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33 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Define language. |
System ofcommunication using arbitrary sounds or symbols to express feelings, thoughts,ideas, and experiences
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When is language uniquely human? |
When it is defined as having complex grammar and productivity. (But all animals have the ability to communicate) |
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What are some characteristics of language? |
- Governed by rules - Creative - Universal - Hierarchial organization |
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In what ways is language universal? |
- All cultures have a language with nouns, verbs, past/present tenses, etc. - Everyone with normal capacity develops language easily - Language development in infants develops at similar rates/stages across cultures - We are driven to communicate even when we don't have the capacity to (i.e. sign language) |
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What are the hierarchial components of language and their definitions? |
- Phonemes: shortest segments of speech (i.e. "duh", "guh", or "fuh" sounds) - Morphemes: smallest units that have meaning/function (i.e. "chase-ing", "dog-s") - Semantics: the actual words & their meanings - Syntax: structures of phrases & sentences - Discourse: larger texts longer than a sentence (includes aspects such as sarcasm & prosody) |
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What is phonology? |
The production of phonemes |
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What are the subcomponents of phonology? |
- Voicing: whether vocal folds vibrate (i.e. z, d, b, v) or not (i.e. s, t, p, f) - Manner of production: whether air is fully stopped (i.e. b, p, d, t) or restricted (i.e. z, s, v, f) - Place of articulation: where in the mouth the air is restricted--closing of lips (i.e. b, p), top teeth against bottom lip (i.e. v, f), or tongue behind upper teeth (i.e. d, t, z, s) |
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Why is speech perception complex? |
Because of phonological ambiguity--most words don't have clear boundaries when looking at a voice recording, and some phrases sound much like others (i.e. "The sky is falling" vs. "This guy is falling"), but we are still easily able to segment speech naturally. |
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How do we differentiate between phonemes? |
Through categorical perception: we are very senstitive to between-category differences (i.e. p vs. b), but not to within category differences (i.e. one p vs. another p), so we listen to the vibrations of the phonemes until we reach a point where we can clearly and instantly identify which phoneme we're hearing |
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What information is associated with each word that a person knows? |
- Phonology: the sequence of phonemes that make up the word - Orthography: how the word is spelled - Syntax: how to combine the word with other words - Semantics: what the word means |
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What is the generativity of words? |
Says that vocabulary is fluid--we can create new words (i.e. hardware, malware) and words can adopt new meanings (i.e. being "hacked" by a hacker) |
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What is the referent of a word? |
The actual object, action, or event in the world that a word refers to (i.e. conceptual information, semantic knowledge) Note: not every word has a referent (i.e. unicorn) |
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What is lexical ambiguity? |
When a word has multiple meanings associated to it (i.e. straw, bug) |
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What experiment demonstrated lexical ambiguity through cross-modal priming? |
Swinney: participants listened to a sentence about "bugs" while performing a lexical decision task for the words: ant, spy, & hat |
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What were the results of Swinney's lexical ambiguity experiment? |
Results: immediately after hearing "bugs" people responded equally as fast for "ant" and "spy", meaning that both meanings were primed in their minds. However, after a delay, "ant" was the quicker response because the participants had time to process the meaning of the sentence and were then primed for the correct meaning of the word "bug".
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What is the difference between an interlingual homograph and a cognates? |
Interlingual homograph: a word that has the same spelling in different languages, but different meanings across those languages Cognates: words that are spelled the same and have the same meanings across different languages |
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How do interlingual homographs and cognates affect word-processing speeds in bilinguals? |
Interlingual homographs interfere with processing because they are ambiguous Cognates facilitate faster processing because they have the same meaning in both languages |
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What experiment tested bilinguals on interlingual homographs? |
Libbon & Titone: had bilinguals read either low-constraint sentences (open-ended) or high-constraint sentences (directed towards a target word), then tested their reading times in early measure and late measures |
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What were the results of Libbon & Titone's interlingual homograph experiment? |
- For early measures: whether the sentence was high or low constraint, the reading time was always slower than for the control sentence because participants didn't have time to process meaning of ambiguous word - For late measures: when sentence was high-constraint, participants now read just as fast as the control sentence because they had guidance and a little extra time to process the meaning of the ambiguous word |
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What was the main point of Libbon & Titone's interlingual homograph experiment? |
That, in bilingual processing-- - both languages are important - sensitive to sentence context |
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What are the different types of ambiguity in language? |
- Phonological: words/phrases have similar sounds but different meanings - Lexical: the same words have multiple meanings - Syntactic (global): ambiguous interpretations to a phrase - Syntactic (local): beginning of a sentence is ambiguous...but ending provides clear meaning |
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What is sentence parsing? |
Theprocess of figuring out the syntactic role of each word in a sentence in orderto understand it
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What are garden path sentences and why do they occur? |
Sentences that have locally ambiguous syntax (i.e. "fat people eat accumulates) Occur because people tend to parse sentences incrementally (online parsing) |
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What components of online parsing contribute to the creation of garden path sentences? |
Late closure: new words are assumed to be part of the same phrase Minimal attachment: reader seeks the simplest phrase structure |
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What other things can help us parse sentences? |
- Background knowledge - Extralingual context: outside context aside from our background knowledge (i.e. pictures) - Prosody: patterns of rhythm and pitch changes (i.e. spoken statements vs. questions) - Pragmatics: knowledge of how language is used and how conversations flow |
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What is aphasia? |
Disruption in language due to brain damage |
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What are the two types of aphasias? |
Broca's aphasia: inability to produce language Wernicke's aphasia: inability to comprehend language |
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What are the two hypotheses for how we learn language? |
Imitation and correction Statistical learning (more likely) |
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How do children demonstrate the cons of the imitation and correction theory to learning? |
- Overregularization errors (i.e. putting -ed on any word to make it past tense) - Pluralization capabilities (being able to pluralize words they've never heard before) - Correction from adults doesn't always fix errors |
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What is statistical learning? |
The ability to be able to tell statistically which words go together and which words don't based on their sounds |
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What study demonstrates statistical learning in infants? |
- Saffran, Aslin, & Newport: played infants a string of nonsense syllables, in which there were specific syllables repeated again and again - Results: infants showed surprise to new nonsense syllables, but not the repeated ones from the recording. - Proved that the infants had learned to recognize the repeated syllables just by hearing the recording over and over again, showing that this is most likely how they learn language normally |
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What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? |
Theory that the language you speak changes the way you think and perceive the world, in ways such as: increasing your attention to certain things and your expertise in a certain category |
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What experiment demonstrates the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? |
Color-matching experiment: compared Russian and English speakers' speeds at matching different colors of blue Results: Russian speakers were faster at matching if the two choices came from two different categories (goluboy & siniy), because English speakers don't have this differentiation |
