Lect11 Language PDF

Language Contents Definition & characteristics Language and the brain – Aphasia...

Language Contents Definition & characteristics Language and the brain – Aphasia Broca’s aphasia Wernicke’s aphasia KMF 1023 Understanding words COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY – Effects of words: Word-superiority effect Lecturer: Norehan Zulkiply – Effects of words in sentences: the role of FSKPM, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak frequency & context Word-frequency effect Contents Definition and Properties Understanding Sentences Language : a system of communication through which we code and express our feelings, thoughts, – Parsing sentences ideas, and experiences. Syntax first approach One of several means of communication. Semantics Interactionist approach Important properties of language – a hierarchical structure and that is governed by rules - allows creation of unique sentences, communicate Language and culture whatever we want to express … Hierarchical –words, phrases, sentences to a large text/story – Culture can influence one’s use of Rules – I eat bread and cheese this morning (permissible) language but Cheese eats this morning bread (not permissible) Functions of Language: What do Milestones in the Study of L you use language for? Wilhelm Wundt (1980) – Language : mechanism of transforming thoughts into to communicate sentences. – to memorize (rehearse, encode…) Language – one of the earliest cognitive capacities to – to compare and categorize be studied physiologically (by Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke) which give insights into brain function: – to identify (e.g., inner states, feelings…) – to enjoy (e.g., arts, poetry…) – to think about something – to discover new ideas or viewpoints Frontal lobe Temporal lobe 1 Milestones in the Study of L Understanding Words The modern era of language research began in 1950s: – B.F.Skinner (1957) – in Verbal behavior, proposed that language is learned through the mechanism of reinforcement Children learn language by being rewarded for using correct Impressive acquisition rate: language, being punished for using incorrect language From 0 — 18years old: 75,000 (~12.1 words – Noam Chomsky (1957) – proposed that human are genetically per day) programmed to acquire and use language Person’s lexicon - all understandable words Studying language is a way to study properties of the mind. Disagree with the behaviorist ideas that the mind is not valid of a person topic of study in psychology Perceiving letters and words 1970s/1980s: Chomsky’s criticism of behaviorism led to the emerging – Phoneme- the shortest segment of speech, if ‘Psycholinguistics’- the field concerns with psychological study of changed, changes the meaning of a word language (speech sound) 1990s/today: Enormous specialization: E.g. bit : /b/, /i/, and /t/ – Language acquisition Replacing /b/ with /s/..becomes sit – Comprehension: Syntax vs. Semantics Replacing /i/ with /u/..becomes but – Speech production Perceiving letters and words Perceiving letters and words Phonemic restoration effect – “Fill in” missing phonemes based on context of sentence and portion of word presented Questions to consider: E.g. You hear this sentence  I want to go to the – How does a letter’s presence in a word hospital to do medical check-up. affect our ability to identify it? – if while hearing the sentence, a phoneme /s/ is – How do we perceive separate words within masked by a noise (e.g., cough), you can still a sentence. make sense of the word “hospital). These help: 1) The context produce by the sentence Answers to both involve meaning 2) The portion of the word that was presented 3) The meaning of the words that follow the missing phoneme. Perceiving Letters and Words The Word-Superiority Effect Are letters in words processed serially or in parallel? Word-superiority effect (Reicher, 1969; Wheeler, 1970) – – Participants sees a stimulus- either a word, a single letter or a Letters are perceived more easily in string of letters that do not create a word – flashed for 25-40 words than when they are in isolation msecs or in non words Letters in words are not processed Masking stimulus Decision task: Which of the two letter by letter but are affected by its letters has been appeared before? surrounding (context) = processed in Results: parallel (selari) (a) Faster and more accurate than (b) and (c) letters are perceived more easily in words (based on context) – parallel processing 2 Perceiving Words in Sentences Perceiving Words in Sentences Speech segmentation: the process of perceiving individual words from the continuous flow of the Perceiving separate words you read on paper is speech signals easy- each word is separated by a space, so easy to The problem of speech segmentation: tell one word from another – No clear breaks between words in physical speech signal. However when we hear words in conversational – Difficult to tell where one word ends and the other begins speech, these words are not separated by spaces, pauses, even though they may sound like they are. When we look at the record of the physical energy produced by conversational speech, we see that speech signal is continuous, with either no physical breaks in the signal or breaks that do not correspond to the breaks we perceive between words Mice eat oats and does not eat oats and with lambs eat ivy Accessing Words: Frequency Accessing/Understanding Words Effects What factors influence our ability to Demonstration: Lexical Decision Task access or understand words Carroll (1999): Word or non-word? (Say ‘yes’/’no’): – List 1: Gambastya, revery, voitle, chard, wefe, cratily, decoy, – Frequency effects puldow, faflot, oriole, voluble, boovle, chalt, awry, signet, – Context effects trave, crock, cryptic, ewe, himpola. – List 2: Mulvow, governor, bless, tuglety, gare, relieve, ruftily, history, pindle, develop, grdot, norve, busy, effort, garvola, match, sard, pleasant, coin, maisle. Result: – people read lists of common words (many in List 2) faster than lists of less common words (many in List 1) – Word-frequency effect - High-frequency words are recognized and read faster than low- frequency words Accessing Words: Frequency Accessing Words: Context Effect Effects Easier to understand words that fit the meaning of a sentence. Rayner et al. (2003): Eye-movements during reading Example (Marslen-Wilson, 1990): – ‘Sam wore the horrid coat though his pretty girlfriend complained.’ 1.‘The Eskimos were frightened by the walrus.’ – ‘Sam wore the horrid coat though his demure girlfriend 2. ‘The bankers were frightened by the walrus.’ complained.’ – Walrus is understandable easier in 1st sentence Result: Fixation is shorter at high frequency words – Fixation time : High frequency word (pretty) Context helps to disambiguate (to clear up lexical < low frequency word (demure) ambiguity, though perhaps not straight away) – Example: ‘My mother is bugging me.’ ( Bugging ~ refer to my mother is annoying me, rather installing a hidden listening device in my room) 3 Accessing Words: Context Effects David Swinney (1979) –Presented participants with tape recording of a sentence. ‘Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been Understanding Sentences plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of the room.’ Lexical-decision task at ‘bug’: After hearing the word bug, participants How do we understand sentences? were shown a word or nonword onto the screen and asked to indicate whether it’s a word or nonword. Measured RT for ANT, SPY & SKY. – Semantics Result: Participants accessed faster to the 2 meanings of an – Syntax ambiguous word “bug” – ANT and SPY (as indicated by significant RTs) – but select rapidly the one that fit the sentence – Parsing a sentence Semantics vs. Syntax Understanding Sentences Physiological distinction in ERP (Osterhut et al., 1997): To understand sentences, need to distinguish the two properties of sentences: – Syntax: grammatical rules of combining words into well-formed sentences. – Semantics: meaning of words and sentences. (a)The N400 wave of the ERP is affected by semantics. It becomes larger (dark line) when the meaning of a word does not fit the rest of the sentence. (b) The P600 wave of the ERP is affected by syntax. It becomes larger (dark line) when syntax is incorrect. Parsing a Sentence Parsing : the mental grouping of words in Parsing a Sentence a sentence into phrases – One of the central process for determining meaning. 3 approaches to parsing a sentence: Demonstration: Syntax first approach – The spy saw the man with the binoculars. Semantics – Flying planes can be dangerous. Interactionist approach – He read the paper that he received yesterday. => Syntactic ambiguity : due to multiple possible parsers (sentence-analyzing mechanism) that determine the various meanings of the sentence (based on how the phrases are grouped) How does the parser work? 4  Parsing: The Syntax-First Approach Parsing: The Syntax-First Eg. “Because he always jogs a mile seems like a Approach short distance to him”. Parsingis primarily determined by syntax and syntax-based rules. Syntax-based rules: – Late Closure : when a person encounters a new word, the parser assumes that this word is part of the current phrase. These sentences are also called “garden-path sentences” because the sentences have led the reader “ down the garden path” (down a path that seems right, but turns out to be wrong) Semantic Influences on Parsing Semantic Influences on Parsing: Daniel Slobin (1966) compared the speed of participants to The meaning of one word can affect the ability to understand these 2 sentences by presenting a picture along with each sentences – say TRUE if the sentence below the picture described understand the entire sentence: Eg: it or FALSE if it did not. “The man recognized by the spy took off down the street.” It takes longer to understand(verify) reversible sentences as in (a). Need to identify the doer (who took the action) and the done to (who received the action) Semantic Influences on Parsing: The Interactionist Approach Parsing: Claim: Syntax and semantics interact during parsing, i.e., syntax affects early processing. Another example: – Semantics come into play as a sentence is being read “The van recognized by the spy took off down the street”. Evidence: Eye-tracking studies (measuring the fixation-durations. – Trueswell et al. (1994): – In his eye-movement study, he determined the amount of time the participants’ eyes spent on different parts of sentences 1 and 2. 1. ‘The defendant examined by the lawyer turned out to be reliable’ 2. ‘The evidence examined by the lawyer turned out to be reliable’ 5  Parsing: The Interactionist Approach Parsing: The Interactionist Approach Results of Trueswell at al.’s (1994):Semantics immediately affect Tannehaus et al.(1995) use another approach of eye movements processing to study how people process information in sentences – He presented a picture that illustrate the objects mentioned in a sentence, and to determine where participants look while they listen to and trying to understand the sentence “ Put the apple on the towel in the box” 1-apple: where? 2-apple: which? Readers spent more time on the phrase “by the lawyer” for sentence 1 (“The defendant….”) than for sentence 2 (“The evidence…”). Why? Sentence 1 > ambiguous than sentence 2 – Defendant could examine something or be examined by someone else – Environmental context helps to disambiguate – Evidence, can only be examined immediately Inferences in Text Comprehension 3 types: Anaphoric, Instrumental and Causal Inferences How do we understand Text or Anaphoric Inferences – connect an object/person in Stories? one sentence to object/person in another sentence Using inferences 1. Beatrice arrived. She was wearing the shirt, that her friend had made. It was awful. 2.“… on our vacation time [we] go down to our ranch (…) There are lots of ponds and I take the kids out and we fish. And then of course, we grill them.” – quoted from George Foreman Instrumental Inferences- inferences about tools/methods Why is human language unique? 1. “He was pounding the nail when his father came out…” (Was he using a hammer?) Once you learn a human language, you can use it to say absolutely anything 2. “Shakespeare wrote Hamlet at his desk.” (Was it a quill pen that he used for writing? Did he use a whether you have heard it before or not. laptop computer?) Infinity capacity – You can construct a short sentence or Causal Inferences – inferences about causal-effect 1.She took an aspirin. Her headache went away. sentence as long as a dictionary (we infer that aspirin caused the headache to go It is stimulus independent away) – What you say is not necessary tied to what 2.She took a shower. Her headache went away. (we happens to you infer that shower caused the headache to go away) 6  Language and Culture: How does thinking (cognition) affected by How does culture affects Language Language? Yum (1991): Japanese more indirect than US Americans. – “It is cold today” vs. “The door is open” (to mean “please shut the door”) Fernald & Morikawa (1993)- observed interactions between Which two of the objects mother and her 6-19 month children – American mothers uses twice as many object labels Would you place together? e.g: “that’s a car. See that car? You like it? It’s got nice wheels.” – Japanese mothers were twice as likely to talk about relationships & how to be polite. e.g: “Here!It’s a vroom vroom. I give it to you. Now you give this to me. Yes!Thank you.” => Cultural orientation & the way parents talk to their children Objects like the ones Chiu (1972) used to determine which objects influence attention and perception of adults Chinese and American children group together. Language & Cognition (cont’d) Summary Definition of Language Understanding words – Effects of words: Word-superiority effect – Effects of words in sentences: the role of frequency & context Word-frequency effect Understanding Sentences – Parsing sentences Syntax first approach The results make sense: Americans are more object-oriented and Semantics Asians are more relationship-oriented Interactionist approach Summary Language and culture – Culture can influence one’s use of language Language and the brain – Aphasia Broca’s aphasia Wernicke’s aphasia 7