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SUSS PSY 305 STUDY UNIT 6 Language - Coggle Diagram
SUSS PSY 305 STUDY UNIT 6 Language
Language acquisition
What is language
Language is a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences
Nature vs nurture debate in language acquisition
Nature
According to
Chomsky
(1965), humans are pre-programmed to use language and it
wasn’t something that could be learnt
through the principles of operant conditioning.
human language is coded in the genes
He also believes that there is a
critical period within which language can be fully acquired.
According to Hurford (1991), the critical period for language acquisition ends at puberty.
Arguing against nurture
In his review, Chomsky presented arguments against the behaviorist idea that language can be explained in terms of reinforcements and without reference to the mind.
One of Chomsky’s most persuasive arguments was that as
children learn language
, they
produce sentences that they have never heard and that have never been reinforced
.
(A classic example of a sentence that has been created by many children and that is unlikely to have been taught or reinforced by parents is “I hate you, Mommy.”)
Psycho-linguist
Chomsky’s criticism of behaviourism was an important event in the cognitive revolution and began changing the focus of the young discipline of psycholinguistics, the field
concerned with the psychological study of language
.
The goal of psycholinguistics is to discover the psychological processes by which humans acquire and process language
The
four major concerns
of psycholinguistics are as follows:
Speech production.
How do people produce language?
This includes the physical processes of speech production and the mental processes that occur as a person creates speech
Acquisition.
How do people learn a language?
This includes not only how children learn language but also how people learn additional languages, either as children or later in life.
Comprehension.
How do people understand spoken and written language?
This includes how people process language sounds and understand words
Representation.
How is language represented in the mind and in the brain?
This includes how people group words together into phrases and make connections between different parts of a story, as well as how these processes are related to the activation of the brain.
Nurture
B. F. Skinner, through his behaviourist thought, proposed that
language is learned through reinforcement
.
According to this idea, just as children learn appropriate behaviour by being rewarded for “good” behaviour and punished for “bad” behaviour, children
learn language by being rewarded
for using correct language and punished (or not rewarded) for using incorrect language
Language
There are four broad components to language
Language structure starts with the smallest unit of sound known as
phonemes
.
A phoneme is the
shortest segment of speech
that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word
For example, the word bit contains the phonemes /b/, /i/, and /t/, because we can change bit into pit by
replacing /b/ with /p/
phonemes refer to sounds (in Malay it is called suku-kata), they are not the same as letters
Morphemes
are the smallest unit of language that carries meaning.
There are free morphemes such as “cat” and “play”, and bound morphemes such as “-s” and “-ed”.
Syntax
refers to the rules for combining words into sentences (grammar), while
semantics
refers to the meaning of words and sentences.
lexicon
Our
knowledge about words is stored in our lexicon
, which is a person’s knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words.
HOW PERCEIVING SOUNDS AND LETTERS
IS AFFECTED BY MEANING
SPEECH: THE PHONEMIC RESTORATION EFFECT
The phonemic restoration effect occurs when
phonemes are perceived
in
speech when the sound
of the phoneme
is covered up
by extraneous noise.
In a study by Warren, subjects were able to “Fill in” the missing phoneme based on the context produced by the sentence and the word containing the phoneme.
This is an example of
top-down processing.
Warren also showed that the phonemic restoration effect can be influenced by the meaning of the words that follow the missing phoneme
Speech segmentation
Our ability to
perceive individual words
even
though
there are often
no pauses
between words in the sound signal is called speech segmentation
segmentation is
aided by
knowing the
meanings of words
and being aware of the
context
in which these words occur,
Segmentation is also aided by linguistic which suggests that some sounds go together in words and somesounds are more likely to be separated into two different words
THE WORD SUPERIORITY EFFECT
The word superiority effect refers to the finding that letters are easier to recognize when they are contained in a word than when they appear alone or are contained in a nonword.
This was encapsulated in Reicher's study. When Reicher’s subjects were asked to
identify
which of the two letters they had seen in the original stimulus, they did so more
quickly and accurately when the letter had been part of a word
The word superiority effect shows that letters in words are not processed one by one but that
each letter is affected by the context within which it appears.
Just as context affects how we hear phonemes and words in spoken sentences,
context affects how we see letters in printed words
LEXICAL AMBIGUITY
The existence of
multiple word meaning
s is called lexical ambiguity.
For example, the word bug can refer to an insect, a hidden listening device, or being annoying
For words with
biased dominance
, one meaning of the word is more likely to be recalled - i.e. a tennis player would likely recall the word 'court' to refer to a tennis court as opposed to a justice court..
For words with
balanced dominance
, meanings are equally likely..
Response time for lexical ambiguous words
Accessing the meaning of ambiguous words while reading a sentence is determined by the
word’s dominance
and the
context
created by the sentence
Response time based on word dominance
Balanced dominance
- When a word has two equally likely meanings, both meanings of the words are activated, which
results in slow access
Biased dominance
- When a word has one dominant meaning and one less dominant , only the most frequent meaning of a word is activated, which
results in fast access
Response time based on context
Less dominant meaning in context
- If the less dominant meaning is indicated by the context, it is activated, but so is the more dominant meaning, even though it doesn’t fit the context
(Double activation). This slows down access.
Dominant meaning in context
- If the more dominant meaning is indicated by the context, it is the
only meaning activated, and access is fast.
UNDERSTANDING SENTENCES: PARSING
The
grouping of words into phrases
, called parsing
Garden path sentence
Sentences which begin appearing to mean one thing but then end up meaning something else, are called garden path sentences
Garden path sentences
illustrate temporary ambiguity
, because the 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.
One of the early proposals to explain parsing, and garden path sentences in particular, is called the
syntax-first approach to parsing
.
THE SYNTAX FIRST APPROACH TO PARSING
This approach, proposed by Lynn Frazier (1979, 1987), states that as people read a sentence, their
grouping of words into phrases is governed by
a number of rules that are based on
syntax or linguistic rules.
If, along the way, readers realize there is something wrong with their parsing, then they take other information into account in order to reinterpret the sentence
The syntax-first approach proposes
a number of principles, all based on syntax. One such one principle is called
late closure
Late closure
The principle of late closure states that 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.
For example:
[After the musician played] [the piano was wheeled off the stage] Instead of
[After the musician played the piano was wheel][off stage
Critical look at sytax approach
other researchers have questioned the proposal that syntactic rules like late closure operate alone to determine parsing until it becomes obvious that a correction is needed.
These researchers have provided
evidence to show
that factors, in addition to syntax ,may be
influencing parsing right from the beginning
rather than waiting until halfway through the sentence
THE INTERACTIONIST APPROACH TO PARSING
The idea that information provided by both
syntax
(linguistic rules)
and semantics
(Contextual meaning) is
taken into account simultaneously
as we read or listen to a sentence is called the interactionist approach to parsing
how parsing can be influenced by factors in addition to syntax
MEANING OF WORDS IN A SENTENCE
Semantics play a role in parsing
.
For example in this sentence:
[The spy saw the man with the binoculars,]
This sentence has two meanings, which represent different relationships between the words in the sentence.
[The spy saw the man] [with the binoculars] or
[The spy saw] [the man with the binoculars].
But if we change just one word, as in:
[The bird saw the man with the binoculars]
the following sentence only one meaning becomes
reasonable.
The
important point
here is that the structure of the bird sentence is the same as that of the spy sentence, but
our knowledge
of the properties of spies and of birds
influences the way we interpret the relationships between the words
in the sentence.
INFORMATION IN A VISUAL SCENE
Our interpretation of a sentence is also
influenced by
the meaning of a
scene we may be observing
Visual world paradigm
Michael Tanenhaus and coworkers (1995) developed a technique called the visual world paradigm , which
involves determining how subjects process information
as they are
observing a visual scene
.
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
.
This result is
different from the prediction of the syntax-first approach
: If parsing is always based on the structure of the sentence, then changing the scene should have no effect on the eye movements
MAKING PREDICTIONS BASED ON KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT
One of the contributions of the visual world paradigm to our understanding of language is its
acknowledgment that we often use language as we interact with the environment.
According to this idea,
we take
the “statistics” of the
environment
—our
knowledge
of what is most likely to occur—
into account to determine meaning
MAKING INFERENCES
Inference is the process of implicitly linking different sets of information to piece together a coherent narrative.
One role of inference is to create connections between parts of a story. This process is typically illustrated with excerpts from narrative texts.
Narrative refers to texts in which there is a story that progresses from one event to another, although stories can also include flashbacks of events that happened earlier.
An important property of any narrative is
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.
Types of inferences
Coherence can be created by a number of different types of inference
CAUSAL INFERENCE
Inferences that the events described in one clause or sentence were
caused by events that occurred in a previous sentence are causal inferences
example Sharon took an aspirin. Her headache went away.
INSTRUMENT INFERENCE
Inferences about tools or methods are instrument inferences .
For example, when we read the sentence “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.
ANAPHORIC INFERENCE
Inferences that connect an object or person in
one sentence to
an object or person in
another sentence
are called anaphoric inferences
For example, consider the following:
Riffifi, the famous poodle, won the dog show.
She
has now won the last three shows
she
has entered.
Anaphoric inference occurs when we infer that She at the beginning of the second sentence and the other she near the end both refer to Riffifi