COGPSY230 Midterm Notes #8 PDF

# COGPSY230 | MIDTERM Notes #8 ## Unit 8: Language ### What is Language? - Language is a system of communication used by humans to express thoughts, feelings, ideas, and information. - It consists of symbols, sounds, or gestures that are combined in specific ways to convey meaning. ### Language...

# COGPSY230 | MIDTERM Notes #8 ## Unit 8: Language ### What is Language? - Language is a system of communication used by humans to express thoughts, feelings, ideas, and information. - It consists of symbols, sounds, or gestures that are combined in specific ways to convey meaning. ### Language and Thought - The relationship between language and thought is complex. - While language can influence thought by providing categories, concepts, or frameworks, it is not the only factor shaping how people think. - Thought can exist independently of language, and some cognitive processes (like visual thinking or emotions) do not rely on verbal language at all. ### Language Comprehension - Many processes are involved when we try to understand what somebody says. - First of all, we need to perceive and recognize the words that are being said. - Then we need to assign meaning to those words. - In addition, we have to make sense of the sentences we hear. ### Properties of Language 1. **Communicative** - Language permits us to communicate with one or more people who share our language. 2. **Arbitrarily Symbolic** - Language creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and what it represents: an idea, a thing, a process, a relationship, or a description. 3. **Regularly Structured** - Language has a structure; only particularly patterned arrangements of symbols have meaning, and different arrangements yield different meanings. 4. **Generative, Productive** - Within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances. - The possibilities for creating new utterances are virtually limitless. 5. **Dynamic** - Languages constantly evolve. ### The Basic Components of Words - SPEECH - Language can be broken down into many smaller units. - It is much like the analysis of molecules into basic elements by chemists. - The smallest unit of speech sound is the *phone*, which is simply a single vocal sound. #### Phonetics - Is the study of how to produce or combine speech sounds or to represent them with written symbols. #### Morpheme - The smallest unit of meaning within a particular language. - The *lexicon* is the entire set of morphemes in a given language or in a given person's linguistic repertoire. - The average adult speaker of English has a lexicon of about 80,000 morphemes. - By combining morphemes, most adult English speakers have a vocabulary of hundreds of thousands of words. ## When Reading is a Problem - Dyslexia - Difficulty in deciphering, reading, and comprehending text can suffer greatly in a society that puts a high premium on fluent reading. - Problems in phonological processing, and thus in word identification, pose the major stumbling block in learning to read. - Several different processes may be impaired in dyslexia: 1. **Phonological Awareness** - Which refers to awareness of the sound structure of spoken language. 2. **Phonological Reading** - Which entails reading words in isolation. - Teachers sometimes call this skill "word decoding" or "word attack." - For measurement of the skill, children might be asked to read words in isolation. 3. **Phonological Coding** - Which refers to coding in working memory. - This process is involved in remembering strings of phonemes that are sometimes confusing. - It might be measured by comparing working memory for confusable versus non-confusable phonemes. 4. **Lexical Access** - Which refers to one's ability to retrieve phonemes from long-term memory. - The question here is whether one can quickly retrieve a word from long-term memory when it is seen. ### Kinds of Dyslexia - **Developmental Dyslexic** - The most well-known kind is development dyslexia, which is difficulty in reading that starts in childhood and typically continues throughout adulthood. - Most commonly, children with developmental dyslexia have difficulty in learning the rules that relate letters to sounds. - **Acquired Dyslexia** - A second kind of dyslexia is acquired dyslexia, which is typically caused by traumatic brain damage. - A perfectly good reader who experiences a brain injury may acquire dyslexia. ## Aphasia - **Wernicke's Aphasia** - Speech is fluent and grammatically correct but often nonsensical or invented words, filled with - They may produce sentences that sound normal but lack meaning. - Location of Damage: Wernicke's area, in the temporal lobe, responsible for language comprehension. - **Broca's Aphasia** - Difficulty producing speech: speech is slow, effortful, and broken. - Comprehension is generally good, but the individual has trouble with complex sentences - Location of Damage: Broca's area, in the frontal lobe, responsible for speech production. - **Anomic Aphasia** - Difficulty finding the correct words, particularly names of objects (word-finding difficulties) - Speech is fluent, and comprehension is largely intact, but the person struggles to recall specific words - Location of Damage: Can be associated with various parts of the brain but typically involves damage in areas related to word retrieval. - **Global Aphasia** - Severe impairment in both speech production and comprehension. - People with global aphasia have very limited ability to speak or understand language. - Location of Damage: Extensive damage to both Broca's and Wernicke's areas, typically after a massive stroke or brain injury. ## Other Concepts to Remember: - Linguistic Relativity - Motherese - Verbal and Non-verbal Cues