Ch. 11 - language - Summary Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience PDF

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What is Language?  Language: a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences  The creativity if human language o Language provides a way of arranging a sequence of signals to send from one person to another o Language has ...

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What is Language?  Language: a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences  The creativity if human language o Language provides a way of arranging a sequence of signals to send from one person to another o Language has 2 structures:  Hierarchical  Idea that smaller components can be combined to become larger units  Governed by rules  Idea that these units can be arranged in certain ways but not in other  The universal need to communicate with language o People create their own language  Ex. deaf person that is around people who cannot sign o Humans have the ability to follow rules without even attending to it constantly o Language is universal across culture despite the unique aspects of each one  They also tend to develop in similar fashion  Studying language o The study of language can be dated back to the 1800s o Verbal behaviors  B. F. Skinner  Proposed that language is learned through reinforcement o Syntactic structure  Noam Chomsky  States that the human language is coded in the genes  People are programed to know the underlying basis of language  Was against behaviorism  Psycholinguistics: the field concerned with the psychological study of language  4 major concerns: o Comprehension  How people understand the spoken language o Speech production  How people produce language o Representation  How the language is represented in the mind and the brain o Acquisition  How people learn language Perceiving Phonemes, Words, and Letters  Lexicon: a person’s knowledge of what a word means, how it sounds, and how it is used  Components of words o Phonemes: shortest segment of speech that changes the meaning of a word  One of the smallest units of language which refers to sounds

o Morphemes: have definable meaning or a grammatical function  One of the smallest units of language which refers to meanings o They are the building blocks of words  How perceiving sounds and letter is affected by meaning o Phonemic restoration effect: when phonemes are perceived in speech when the sound of the phoneme is covered up by an extraneous noise  Top-down processing  “filling in”: where the missing phoneme wasn’t perceived as missing by the listener  Where use of word context allows people to recognize the word  The knowledge of the meaning of a word call also allow people to recognize words o When words, especially where the pronunciation is different, are taken out of context, it becomes more difficult to understand o Speech segmentation: the ability to perceive individual words even though there are often no pauses between words in the sound signal  Aided by knowing the meanings of words and knowing the context in which the word was used o Word superiority effect: the finding that letters are easier to recognize when they are contained in a word than when they appear alone Understanding Words  Corpus: sample of utterances or written text from a particular language  Word frequency: the frequency with which a word appears in a language o Word frequency effect: the fact that we respond more rapidly to high-frequency words  Lexical ambiguity: the existence of multiple word meanings o Meaning dominance: when some meanings of words occur more frequently than others o Biased dominance: when words have two or more meanings with different dominances o Balanced dominance: when a word has more than one meaning but the meanings have about the same dominance o The process of accessing the meaning of a word is complicated and is influenced by multiple factors  Frequency of a word determines how long it takes to process meaning  The context of the sentence determines which meaning we access  Our ability to access the correct meaning of a word depends on both the word’s frequency and combination of meaning dominance and context Understanding Sentences  Semantics: the meanings of words and sentences  Syntax: specifies the rules for combining words into sentences  Parsing: a central process for determining the meaning of a sentence...