Psych Chapter 8.3: Language – Flashcards

The ability to combine words into new sentences that express and unlimited variety of ideas. -Only the human language has this property and did not evolve by accident -The whole human brain makes language possible -Every day, we invent new sentences that no one has ever said before -We do not memorize all the sentences we use, we learn rules for making and understanding sentences

A system of converting a deep structure into a surface structure. -First proposed by Noam Chomsky -The deep structure is the underlying logic or meaning of a sentence -The surface structure is the sequence of words as they are actually spoken or written -Whenever we speak, we transform the deep structure of a language into a surface structure -Two surface structures can resemble each other without representing the same deep structure, or they can represent the same deep structure without resembling each other

Explained that other species communicate but without the productivity of human language.

R. Allen Gardner and Beatrice Gardner taught a chimp named Washoe to use sign language and learned that chimps can learn to communicate through visual symbols. -These symbols are used almost exclusively to make requests, not to describe, and rarely in original combinations

-Has social behavior that resembles humans by having male and females form strong attachments, females are sexually responsive outside fertility period, males contribute to infant care, and adults often share food -Learned to press keys on a board to make short sentences but almost never use expressions of possession -Sometimes used symbols to describe events, without requesting anything -Most proficient bonobos comprehend symbols about as well as a 2-2 1/2 child comprehends language -Show considerable understanding of spoken English -Have a great predisposition for this type of learning; they learn by observation and imitation which promote better understanding than formal training methods, and they begin their language experience early in life

A genetic condition characterized by mental retardation in most regards but surprisingly good use in language relative to their other abilities.

A built in mechanism for acquiring language. -Suggested by Chomsky and his followers -Evidence for this theory is that deaf children who are not taught sign language invent their own and try to teach it -Further evidence is that children learn the use of grammatical structure even though they don't hear that kind of expression often. To pick up that grammar quickly, children must have a predisposition to guide them

Pattern of speech that elongates vowels. -Parents throughout the world simplify learning-language tasks by speaking to their children in parentese -Infants learn the basics of language from regularities in what they hear

A condition characterized by difficulties in language production. -Occurs from damage in the Broca's area [frontal cortex] -Serious language impairment occurs if the damage is far beyond the Broca's area, but the area seems to be central -The person speaks, writes, and types slowly and inarticulately

A condition marked by impaired recall of nouns and impaired language comprehension, despite fluent and grammatical speech. -Occurs from damage in the Wernicke's area [temporal cortex] -Difficulty with nouns and impaired comprehension fit together -Their speech is hard to understand because they omit most nouns

-Progression through the stages depends largely on maturation -Parents who expose their children to as much language as possible increase the child's vocabulary, but they hardly affect the rate of progression through the language stages -Deaf infants babble as much as hearing infants -When young children speak, they apply grammatical rules, although they cannot state these rules. They overregulate and overgeneralize the rules -Optimal period for learning a language is in early childhood -Children learn pronunciation and difficult aspects of grammar better than adults -To master a language one must start early, and those we start after the age of 12 almost never approach the level of a native speaker

If an infant is separated at birth from human contact, they fail to show language of their own and fail to learn much language after they are given a chance. -A child who does not learn language young is permanently impaired at learning one

Learning two languages. -Both languages activate the same brain areas -Those who are bilingual from infancy devote more brain areas to language, including parts of both the left and the right hemispheres, and they develop wider connections in the brain -Children take longer to master two languages than one and their vocabulary lags behind those who speak one language -Take longer than average to think of a word -Can communicate with more people -Gain practice controlling their attention, shifting from one language frame to another, inhibit distractions, and hold more information in their working memory -On average, they do better than one-language people on nonverbal tasks

-English language has many words with ambiguous meanings -Context determines how we interpret a word and primes us to hear an ambiguous sound one way or another -We use lip-reading to understand what we hear. If lip movements to do not match the sound we compromise between what we see and what we hear -Our brain uses context to fill in the missing sounds -We interpret a sequence of words as a whole, not one at a time -When you hear an ambiguous sound, you hold it in an "undecided" state for about three syllables for the context to clarify it -Long-delayed context helps you understand a word's meaning but it cannot help you hear an ambiguous word correctly; only the immediate context can influence what you hear

-Depends on your knowledge of the world and all the assumptions you share with the speaker or writer of the sentence -You have to remember where you are because the meaning of a word can differ from one place to another

A sentence within a sentence within a sentence. -Grammatical but incomprehensible -Overburden one's memory -Ex. The squirrel the dog the cat saw chased climbed the tree

A unit of sound. -Ex. "f" or "sh" -Readers of the English language are accustom to believe that a letter or a combination of letters is a phoneme. However, in the Japanese Hiragana style of writing, each character represents a symbol.

Unit of meaning. -Help us break an unfamiliar word into meaningful parts -In Chinese, each character represents a morpheme and ordinarily an entire word -Ex. The word "thrills" has two morphemes: thrill and s -Ex. "Harp" has one morpheme and "harping" has two

Most people identify the letter more accurately when it is part of a word than when it is presented by itself. -We read a word as a whole-we see the last letter just as fast as the first letter -Our perceptions and memories are represented by connections among "units" corresponding to sets of neurons and each unit connects to other units -Any activated unit excites some of its neighbors and inhibits others -Ex. "Coin." Although none of the four letter units send a strong message by itself, the collective impact is strong. The perception of "coin" then feeds excitation back to the individual letter-identifying units and confirms their tentative identifications

When your eyes are stationary. -Attention is wandering when fixations become longer, more erratic, less sensitive to the difficulty of text, and when you blink more -Last about 200-250 milliseconds -Briefer on familiar words than words that are harder or have more than one meaning -You read fixations, not saccades -Typical limit of the number of fixations someone can read is 11 characters at a time. This limit depends on how much meaning one can attend to at once -Speed readers have briefer fixations with fewer backtracks, and some increase the number of letters per fixation

Quick eye movements from one fixation to another. -Last only 25-50 milliseconds, therefore a normal reading pace is about four fixations per second