Chapter 11: Language

Chapter 11: Language

1. developments in the psychological study of

   • Broca: frontal gyrus, language production
     • Broca's aphasia: affects communication abilities
   • Wernicke: temporal gyrus in dominant hemisphere, understanding of language
     • Wernicke's aphasia:
   • Skinner: behaviorist, believed lang was part of human programming, children learn by being rewarded and punished
     • Chomsky: disagreed
       • what about 'I hate you mommy'
   • psycholinguistics
     • psychological process for how people learn and process lang
     • comprehension: how people understand
     • speech production: physical + mental process
     • representation: how mind imagines lang
     • acquisition: how we learn lang, later in life etc
   • does language affect thought
     • Sapir-Worth hypothesis
       • determinism: yes
       • myth: inuit and snow words
     • cloak theory: basic categories of thought, affects but does not determine
       • language conforms to ways of thinking
     • mould: language is the basis for which we understand things, determinism

2. COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE

   • phoneme: shortest segment of speech that can be changed/change word meaning
     • bit=/b/ /i/ /t/
       • b /a/ t
     • somehow we just learn how to articulate this
       • place of articulation
       • voicing: do yourvocal cords vibrate
         • vowels nearly always voiced (placement in mouth, tongue position)
         • [p]
           • bilabial: airflow disrupted @ lips
           • plosive/stop-consonant: air column stopped and released
           • nonvoiced: vocal cord vibration is delayed
         • [b]
           • voiced, bilabial, plosive
         • wug vs wuk vs wugz vs wuks
           • inherent knowledge about keeping voiced, voiceless near each other
       • accents come from millisec shifts in phonemes, sometimes can't hear the differences in phonemes
     • babies better @ distinguishing these
   • morpheme: smallest unit of language that can be defined, or has grammatical meaning
     • trucks=truck + s
     • bedroom=bed+room
   • allophone: different ways to pronounce the same phoneme
     • lull vs little

3. perception of phonemes and words

   • Warren's phonemic restoration effect
     • people will listen to words with extraneous sounds in them (like coughs or sneezes) and not notice the filled in part
       • an example of top-down processing
       • less likely in unknown words
   • Pollack + Pickett
     • recorded conversations and played back single words
       • participants couldn't understand words out of context
       • speech segmentation: finding individual words in the continuous flow of speech
         • need context to distinguish b/n words like big girl and big Earl
   • word superiority effect: we can better recog. individual words/sounds within words rather than nonwords

4. understanding words

   • word frequency effect: responding faster to higher freq. words than lower
     • kowtow vs bread
     • prior knowledge and context can affect this
   • lexical ambiguity: words have more than 1 meaning, but context eliminates this

5. understanding sentences

   • syntax: how language is structured
     • garden path sentence: when first reading sentence think 1 thing, then as you read changes meaning
       • ex: cast iron sinks quickly rust
       • late closure: each word builds on your understanding of the word
   • semantics: what it means
   • parsing: grouping of words into phrases
     • interactionist approach: we take in both things at the same time
       • Tanenhaus apple on the towel exp: with two apples becomes a lot clearer
   • McGurk Effect: what we see overrides what we hear, mouth mvt influences what we hear, ba vs da

6. understanding stories

   • anaphoric inference: connect obj to obj/person
     • Emily did this with them. She also...
   • instrument inference: what we know about that context helps inform our imagination
     • The cave man hunted the wooly mammoth.
       • b/c semantic knowledge of cave men, we know they didn't use guns
   • causal inference: events caused by other events in earlier sentences
   • situation model: mental rep of what story is about
     • Zwann: photos of nail + sentence, participants were faster @ indicating which one was which
     • blocked continuum: mother in front of tv scenario, implies we represent things as they should be

7. grammar/syntax

   • particle: preposition acts as part of the verb: ex looked 'over'
     • combined with that verb changes the meaning
       • came by, turned up, lived down (by, up, down particles)

8. written language

   • writing took a long time to develop
   • Han-gul: each letter has meaning
     • King Sejong, 1446, accessible to all

9. conversation

   • 1. semantic coordination: in convos we have to present given info+newinfogiven-new contract
   • Bock syntatic priming: we're more likely to mirror each other's syntax in convo

10. properties of language

    • 0. records experience, sometimes unique only to lang
      • marriage, legal, memory, inertia, bible, democracy, military
      • sometimes the senses just can't cover it
    • 1 language=species specific
      • critical learning period
    • 2 major part of culture
      • code switching: 2 diff lang in diff context
    • 3 way of communicating self/other
      • gendered terms
      • bilingualism: increased memory for when you learned new lang, but normal reminiscence bump for native lang
    • 4 register=info about speaker
      • baby talk, dimunitives
    • 5 language as serial behavior
      • not random, subject, predicate, etc
      • requires lots of different movements in mouth etc
    • 6 implicit rules
      • ex: corridor and eye contact, studying at table
      • case grammar: what function does noun serve in sentence
        • dative: noun that receives the action
          • I gave 'you' the drink
          • to or for
        • agentive: cause
          • eating, procurer, prosecutor
        • genitive: possession
          • whatever would have the apostrophe s would be in dative case
          • your book= you = possession
        • accusative: passive action, receptor
          • I kicked, I hit, I read it: noun verb noun
        • instrumental: implies the noun was actually used in the shindig I wrote a note with the pen