Language and Mental Representation

Language and Mental Representation

• Humans' capacity for mental representation, encompassing images, ideas, concepts, and principles, underlies their dominance of the planet.

Defining Language and Psycholinguistics

• Language comprises symbols and formation rules to generate an infinite array of messages.
• Psycholinguistics explores how people grapple to understand, produce and learn language psychologically.

Adaptive Qualities of Language

• The human brain's physical structure has remained relatively stable for 50,000 years.
• Humans started producing life-like paintings ~35,000 years ago.
• Writing, as a tool for storing extra-brain information, emerged ~12,000 years ago.
• Language is theorized to grow to support increasingly large social structures, aiding survival and reproduction.
• Language helps humans by dividing labor, development of social customs, enable adaptive response to environmental demands, knowledge transfer, and cooperation.
• Physical language characteristics and the brain's ability to learn languages combined are not coincidental.
• Humans are social beings who must communicate with each other.
• Inner dialogue and language facilitate the sharing of thoughts and goals.
• Language enables knowledge transfer across generations through mass media, instruction, and storytelling.

Key Language Properties

• Languages share fundamental attributes: symbols, structure, meaning, generativity, and displacement.

Symbolic and Rule-Governed Language

• Language employs sounds, written characters, or symbols to represent actions, events, ideas, feelings and objects.
• The employed symbols are arbitrary, and language relies on a rule-based composition in its structure.
• Grammar defines symbol combination for meaningful communication and language syntax governs word order.
• Language users subconsciously know grammar rules.
• While grammar conventions share core functions like tense and negation, they vary across languages.

Transmission of Meaning in Language

• Language, once learned, facilitates mental representation formation and mind to mind transfer.
• Semantics concern word and sentence meaning, interpreted beyond the literal.

Generative Language and Displacement

• Language generativity allows novel message creation.
• Language displacement facilitates communication about non present events, including those in imaginary or past events.

Structure of Language and Semantics

• Surface structure constitutes the symbol's and their order.
• Deep structure refers to the symbols' root/core meaning (semantics).
• Sentences with variable surface structures share the same deep structure.
• Identical sentences in surface structure can host two distinct deep meaning structures.
• Reading and listening involves surface to deep structure processing, with thoughts expressed in a reverse.

Hierarchical Structure of Language Components

• Phoneme refers to the smallest speech sound to signal a difference in meaning.
• Morphemes refer to the smallest language unit to convey meaning.
• Discourse encompasses sentences combined into books, conversations, paragraphs, articles, etc.

Context Importance and Language Processing

• Context is critical for successful language comprehension.
• Extracting insights from linguistic stimuli requires both top-down and bottom-up processing forms.

Understanding Language Bottom-Up

• Perception is unified through analyzing individual stimulus elements before synthesis.
• Analyzing word derivation from a base of phonemes uses spoken language as the structural set of building blocks in a hierarchical structure.

Top-Down Language Processing

• Top-down processing understands sensory data based on prior expectations, knowledge, and understanding.
• Shared long-term memory for grammar, vocabulary, and other elements enables language use across languages using top-down processing.
• Speech segmentation involves perceiving word boundaries in spoken sentences.
• Identifying word beginnings and ends can be difficult in multisyllable words and in fast speech without pauses.
• A language user knows which phoneme sequences are not likely to occur in the same word which enables their perception as the end or beginning of a word depending on which sequence is unlikely.

Social Pragmatics in Language

• Pragmatics pertains to the practical knowledge of using language across a social context.
• People use social context to be understood/communicate, and change lexicon, complexity, and speech speed depending on an adult versus child, or a foreign visitor. Formal versus informal speaking tones are based on the context used.

Brain Function, Language, and Sex

• Broca's area has to do with word articulation and production.
• Wernicke's area oversees speech comprehension.
• Language processing in blind children recruits the visual cortex, and aphasia creates impaired speech production and comprehension.
• Language tasks in males vs females recruits the left hemispheres for males, however, both are used in females.

First Language Acquisition

• Language acquisition depends on biology and social environment, as all languages have similar components.
• Native Japanese speakers are unable to differentiate sounds of ‘r' or ‘l' because their language does not have that distinction, and they put verbs after objects.
• Language acquisition device (LAD) hosts all grammatical rules common to all languages
• Calibration to ones native language utilizes “yes” and “no” switches, and organization of verb, noun and phrase structures.

Social Influence

• The use of child-directed speech uses high pitched intonation.
• Language acquisition in children depends on object identification and naming by parents.
• Reinforcement is a part of BF Skinners' operant conditioning language explanation.
• However, adults do not correct grammar (they correct truth). Example: having 2 feet vs 4.
• A Language acquisition support system(LASS) relies on social environment which can learn a language and work with the LAD.

Sensitive Periods for Development

• Receiving early exposure to sign or spoken languages helps language development and lowers any learning deficiencies.
• This sensitive period extends from being a baby to puberty, with diminishing returns once passed.

Learning New Languages

• Learning when young helps language fluency during the sensitive period.
• Early syntax learning is more important than vocabulary, and different languages are identifiable by age 2.
• Higher order cognitive skills are improved with perceptual tasks which call for more attention by bilinguals.
• Learning in the native and new tongue helps immigrant children learn English.

Critical Period for Language Learning

• Studies with early and late immigrants have shown younger age is better and there may be a sensitive period. Older age causes scores to diminish by age of acquirement, as shown by studying the scores of Spanish speakers.
• A limited amount of education access diminishes older adult scores. However, a sensitive period may lead to childhood ease.

Influence of Linguistics

• The linguistic relativity hypothesis considers language ability and impact by what we are capable of thinking. Study where a language with 2 color terms and 11 demonstrate discrimination. Geometric spatial word tasks test children as well. However children with few color distinctions performed worse. Language can influence more than dictate. Sexist languages can evoke women being less attracted to a certain profession. Math is facilitated by Asian languages by base 10.

Thinking

• There is technology to move things. Biologically, patterns are made from neural activity.
• Verbal expression is made from propositional thought.
• Imaginal thought has to do with feelings.
• Motoric is mental representation.

Propositions

• There are statements of ideas with a type. One part is the predicate.

Concepts

• They are basic units of semantic memory (i.e. for objects) which can be acquired by similarities
• Prototypes are mostly familiar people in a class.

Reasoning Based with World Info combined with Knowledge

• Helps avoid error.
• Reconsolidate and manipulate it.

Deductive Reasoning

• It is top down with information, such as math. Is useful for forming a conclusion. Is valid.

Inductive Reasoning

• It is bottom up reasoning where new reasoning disapproves a conclusion.

Stumbling blocks

• Distraction is a problem that uses irrelevant information.
• Belief has tendency to abandon logical rules, as emotions do the same. Information that can be shown in different ways is a frame.

Problem Solving

• There are solving ways, such as generating. Set back is mental blocks, and ways to have a easier approach. Schemas are made for solving the problem.

Algorithms

• They solve with math solutions.

Heuristics

• They are general solutions that identify the differences. Sub goals attack problems.

Heuristics and Decisions

• Most decisions rely well, and are with what is right.

Availability

• Decisions are with what is available, and is bias.

Overconfidence and bias

• The best way is to disconfirm the information and show how the truth can blink.

Expertise Knowledge and Wisdom

• Cultures show the next generation through language. Organize the thought and idea for the world.

Scripts Schemas

• There are algorithms, and as schemas make new connections.

Expertise Nature

• Experts are good guides.

Schemas Memory

• The schema can solve quick. Novices will use the main methods with working memory.

Components

• There is knowledge, procedures, relativism.