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Chapter 11

Chapter 11. Language. What Is Language?. System of communication using sounds or symbols Express feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImQrUjlyHUg. Broca ’ s and Wernicke ’ s Aphasia. Anatomy of Speech Production : – Many opportunities for failure.

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Chapter 11

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  1. Chapter 11 Language

  2. What Is Language? • System of communication using sounds or symbols • Express feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImQrUjlyHUg

  3. Broca’s and Wernicke’s Aphasia

  4. Anatomy of Speech Production: – Many opportunities for failure

  5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aplTvEQ6ew • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CJWo5TDHLE

  6. The Creativity of Human Language • Hierarchical system • Components that can be combined to form larger units • Governed by rules • Specific ways components can be arranged

  7. The Universality of Language • Deaf children invent sign language • All cultures have a language • Language development is similar across cultures • All have nouns, verbs, tense, questions, etc.

  8. Studying Language in Cognitive Psychology • B.F. Skinner (1957) Verbal Behavior • Language learned through reinforcement • Noam Chomsky (1957) Syntactic Structures • Human language coded in the genes • Underlying basis of all language is similar • Children produce sentences they have never heard and that have never been reinforced

  9. Perceiving and Understanding Words • Lexicon: all words a person understands • Phoneme: shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of the word • Morphemes: smallest unit of language that has meaning or grammatical function

  10. Perceiving and Understanding Words • Phonemic restoration effect • “Fill in” missing phonemes based on context of sentence and portion of word presented • Speech segmentation • Context, Understanding meaning, Understanding of sound and syntactic rules

  11. Understanding Words • Lexical decision task • Read a list of words and non-words silently • Say “yes” when you read a word • Word frequency effect • Respond more rapidly to high-frequency words

  12. Understanding Words • Context effects • Attempt to figure out what a sentence means as we read it • Lexical ambiguity • Words have more than one meaning • Context clears up ambiguity after all meanings of a word have been briefly accessed

  13. Understanding Sentences • Semantics: meanings of words and sentences • Syntax: rules for combining words into sentences

  14. Understanding Sentences • Event-related potential and brain imaging studies have shown syntax and semantics are associated with different mechanisms (Chapter 2)

  15. Understanding Sentences • Parsing: mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases • Syntactic ambiguity: more than one possible structure, more than one meaning

  16. Understanding Sentences • Syntax-first approach to parsing • Grammatical structure of sentence determines parsing • Late closure: parser assumes new word is part of the current phrase • Garden-path model • Interactionist approach to parsing • Semantics influence processing as one reads a sentence

  17. Understanding Sentences • Tannenhaus and coworkers (1995) • Eye movements change when information suggests revision of interpretation of sentence is necessary • Syntactic and semantic information used simultaneously

  18. Put the apple……….. on the towel………… in the box.

  19. Understanding Text and Stories • Coherence: representation of the text in one’s mind so that information from one part of the text can be related to information in another part of the text • Inference: readers create information during reading not explicitly stated in the text

  20. Understanding Text and Stories • Anaphoric: connecting objects/people • Instrumental: tools or methods • Causal: events in one clause caused by events in previous sentence

  21. Bigger Picture – StoriesConsider how much we “just know.” • Anaphoric Inference • “Simon had such an attitude last night. I hatehim.” Who do I hate? • Instrumental Inference • “Jefferson signed the documents and rode all the way back to Monticello.” On what? • Causal Inference • I played basketball for three hours. My back hurts. Why?

  22. Conversations • Historically, the most important and commonly used form of language • Depends on shared knowledge • Each person is responsible for knowing what is and is not shared knowledge • H.P. Grice (1975) described the rules of conversations

  23. Grice and the Conversational Maxims • Quantity – Not too much, not too little • Quality – Be truthful and accurate • Manner – Be clear • Relation – Be relevant Jason: Howard is meeting a woman for dinner tonight. Susan: Wow! I wonder what his wife is going to think, if she finds out.

  24. Conversational Rules • We don’t notice them when they are being followed. • We do notice when they are not. • This can be good.

  25. Producing Language: Conversations • Two or more people talking together • Dynamic and rapid

  26. Producing Speech: Conversations • Semantic coordination • Conversations go more smoothly if participants have shared knowledge

  27. Producing Speech: Conversations • Given-new contract: speaker constructs sentences so they include • Given information • New information • New can then become given information

  28. Producing Speech: Conversations • Syntactic coordination • Using similar grammatical constructions

  29. Producing Speech: Conversations • Syntactic priming • Production of a specific grammatical construction by one person increases chances other person will use that construction • Reduces computational load in conversation

  30. “The girl gave the book to the boy.”

  31. Culture, Language, & Cognition • Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: language influences thought • Roberson and coworkers (2000) • Two cultures had differences in how participants assigned names to color chips

  32. Culture, Language, & Cognition • Categorical perception • Stimuli in same categories are more difficult to discriminate from one another than stimuli in two different categories

  33. Culture, Language, & Cognition • Differences in the way names were assigned to colors affect the ability to tell the difference between colors

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