Memory and Cognition

1. Memory and Cognition PSY 324 Topic: Language Dr. Ellen Campana Arizona State University

2. What is language? • “a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences” • Human (animals have simpler systems) • Bees signal through “waggle dance” • Chimps have simple calls • Snakes • Eagles • Leopards

3. Essential Properties of Language • Semanticity • Arbitrariness • Flexibility of Symbols • Naming • Displacement • Productivity

4. Productivity of Language (“Creativity” in the text) • Language is hierarchical • Made up of different parts that can be combined • Parts form a hierarchy • Larger and larger units

5. Hierarchical Structure S NP VP Det N V NP the mouse Det N saw the cat

6. Productivity of Language (“Creativity” in the text) • Language is hierarchical • Made up of different parts that can be combined • Parts form a hierarchy • Larger and larger units • Language is governed by rules • Some things are permissible and others are not • OK: What is my cat saying? • NOT OK: Cat my saying is what?

7. Universality of Language • Everyone with normal capacities develops a language and learns its complex rules implicitly • Not talking about prescriptive grammar, but knowledge that produces permissible language • Language occurs in all cultures • Over 5000 different languages • No culture without a language • Even isolated communities have language

8. Universality of Language • Urge to communicate is powerful • Children who are deaf but not exposed to sign develop their own languages (homesign) • Language development consistent across cultures • Babbling @ 7 months • First words @ 1 year • Multiword utterances @ 2 years • All languages are “unique but the same”

9. Unique but the same • Languages are unique • Different sounds, words, rules • All different, but sometimes similar • Languages are the same • Have words that serve as nouns / verbs • Have a system to make things negative (e.g. “not”) • Have a way to ask questions • Have a way to refer to past and present • Have a way to refer to things that are not present

10. Study of Language • Wundt wrote about language in 1900 but detailed study started with cognitive revolution • Skinner: Verbal Behavior • People are trained to speak through conditioning • Noam Chomsky • Syntactic Structures described similarities and differences across languages (Zellig Harris work) • Humans are genetically programmed for language • Critique of Verbal Behavior introduced the poverty of the stimulus argument, which shattered behaviorism

11. Poverty of the Stimulus • Behaviorist argument: children learn on the basis of feedback from parents • Child says “cat eat” • Parent corrects with “the cat will eat” • Poverty of the stimulus argument • Children do not get enough feedback to learn • Language requires production of things never heard before • Classic example: “I hate you, Mommy.”

12. Study of Language • Disciplines that investigate language • Linguistics: like philosophy + anthropology • Natural Language Processing: computer science / AI • Psycholinguistics: cognitive psychology • Psycholinguistic study of language • Comprehension – how we understand language • Production – how we produce language • Representation – how we represent or code language • Acquisition – how we learn language

13. Language Comprehension

14. Levels of Language • Pragmatic Level (use in the real world) • Semantic Level (meaning) • Syntactic Level (sentences) • Lexical Level (words) • Morphological Level (meaningful parts) • Phonological Level (sounds)

15. Understanding Words

16. Comprehension of Words • Lexicon: All of the words a person understands • Often called a “Mental Dictionary” • Adults have over 50,000 different words • Contains meaning, grammatical category, phonemes, and rules about combining with morphemes

17. Comprehension of Words • Phonemes: The sounds of a language • Shortest segment of speech that, if changed, alters the meaning of the word within a language • Not quite the same as our letters, but close • Different languages have different sounds (and therefore different phonemes) • Number of phonemes varies by language • Morphemes: in between words and sounds • Smallest unit with a definable meaning OR grammatical function • Examples: truck, -ed, -s, banana

18. Perceiving Words • Perception of (spoken) words is about how we link the sounds we hear to our lexicon • As in the perception unit, it’s useful to think about top-down and bottom-up processes • Top and bottom determined by levels of language

19. Levels of Language • Pragmatic Level (use in the real world) • Semantic Level (meaning) • Syntactic Level (sentences) • Lexical Level (words) • Morphological Level (meaningful parts) • Phonological Level (sounds)

20. Perceiving Words • Perception of (spoken) words is about how we link the sounds we hear to our lexicon • As in the perception unit, it’s useful to think about top-down and bottom-up processes • Top and bottom determined by levels of language • In the book “context” is usually top • HUGE topic, will only be able to give you a bit of an overview

21. Perception of Words • Meaning of a word create a context that helps us actually hear the sounds of the word • Top-down effect on phoneme perception • Phonemic Restoration Effect (Warren, 1970) • Researchers edited coughs into sentences (actually replacing phonemes with the cough, not mixing) • Participants heard sentences, had to say what they heard and where the cough occurred

22. Warren (1970) Sentence: The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city. Results: • People couldn’t report where the cough was • People didn’t know the /s/ was missing Explanation: People seemed to “fill in” missing info based on context provided by sentence (and lexicon)

23. Warren (1970) Sentence: It was time to ave Results: • People couldn’t report where the cough was • People didn’t know the was missing Explanation: People seemed to “fill in” missing info based on context provided by sentence (and lexicon) goodbye to the family. /w/

24. Warren (1970) Sentence: It was time to ave Results: • People couldn’t report where the cough was • People didn’t know the was missing Explanation: People seemed to “fill in” missing info based on context provided by sentence (and lexicon) up for a new roof. /s/

25. Phonemic Restoration Effect • People use context to “fill in” missing or degraded sound information • Can be context before or after the sound itself • Very quick, people aren’t aware • It is a demonstration of a top-down effect (context effect) on word perception

26. Speech Segmentation • Ever notice how… • Language you don’t know – words blend together • Your language – words seem separate • You are using your knowledge of the language to find the word boundaries

27. Meaning and Segmentation • Same signal segments differently in different sentences • Be a big girl and eat your vegetables • The thing Big Earl loved most was his truck • Fun demo: Mad Gab game. For this you need to find a friend to help you.

28. Mad Gab Instructions • Take turns with the following roles: • Person A: Close your eyes, listen, and try to figure out what the other person is saying • Person B: Read the slide out loud (you may have to repeat a few times). • Talk about it – Person A will hear something different than what Person B was saying

29. “Mad Gab” demo Ask Rude Arrive Her

30. “Mad Gab” demo Eight Ape Reek Quarter

31. “Mad Gab” demo Amen Ask Hurt

32. “Mad Gab” demo Eye Mull Of Mush Sheen

33. “Mad Gab” demo I’ve Hailed Ink Lush

34. Mad Gab • What was the point of doing this for class? • Meaning affects which phonemes you hear and where the word boundaries are (top-down) • This meaning comes from your previous experience with Language • Based on actual sentences or phrases in English, rather than just words • There are also bottom-up aspects of speech segmentation

35. Transitional Probabilities and Segmentation • Transitional probabilities: the chances that one sound will follow another sound • Sounds “pretty” more likely than “tyba” in English • When we hear “prettybaby” we segment it into the words “pretty” and “baby” • We can learn to do this even if the words are not meaningful, through statistical learning • Tested with 8-month-olds (Saffran&colleagues, 1996) • Still knowledge, just knowledge of the language

36. Statistical Learning • Study with 8-month-olds • Training: infants heard a stream of nonsense “words” for two minutes • …bidakupadotigolibutupiropadotibidaku… • No pauses, random order, flat intonation • Testing: infants chose how long to listen to test stimuli by turning their heads • Whole word: padoti…padoti…padoti • Part word: libutu…libutu…libutu • Infants could tell which one (preferred part)

37. Perceiving Letters • So far we’ve been talking about understanding the sounds in spoken language. • Top-down and bottom-up effects • Understanding written letters is similar • Visual perception of the letters themselves is both top-down and bottom-up (from chapter 3) • Word superiority effect shows that words affect processing of letters (top-down)

38. Perception of Letters

39. Word Superiority Effect • Coglab / Example in the book…. • Stimuli: word (FORK), nonword (RFOK), or letter (K), followed by a target & distractor • Task: choose the target • Finding: People are more accurate and faster at picking the target when the stimulus is a word, compared to when it is *alone* or part of a nonword

40. Word Superiority Effect • What’s the point of this study? • Demonstrates that the top-down context (the word) helps with processing • There’s a model of this that my help you visualize this. • Picture “spreading activation” going from bottom to top and then back down • Only some features are shown – the model would be complete • If this doesn’t help, it’s OK! (not on exam)

41. Interactive Activation Model ROOF FORK Word Level F K O R Letter Level Feature Level K Stimulus

42. Understanding Words

43. Word Frequency Effect • We respond more quickly to high frequency words (home vs. hike). • Supported with lexical decision studies • Task = word or nonword • Findings = faster to say a high-frequency word is a word than to say a low-frequency word is a word • Supported by faster reading times • Eye movements • Overall reading times (story with pretty vs. demure)

44. Lexical Ambiguity • Same word has different meanings • “Bugs” = insects OR recording devices • “Bank” = river bank OR financial institution • When reading, both meanings are accessed right away, but then context overrides one of them • Shown with lexical priming at “bug” in a story • Simultaneous presentation: “spy” / “ant” equally fast • 200 ms delay: context-specific meaning faster

45. Understanding Sentences

46. Levels of Language • Pragmatic Level (use in the real world) • Semantic Level (meaning) • Syntactic Level (sentences) • Lexical Level (words) • Morphological Level (meaningful parts) • Phonological Level (sounds)

47. Syntax vs. Semantics • Meaning / Semantics • Semantic violation: “The cats won’t bake.” • It’s English but it doesn’t seem meaningful • Form / Syntax • Syntactic violation: “Cat bird the chased.” • You can guess what it might mean, but it doesn’t follow the rules of English • Recall discussion from Chapter 2 – different brain areas for these two levels of language

48. Parsing • Most of the time language is successful • No syntactic or semantic violations • Syntax and semantics work together • Meaning of whole sentence depends on syntax • How words are grouped together, or parsed, can have a major effect • Example: Ambiguous sentences • Example: Garden Path sentences

49. Ambiguous Sentences • Ambiguous means that it has more than one interpretation • We saw ambiguous man-rat pictures in the perception chapter • Some sentence ambiguities depend on structure • Example: “I saw the spy with the telescope” • Option 1: Phrase “with the telescope” is grouped with “spy” • Option 2: Phrase “with the telescope” is grouped with “saw”

50. SPEAKER JOHN Ambiguity ACME TELESCOPE “I saw the spy with the telescope.”