Language Multiple Choice

Lecture 8: Language and Reading

• PSYC2112/5262 Foundational Perspectives: Cognition
• Lecture 8 covered Language and Reading
• Acknowledgment of Traditional Owners of country throughout Australia, paying respect to Elders past, present and emerging, and recognizing the ongoing effort to protect and promote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.

What is Language?

• Understanding individual words
• Combining words to create sentences
• Understanding sentences with multiple meanings
• Language is the primary way people communicate, and universal.
• Study of language use and understanding reveals the mind's operations.

What is Language? (continued)

• A system of communication using sounds or symbols to express feelings, thoughts, and experiences.

• Examples of animal communication (dog barks, cat meows) are not considered language.

• Koko, the gorilla and Alex, the parrot are examples of non-human communication that have been studied.

• Human language goes beyond a series of fixed signals and uses a sequence of signals (sounds for spoken language, words for written language, or signs for sign language).

What is Language? (continued)

• Language is hierarchical—organized in a structured way with smaller components combining to form larger units.
• Language is governed by rules—specific ways components are arranged to create new sentences.

Language Satisfies our Need to Communicate

• Deaf children invent their own sign language (Goldin-Meadow, 1982).
• All humans with normal abilities develop and follow language rules.
• Language is universal across cultures, with over 5,000 different languages.
• Language development is similar across cultures, with babbling beginning at around 7 months, first words by a year, and first multiword utterances around age 2 (Levelt, 2001).

Language Learning

• Skinner believed that language is learned through imitation, reinforcement, and conditioning.

• Chomsky believed that language is innate and comes from the built-in universal grammar within the Language Acquisition Device (LAD).

Language Learning (continued)

• Chomsky argued that children produce sentences they have never heard and these sentences aren't reinforced, thus highlighting language's innate nature.
• Poverty of stimulus (POS): Children do not have enough opportunities to learn language just by experience.

Language Learning (continued, Chomsky)

• Language is coded in the genes.
• The underlying basis of all languages is similar.
• It is difficult to falsify the claim of universal grammar.
• Children learn grammar probabilistically, not just through imitation and reinforcement.

Language Learning (continued, Skinner)

• Skinner's theory of verbal behaviour involved principles like labeling/classifying, generalizations and discrimination, and conversation as a combination of all the above.
• Verbal behaviour is learned via reinforcement.

Language Learning (continued, Critique of Skinner's Theory)

• Skinner’s theory cannot account for fast mapping/rapid language acquisition, generative aspects of language, or how children misspeak (e.g., "he goed away").

Psycholinguistics

• The study of the psychological processes humans use to acquire and process language, focusing on comprehension and production.
• How do people understand spoken/written language?
• How do people produce language?
• How is language represented in the mind and brain?

What is Language? (continued)

• Lexicon: all words a person understands, making up a mental dictionary.
• Phonology: pronunciation of words.
• Orthography: written form of words.
• Semantics: the meaning of words in a language.

Components of Words

• Phoneme: the smallest segment of speech whose change alters the meaning of a word.
• Morpheme: the smallest units of language with definite meaning or grammatical function.
• For example, "luck" has 3 phonemes but one morpheme; "table" has 2 syllables but one morpheme.

Perceiving Sounds and Letters

• Meaning impacts our perception of sounds e.g. "There was time to *ave...". The context allows participants to hear the words wave and not shave, save, or rave.
• Phonemic restoration effect: Our auditory system fills in missing sounds when parts of a word are masked e.g., filling in a cough sound.

Perceiving Individual Words in Sentences

• Words are easier to understand in context than isolated.
• Our ability to perceive individual words relies on the sounds of a sentence, even though there are no breaks between words.
• In English, some sounds are more likely to be followed by others, aiding segmenting words, e.g., “pretty baby”.

Perceiving Written Words

• Word Superiority Effect: letters are easier to recognize when contained in a real word than when presented in isolation.

Perceiving Language

• General knowledge of meaning, context, and sounds influences understanding.

Understanding Words

• Frequency: determines how easy a word is to process
• Context: influences the meaning accessed
• Dominance: determines whether a word meaning is easier to access by listeners.

Understanding Sentences

• Semantics: the meaning of words is essential
• Syntax: rules for combining words into grammatical sentences.
• Parsing: grouping words into phrases to create meaning.

Brain Areas for Syntax and Semantics

• Broca's area (frontal lobe): responsible for sentence structure (syntax).
• Wernicke's area (temporal lobe): responsible for understanding meaning (semantics).
• N400 wave of ERP (Electroencephalography) is affected by the meaning of words.
• P600 wave of ERP is affected by grammar.

Parsing a Sentence

• Garden path sentences: sentences that seem to have one meaning but end up having a different meaning, depending on which parsing technique is used.

Parsing a Sentence – The Constraint-Based Approach

• Additional information is used, including context and word meaning for better sentence parsing.

Influence of Scene Context (Visual World Paradigm)

• Visual scene enhances parsing by providing information to understand an ambiguous sentence.

Making Predictions Based on Knowledge of Language Constructions

• Predicting upcoming words during reading is influenced by semantic regularities and frequencies in language.

Understanding Text and Stories

• Inferences: mental processes that go beyond what is explicitly stated in a text.
• Inferences create coherence—connections between the information.

Making Inferences—Coherence

• Inferences are necessary to create coherence: connecting information and creating a meaningful understanding

Making Inferences—Other types of Inferences (Coherence)

• Anaphoric inferences: link objects/people in two different parts of a text.
• Instrument inferences: determine the tools used to carry out actions described in a text.
• Causal Inferences: establish a cause-and-effect relationship between events in the text.

Mental Representation of Stories

• Mental representations allow an understanding of stories.

Situation Model

• Mental representation of a text.
• Simulates perceptual and motor characteristics.
• Simulation of situation assists comprehension

Situation Model—Neural Evidence

• Neuroimaging (e.g., fMRI) reveals that reading sentences can trigger brain activity in motor areas of the brain in ways corresponding to the sentence readings (e.g., reading “kicked the ball” activates “leg” areas in the brain).

Predictions Based on Our Knowledge About Situations

• ERPs are affected by the sentence's components (e.g., an event which matches our expectations produces smaller ERP readings than an event that does not match our expectations).

Summary so far

• Key elements for understanding language, including semantics, syntax, parsing, and accessing information
• Cultural effects influence language meaning and use.

Producing Language

• Two or more people talking together are engaging in conversation.
• Conversations involve the idea of a given-new contract (mutual knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions).

Conversation

• The given-new contract states that a speaker should construct sentences that include given information (things listener already knows) and new information (things the listener is hearing for the first time).

Conversation

• Common ground: the knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions shared by conversation partners.

Conversation

• Syntactic coordination—speakers tend to use similar syntactic constructions, making it easy for the listener.

Conversation

• In conversation, the speaker considers the listener's prior understanding.
• Other crucial skills include understanding theory of mind (what others think/feel/believe) and nonverbal cues (tone, gestures).

Learning a New Language

• Tutorial experiment on learning Chinese characters included learning phases with blocks of study and tests for each block.

Background on Chinese Characters

• Most Chinese characters are compound characters (can be broken down into parts).

Background on Chinese Characters (part 2)

• Two types of radicals: phonetic (based on sound) and semantic (based on meaning).

Dissecting a Chinese Character

• Demonstrating how characters are composed of parts and how these parts relate to the overall meaning.

Learning Semantic Radicals

• Explicit (direct instruction) vs. implicit (learning through observation/experience) learning of semantic radicals in Chinese.

Second Language Learning

• Adult learners benefit from explicit instruction more than implicit learning (when being taught a second language), especially when exceptions exist.

Cultural Effects on Language (overall)

• Non-linguistic communication (e.g., body language).
• Language influences how we think and vice-versa.
• Cultural differences impact language use and meaning, including differences in slang, grammatical constructions, and interpretations.

Cultural Effects on Language (part 2)

• Language can reflect and support cultural identity.
• Examples include the use of slang words, different languages in law or religion, accents, grammar and vocabulary use, and use of slang.

Cultural effects on Language (part 3)

• The structure of a language may affect how its speakers conceptualize the world.
• Different languages may conceptualize similar aspects of the world in different ways, depending on their structure.
• There is a link between a person's linguistic cognitive skills and their concepts in culture and memory.