Chapter 11 Book Notes PDF

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Cognition Chapter 11Language Language: A system of communication using sounds or symbol that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, idea and experiences. This captures the ability to string sounds and words together to open a door to communication. Hierarchal nature of language: It consists o...

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Cognition Chapter 11 Language Language: A system of communication using sounds or symbol that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, idea and experiences. - This captures the ability to string sounds and words together to open a door to communication. Hierarchal nature of language: It consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units. - Words can be combined to create phrases, which in turn can create sentences, which themselves can become components of a story Rule based nature of language: Means that these components can be arranged in certain ways - Ex: “What is my cat saying” cannot be rearranged in “Cat my saying is what” - These two properties a hierarchal structure and rules endow humans with the ability to go far beyond the fixed calls and signs of animals to communicate whatever we want to express. There are more than 5000 different languages and there isn’t a single culture without language Paul Broca began his work on language in 1861 and Carl Wernicke in 1874 - Broca studied patients with brain damage which led to the discovery of the area called the temporal lobe (Broca’s area) o Broca’s area is responsible for the portion of language o Therefor damage to Broca’s area would lead to the impairment of speech - Wernicke proposed that an area in the temporal lobe (Wernicke’s area) is responsible for the comprehension of language o Therefor damage to Wernicke’s area would result in the impairment of understanding when people speak however their ability to produce language is not hindered B.F Skinner’s main proponent of behaviorism through his published book called Verbal Behavior - He proposed that language is learned through reinforcement - Children learn language based on being rewarded for using the correct use of language and punished (or not rewarded) for using incorrect use of language Noam Chomsky in 1957 published a book titled Syntactic Structures - Though this he proposed that human language is coded in the genes - Just like humans are programmed to walk, they are also programmed to acquire and use language - He produced arguments saying that you cannot look at language through behavior without adding in the component of the mind. o He says that as children begin learning language, they start forming sentences that they have never learned before and have never been enforced

o An example sentence of this would be “I have you mommy” Psycholinguistics: The field concerned with the psychological study of language. - The goal of psycholinguistics is to discover the psychological processes by which humans acquire and process language. There are 4 major concerns of psycholinguistics: 1. Comprehension: How do people understand spoken and written languages? - How do people process language sounds? - How do people understand words and sentences? - How do people have conversations with one another 2. Representation: How is language represented in the mind? - How do people group words together into phrases to create meaningful sentences? - How do they make connections between different parts of stories? 3. Speech production: How do people produce language? - The physical processes of speech production and the mental processes that occur as a person creates speech 4. Acquisition: How do people learn language? - How do children learn language? - How do people learn additional languages in the future either as children or later in life? Lexicon: All of the words we know which have also been called our “mental dictionary” Semantics: The meaning of language - Each word has more than one meaning Lexical semantics: The meaning of words Word frequency: The frequency with which a word appears in a language Word frequency effect: Refers to the fact that we respond more rapidly to high frequency words like home than low frequency words like hike. - A words frequency influences how we process the word Lexical decision task: The task is to decide as quickly as possible whether strings of letters are words or nonwords. - When looking at words such as reverie, cratily, history, garvola two words stand out as non-words and two words stand out as real words. o Reverie is a low frequency word and history is a high frequency word. o Research shows that people respond slower to lower frequency words than nonfrequency words - Slower response to word frequency has been demonstrated by measuring people’s eye movements and durations of the fixations that occur as the eye pauses at a particular place.

The word frequency effect demonstrates how our past experience with words influences our ability to access their meaning

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Pronunciation of words Not everyone pronounces words the same way Words are perceived through context clues. Words that stand alone which are pronounced cannot be understood or recognized

Speech segmentation: The perception of individual words even though there are often no pauses between words The ability to hear and understand spoken words is affected by 4 factors: 1. How frequently we have encountered a word in the past 2. The context in which the words appear 3. Our knowledge of statistical regularities of our language 4. Our knowledge of word meanings Words are more difficult to understand when taken out of context. Speech Segmentation: The perception of individual words even though there are often not pauses between words. Lexical ambiguity: Words that often have more than one meaning - An example would be the word “bug” it could mean the insect, a hidden listening device, or annoying someone among all things. o Thus in order to distinguish the word from other meanings, we have to use the context that the word was used in. - The example of the use bug shows that simple context can clear up confusion quickly of the meaning, so fast that we often times do not recognize it. Priming: Occurs when seeing a stimulus makes it easier to respond to that stimulus when it is presented again. - First presentation of a stimulus activates a representation of the stimulus, and a person can respond more rapidly if this activation is still present when the stimulus is presented again. Lexical priming: Priming that involves the meaning of words. - Occurs when a word is followed by another word with a similar meaning. - An example would be the word Rose and then the word flower, this could lead the person responding faster because those two words are related to one another. Study by Tenehaus used lexical priming to determine if it was a thing by showing various sentences to participants such as “She held a rose” and “She held a post” and the probe word was “flower” - People were able to identify that the rose was a flower after a slight delay

o This delay meant that all other meanings were being assessed were being processed before the understanding the true meaning behind the word. Meaning dominance: The relative frequency of the meanings of ambiguous words. - An example would be the word Tin which in most cases is referring to the metal and the less frequent use of the word would be the metal can o Therefore, the ability to first recognize the word Tin as the actual metal rather than the metal can describes Biased dominance:  Thus, Biased dominance is when you choose one meaning over another based on how frequently you may hear a certain definition over another. Balanced dominance: When two such words are heard equally as frequent meaning that no one word is heard in more of a different way than the other, so they are equally as likely to be chosen interchangeably - An example of this would be the word cast it could mean members of a play, or a plaster cast you get from injury. How you might perceive these definitions effects the speed of your recognition of the meaning - The assumption is that there is no further context available when deciphering the meaning o Biased dominance causes faster recognition o Balanced dominance causes slower recognition Recap: There are multiple factors that play into accessing the meaning of a word 1. Frequency: This affects how long it takes to process the meaning of a word 2. If a word has more than one meaning the context of the sentence influences which meaning we access to measure dominance 3. Our ability to access the correct meaning of a word depends on both the word’s frequency and for words with more than one meaning, a combination of meaning dominance and context. Understanding sentences Syntax: The structure of a sentence - The study of syntax involves discovering cues that languages provide that show how words in a sentence relate to one another Parsing: Creating meaning for words by grouping them into phrases - Understanding the meaning of a sentence is feat of mental pyrotechnics o This is done by understanding each word as it occurs and parsing words into phrases. - Ex: After the musician played the piano… There are many possibilities of what could happen next in the sentence. o You might think that what comes next could be the following  A. She left the stage

 B. She bowed to the audience  C. The crowd cheered wildly o But if the sentence continued with was wheeled off of the stage you might get surprised because the grouping of words is incorrect.  The correct grouping would be After the musician played, the piano was wheeled off of the stage by adding this subtle comma makes the correct parsing of this sentence clear: After the musician played, the piano was wheeled off stage. Garden Path Sentences: Sentences which begin appearing to mean one thing but end up meaning something else such as the example written above. Temporary ambiguity: First one organization is adopted and then when error is realized, the person shifts to the correct organization. Garden Path Model of Parsing: Proposed by Lynn Frazier in 1979 stating that as people read a sentence their grouping of words into phrases is governed by a number of processing mechanisms called Heuristics. Heuristics: A rule that can be applied rapidly to make a decision. - These decisions involved in parsing decisions about the structure of a sentence as it unfolds in time. These heuristics have 2 properties: 1. (Positive) They are fast which is important for language which occurs at 200 words per minute 2. (Negative) They sometimes result in the wrong decision Late closure: When a person encounters a new word, the person’s parsing mechanism assumes that this word is part of the current phrase, so each new word is added to the current phrase for as long as possible. - Ex: After the musician played… When we add in the word piano the parsing mechanism assumes that the piano is still part of the current phrase so it becomes After the musician played the piano when we add the word was the parsing mechanism continues to assume it is part of the current phrase but when adding the word wheeled it becomes obvious that something is wrong. o Late closure has led us astray by adding too many words to the first phrase, the two parts of the sentence need to be separated into two phrases which are [After the musician played the piano] [the piano was wheeled off of the stage].  It becomes obvious that a correction is needed so a comma is placed. Constraint-based approach to parsing: The idea that information in addition to syntax participates in processing as a person reads or hears a sentence. - Stupid sentences that look weird such as o The dog buried in the sand was hidden

o The treasure buried in the sand was hidden  One of these leads you believe that someone buried a dog in the sand to hid it, and it makes you double read it. Visual World paradigm: Determines how information in a scene can influence how a sentence is processed. Subjective-relative construction: When a sentence is read more difficultly because it contains more than one clause - Sentences like these are difficult to understand because it demands more of the reader’s memory. - In an example of two sentences that have the same words but arranged differently you can see how this affects the speed of comprehension o 1. The senator who spotted the reporter shouted o 2. The senator who the reporter spotted shouted  In sentence one we find out who did the “spotting” right away.  In sentence 2 “spotted” is near the end of the sentence so we need to hold the early part of the sentence in memory until we find out that the reporter did the “spotting” Thus, the higher memory load slows down Sentences are more than the sum of the meanings of the individual’s words Likewise, stories are more than just the sum of the meanings of individual sentences Inferences: Determining what the text means by using our knowledge to go beyond the information provided by the text Making inferences When reading stories or passages we often make inferences or assumptions about things that are happening despite not having explicit text that says so, - For example, if a text reads “John was trying to fix the birdhouse. He was pounding the nail when his father came out to watch and help him do the work” People will have thought that they read that the boy was hammering a nail into the birdhouse to try and fix it and then the dad came out to do the work for him. Narrative: Refers to texts in which there is a story that progresses from one event to another. Coherence: The representation of the text in a person’s mind that creates clear relations between parts of the text and the main topic of the story. Anaphoric inference: Inference that involves inferring that both she’s in the in the second refers to Riffifi because the subject of the sentence was Riffifi. - Just as in the birdhouse reference, he refers to the boy

Instrument inference: When you make an inference and you can picture it happening such as Shakespeare writing Hamlet while sitting in a chair. You would probably picture him writing with a quill and pen at a table based on the time period he was in. Casual inference: Where you infer that the events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous sentence and infer that her taking aspirin made the headache go away based on that being the reason, she took Advil. Recap: Inferences create connections that are essential for creating coherence in texts and making these inferences can involve creativity by the reader. - Reading a text involves more than just understanding words or sentences. o It is a dynamic process that involves transformation of words, sentences, and sequences of sentences into a meaningful story. Situation model: Simulates the perceptual and motor (movement) characteristics of the objects and actions in a story. Given-new contract: States that the speaker should construct sentences so that they include two kinds of information 1. Given information: Information that the listener already knows 2. New information: Information that the listener is hearing for the first time o Ex: Ed was given an alligator for his birthday.  Given information: He had a birthday  New information: He got an alligator Common Ground: The mental knowledge and beliefs shared among conversational parties. The key word is shared - When two people are having a conversation, each person may have some idea of what the other person knows about what they are discussing and as the conversation continues, the amount of shared information increases. - Doctors converse well with their patients by not using medical jargon, they use simple words instead of complex ones to reach a common ground and understand one another. Referential communication task: A task in which two people are exchanging information in a conversation, when this information involves reference. – Identifying something by naming or describing it. - An example of this would be trying to describe an abstract picture that someone else has never seen before. This explanation is done through conversation. Entrainment: Synchronization between two partners. - When people establish similar gestures, speaking rate, body positions, and sometimes pronunciation. Syntactic coordination: Coordinating grammatical constructions.

Syntactic Priming: Hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction. Speakers are sensitive to the linguistic behavior of other speakers and adjust their behaviors to match. Theory of mind: The ability to understand what others feel, think or believe, and the ability to interpret and react to the person’s gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other things that provide cues to meaning. - Every person has to anticipate when it is appropriate to enter the conversation, this phenomenon is called “Turn taking” Language and Music Prosody: The pattern of intonation and rhythm in spoken language Emoji’s: Pictographs providing a way of indicating emotions in written language Tonic: Composition keys in music - Ex: C is the tonic key of C and associated scale C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. o Tonics give a depiction of tone and generate what listeners think might come next Return to the tonic: The expectation that a song that begins with a tonic with end on the tonic Broca’s aphasia: Difficulty in understanding sentences with complex syntax. - There id s connection between poor performance on the language task and poor performance on the music task. - The deficits in the music task for aphasia patients were small compared to the deficits in language tasks o Thus, both of these resulted in support for the connection between brain mechanisms involved in music and language, but not necessarily a strong connection. Congenial Amusia: Causes severe problems with tasks such as discriminating between simple melodies or recognizing common tunes. Conclusion of correlation between music and language studies: - While there is evidence for the separateness of music and language in the brain, there is also evidence for overlap between music and language....