Lecture 10 Language Note PDF

Lecture 10 Chapter 11 : Language Introduction of what language is: What are the properties that make human language unique? TBP. 324 The creativity of human language The universal need to communicate with language Timeline of language evolution Studying language • Brain areas: frontal an...

Lecture 10 Chapter 11 : Language Introduction of what language is: What are the properties that make human language unique? TBP. 324 The creativity of human language The universal need to communicate with language Timeline of language evolution Studying language • Brain areas: frontal and temporal lobes involved in different aspects of language • Focus now: cognitive and behavioural approach Studying language in Cognitive Psychology how people process language sounds, how they understand words, sentences stories in writing, sign language Physical processes of speech production and mental processes occur as a person creates speech How people group words together into phrases and make connections between different parts of a story how children learn language, people learning additional language Perceiving phonemes, words and letter Phonemes Problem of perceiving words There is no time to *ave’ ppt responded, it could be ‘wave’ the remainder of sentence had to do with saying goodbye to a friend Speech: perceiving individual words in sentences Reading: The word superiority effect The word frequency effect Indicate as quickly as possible whether each entry in the two lists below is a word Clear • ambiguous - duck also mean hidden our ability to access meaning is affected by word frequency and some words have more than one meaning e.g. Tin, in the meaning of a type of metal, is high dominance because it occurs more frequently than tin, the meaning of a small metal container of food, which has less dominance. Two meanings sentence Cast is balance dominance so two meanings are activated Tin has 1 dominance so only biased meaning is activated • • • • accessing the meaning of ambiguous words while reading a sentence is determined by the word’s dominance and the context created by the sentence (a) and (b) illustrate situations with no prior context (a) is two equally likely meanings (balanced dominance) (b) is a word has one dominant meaning and one less dominant (biased dominance) Prime ppt into metal (C) and (D) illustrate situations in which context precedes a word with biased dominance • (C) if the less dominant meaning is indicated by the context, it is activated. But so is more dominant meaning, even though it doesn’t fit the context. • (D) if the more dominant meaning is indicated by the context, it is the only meaning activated, and access is fast. Understanding sentences changed the meaning of the sentence - create error You can make use of the meaning of semantic frontal lobe Difficulty to understand the passive sentence Temporal lobe • • -ve N4000 wave of the ERP is affected by the meaning go the word. It becomes larger (red line) when the meaning of the word does not fit the rest of the sentence. +ve P6000 wave of the ERP is affected by grammar. It becomes larger (red line) when a grammatically incorrect form is used. error of semantic Relate to semantic Error of syntax Relate to syntax Understanding sentences: Parsing conceptual unit/ component of a clause After the musician played the piano, what do u think comes next? a. … she left the stage. b….. she bowed the audience. c….. the crowd cheered wildly. Illustrate temporary ambiguity misleading the person If the sentence continue, you find there is something wrong, you go back to the first sentence, you try to make sense of the sentence use sentences with temporary ambiguity to help understand the mechanisms that operate during parsing The syntax-first approach to parsing important principle The same phrase wrong Wrong go back and restructure of sentence The interactionist approach to parsing A reader is continuously anticipating what words come up next To understand sentence, not only based on syntax Meaning of words in a sentence Group 1 Group 2 not ambitious, because bird don’t use telescope • Group 2 require birds to look through binoculars, this interpretation isn’t even considered • Group 1 is automatically applied to sentence 10. 'the man saw the bird with he binoculars’ = the structure of the bird sentence is the same as that of the spy sentence • our knowledge of spies and birds influences the way we interpret the relationships between the words in the sentences. Obtain from our environment Information in visual scene When ppt hear Understanding sentences Making predictions based on world knowledge Understanding text and stories Making Inference Key word: Anaphoric inference Key word: Instrument inference e.g. ‘Williams Shakespeare wrote Hamlet while he was sitting at his desk.’ - infer from what we know about the time Shakespeare lived that he was probably using a quill pen (not computer) and his desk was made of wood. Key word: casual inference Picture matches the situation Producing language: conversations Syntactic coordination key word: Syntactic coordination Syntactic priming experiments Culture, language and cognition key word: Sapir- Short hypothesis