speech was unintelligible)

Question 18

What is the Broca-Wernicke-Gershwind model?

Answer 18

-Heavily influenced by neuropsychological cases

2 key features of this model:
1. Language was recruiting one of the 2 hemispheres in the brain (the LH)
2. The natural for language is a bilateral network which is asymmetrical in most individuals (serious set of processes with different functions i..e, one happens after the other) These functions are parallel to another e.g., low level perceptual analysis then looking for phonemes, grammar etc.,

-Different areas of the brain has different roles e.g., acoustic features in case of spoken words (auditory primary cortex) or spatial features in case of written words (visual cortex)

Question 19

What is the ‘dual pathway model’ of language
processing?

Answer 19

-Post-MRI

 Commonly activated regions: left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca’s area), superior, middle and inferior temporal gyri in both hemispheres (Hickok & Poeppel, 2007) (i.e., crucial for language)

(Catani & Thiebaut de Schotten, 2008; Yeh et al., 2018):
 Also major role of the white matter tracts, especially arcuate fasciculus (dorsal stream-retrieving phonological information i.e., how it sounds) and the extreme capsule (ventral stream-mapping the word meanings) important for healthy language processing and production

 Partially consistent with the old neuropsychological findings, but way more complex and not strictly left-lateralised

Question 20

What are current views on the language network? (Hodgson et al., 2022)

Answer 20

-Determined from a meta-analysis looking at 30-50 brain imaging studies which isolated specific brain areas during a specific task

■ An extensive set of interconnected regions. Left-hemisphere dominant, but encompassing both hemispheres.

■ The involvement of the RH depends on task difficulty and the type of stimuli involved.

■ Different parts of the network engaged depending on the task (comprehension / production) and the input modality (written / spoken language).

■ Brain regions do not act in isolation: interactions are the rule.

Question 21

What has written language been like throughout history?

Answer 21

-Recent cultural invention

■ The earliest known system: pictographs (Mesopotamia 4000 BC)

■ Alphabetic scripts emerged even later (Greece 1000 BC)

-Evolutionary newcomer, yet we are expert readers with fixed brain circuitry attuned to reading

Question 22

Writing systems: What are the Major Types?

Answer 22

■ Logographic: unique symbol for each word/morpheme (Chinese)

■ Syllabic: unique symbol for each syllable (hiragana, katakana)

■ Alphabetic: unique (ish) symbol for each phoneme (English, Russian, etc.)

-Diverse, but sharing multiple visual features: limited number of recurring shapes, contrasting contours, an average of three strokes per character (Dehaene, 2009

Question 23

How is sound-meaning mapping encoded?

Answer 23

■ An interplay between print (what it looks like), sound and meaning

■ The same quest, regardless of the script used – divergence is deceptive

■ Local differences due to specificities of individual orthographies

Question 24

Illustration: What is the role of regularity?

Answer 24

■ In alphabetic languages, lots of variation in the amount of correspondence between phonemes and letters:
English, Hebrew:
letters or groups of letters represent different sounds in different contexts (deep orthography) e.g. ou in cough, through, dough and four (written the same way but pronounced differently)

Finnish, Spanish:
consistent correspondence between letters and
phonemes (shallow orthography i.e., the letters always sound the same)

(English spelling is influenced by two rather different language families - Germanic &
Romance - so it often seems arbitrary and erratic)

-Their is a balance between an accurate representation of sound and the fast transmission of meaning:
1. English: 26 letters, 44 phonemes. Many short words that could not be distinguished if written phonetically (maid-made, muscles-mussels, eye-I)
hence encoded through complex spelling. Once learnt, it is efficient in getting straight to the meaning

2. Finnish: long words, rich morphology. Can afford to go 1-on-1 on sound representation

Question 25

What are the basic findings on reading?

Answer 25

■ Real words are read faster than nonwords (words created in lab OR different language with meaning unknown)

■ Regular words (mint) are read faster than irregular words (pint)

■ Frequent words (rage) are read faster than infrequent words (ire) (i.e., words we are familiar with)

■ Regularity x Frequency interaction

Question 26

What are the components of the reading process?

Answer 26

■ Extracting the information from visual input (visual sampling, eye movements)

■ Letter recognition

■ Access to the orthographic lexicon
and/or
■ Grapheme to phoneme conversion (implementing the rules used from school)

■ Retrieval of word meaning

Question 27

What is involved in the eye movements during reading?

Answer 27

■ Fixations bring text in the foveal vision

■ Average fixation lasts about 200-250 ms

■ Average saccade length is 8 letters approx.

■ 10-15% of the time readers move backwards

■ Parafoveal vision – length and some letter
information

Question 28

What are the 2 stages in letter recognition? (Miozzo & Caramazza, 1998)

Answer 28

1. Recognition of the letter’s visual characteristics (e.g., the strokes, where the line intercepts etc.,)
2. Recognition of the letter’s identity (e.g., a = A)

-A patient with alexia have difficulties recognising the identity of the letter even though they know it is a real letter (although can recognise objects)

Question 29

What brain areas are involved in letter recognition?

Answer 29

 Alexic patients: lesions in the L posterior regions close to the fusiform gyrus

 Neuroimaging: letter processing activates the L
fusiform gyrus, especially the Visual Word Form
Area (VWFA)

 VWFA extracts the identity of the letter string,
regardless of size, shape and position (Cohen et al., 2000)

Question 30

How was letter recognition measured? (Dehaene et al., 2001)

Answer 30

■ Visual priming experiment (showed first word for 29ms then second word for 500ms both the same in different fonts)

■ Classification task on target words (asked whether it was a real word)

■ Primes masked and briefly presented

-Change of the case (font) does not affect reaction
times!

-It takes as long as 29ms to recognise a letter

Question 31

What is the orthographic lexicon?

Answer 31

■ The orthographic lexicon stores representations of spelling for thousands of familiar words

■ They are activated when we read a known, familiar word

■ This is then followed by obtaining the meaning of the word from the semantic system

Question 32

How do we convert Graphemes to Phonemes?

Answer 32

■ We can also read new words or pseudowords (i.e., non-words): mave* churp* wardonl*

■ In order to do that, we must be able to assemble the pronunciation from the letters (in fact, we have not encountered these sequences before)

■ This suggests that word processing might rely on partially distinct mechanisms for regular words, irregular words and pseudowords

Question 33

What is the Dual-route cascaded (DRC) model? (Coltheart et al., 2001)

Answer 33

■ ‘Race’ between lexical and non-lexical routes

■ Lexical route faster for words

■ Lexical route is frequency weighted; regular < irregular

■ Non-lexical route faster for pseudowords

Lesioned computational model:
■ Damage to non-lexical route –> lexicalisation problems (‘mave’ becomes ‘cave’)
■ Damage to lexical route –> slow to read irregular words

Question 34

What evidence from patients backs the DRC model?

Answer 34

■ Patients that have reading problems, but only with pseudowords

■ Lexicalisation errors: ‘mave’ instead of ‘cave’
■ Phonological dyslexia

Seen in Patients:
RG (Beauvois & Derouesne, 1979)
GRN (Shallice & Warrington, 1980)
AM (Patterson, 1982)

■ Other patients that have reading problems with words with irregular spelling (mint, hint, print, tint,…pint)
■ Surface dyslexia

Seen in Patients:
HTR (Shallice, 1983)
KT (McCharty & Warrington, 1986)

Question 35

What is a summary for the DRC Model?

Answer 35

■ DRC accounts well for neuropsychological data

■ It also accounts well for experimental data
– Regular words are processed faster
– High frequency words are also processed faster
– There is also a regularity x frequency interaction

 However, DRC is fully hardwired. There is not learning component in the model (shortcoming!).

Question 36

What are the Triangle models of reading? (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989; Harm & Seidenberg, 2004)

Answer 36

 Learning of correspondences between spelling and sound in a semi-regular system (English - systematic but with many irregularities)

 Fully interactive

 Interconnected semantic, orthographic and phonological units

 Single mechanism for reading regular, irregular and pseudowords

■ Words represented as patterns of semantic, orthographic and phonological units.

Question 37

What is Letter to sound correspondence?

Answer 37

 Strong connections emerge between the units that are more often co-activated. This is an effect of learning.

Question 38

How does the Triangle model work with pseudowords?

Answer 38

 Phonological units and their connections to orthographic units are of particular relevance for pseudowords. Pseudowords have no meaning, so the contribution from semantic units is limited.

 Reading of pseudowords is particularly affected following damage to phonological units.

Question 39

How does the Triangle model work with irregular words?

Answer 39

 Orthographic and semantic units and the connections between them are critical for the recognition of irregular words.

 Reading of irregular words is particularly affected following damage to orthographic units

Question 40

What is the link between Triangle models and experimental data?

Answer 40

■ Can successfully simulate the performance of healthy readers

■ Better reading of frequent words, better reading of regular words, frequency by regularity interaction

Question 41

How can you discriminate between models?

Answer 41

■ Both types of models can account for basic experimental findings in normal reading

■ Both models can account for neuropsychological data

■ Both focus on the English writing system

■ Neither really specifies how they are implemented in the brain

Question 42

What evidence is there for visual word processing in the brain? (Marinkovic et al., 2003)

Answer 42

-In the first 150 to 170ms, you see the activation of the occipital cortex (basic visual processing)

-After 250ms the activation stretches forward where the visual word is activated (important for recognition)

-Between 320 and 420ms, the activation stretches even further reaching the anterior temporal lobe and part of the inferior frontal gyrus

Question 43

What is the Neuronal recycling hypothesis? (Dehaene, 2009)

Answer 43

■ The ‘neuronal recycling’ hypothesis: visual word recognition is a result of recycling cortical structures whose initial functions were for object recognition e.g., the fusiform gyrus now specialised to recognise symbols and lines.

■ In accord with evidence showing positive correlation between complexity of lines in writing symbols and that found in image fragments (natural scenes).

■ This could be the key factor that determined the visual appearance of written symbols.