LANGUAGE

Language = the use of an organized means of combining words to communicate

Makes it possible to think about things and processes people currently cannot see, hear, feel, touch, or
smell

Communication = exchange of thoughts and feelings (verbal or nonverbal)

Psycholinguistics = psychology of our language as it interacts with the human mind

Considers production and comprehension of language

Linguistics = the study of language structure and change

Neurolinguistics =the study of the relationship among the brain, cognition, and language

Sociolinguistics = the study of the relationship between social behavior and language

Computational linguistics = the study of language via computational methods

Referent = the thing or concept in the real world that a word refers to

Principle of conventionality : meanings of words are determined by conventions

Principle of contrast : different words have different meanings

✓ Regularly structured
✓ Structured at multiple levels (sounds, meaning units, words, and phrases)

The Basic Components of Words

Phone = the smallest unit of speech, a single vocal sound
Phoneme = the smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance in each
language from another
Phonemics = the study of the phonemes
Phonetics = the study of how to produce or combine speech sounds or to represent them with written
symbols
Morpheme = the smallest unit of meaning within a particular language
Content morphemes = the words that convey the bulk of the meaning of a language
Function morphemes add detail and nuance to the meaning of the content morphemes or help the
content morphemes to fit the grammatical context
Lexicon = entire set of morphemes in each language or in each person’s linguistic repertoire

The Basic Components of Sentences

Syntax = the systematic way in which words can be combined and sequenced to form meaningful phrases
and sentences
A sentence comprises at least two parts: a noun phrase and a verb phrase
Understanding the Meaning of Words, Sentences, and Larger Text Units
Semantics = the study of meaning in a language

Coarticulation = simultaneous pronunciation of more than one sound (Result of the anticipation of the
next word)

Speech segmentation = the process of trying to separate the continuous sound stream into distinct words
The View of Speech Perception as Ordinary
Template-matching or feature-detection processes
(1) Speech sounds are analyzed into their components
(2) Components are analyzed for patterns and matched to a prototype or template
Require decision-making processes above and beyond feature detection or template matching cognitive
and contextual factors influence perception of speech (e.g., phonemic restauration effect)

Phonetic refinement theory

✓ Start with the analysis of auditory sensations and shift to higher-level processing
✓ Identification of words based on successively paring down the possibilities for matches between
each of the phonemes and the words already known
✓ The initial sound that establishes the set of possible words people have heard need to be the first
phoneme alone
✓ TRACE model
✓ Speech perception begins with three levels of feature detection

Acoustic features o Phonemes o Words

✓ Speech perception is highly interactive lower levels affect higher levels and vice versa
✓ Phonemic restauration effect = integration of what is known with what is heard when perceiving
speech
o Like the visual phenomenon of closure
o Gestalt principles: symmetry proximity, similarity

Categorical Perception = discontinuous categories of speech sounds

Perception of speech sounds is experienced categorically
People are better able to discriminate between two different categories than within categories
People with reading disabilities: vice versa

The Motor Theory of Speech Perception

✓ Movements of the speakers’ vocal tract are used to perceive what is said
✓ Motor parts of the cortex are involved in the production and perception of speech
✓ McGurk effect = perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and
vision
✓ in speech perception, illusion occurs when the auditory component of one sound is paired with
the visual component of another sound, leading to the perception of a third sound

Understanding Meaning: Semantic

✓ Denotation = strict dictionary definition of a word
✓ Connotation = a word’s emotional overtones, presuppositions, and other non-explicit meanings
✓ Denotation and connotation together form the meaning of a word
✓ Being able to comprehend the conceptual meanings of words is important
 ✓ When retrieving the meaning of words, people may rely on their perceptual features and the
function

Understanding Sentences: Syntax

✓ Grammar = the study of language in terms of noticing regular patterns (patterns relate to the
functions and relationships of words in a sentence)
✓ Prescriptive grammar: describes the “correct” ways in which to structure the use of written and
spoken language
✓ Descriptive language: describes the structures, functions, and relationships of words in language

Syntactical Priming = People tend to use syntactical structures and read faster sentences that parallel the
structures of sentences they have just heard

Sentence priming = independent of its grammatical correctness, a sentence is rated more grammatically
correct when a sentence with the same structure was presented before
Speech Errors = When speech errors occur, they do so in grammatical correctness (nouns are switched
for nouns, verbs for verbs, propositions for propositions, etc.)

Analyzing Sentences: Phrase-Structure Grammar

✓ Humans seem to have a mental mechanism for classifying words according to syntactical
categories which is separate from the meaning of words
(1) Parsing: when composing sentences, people seem to analyze and divide them into functional
components
(2) People assign appropriate categories to each component
(3) Syntax rules are used to construct grammatical sequences of the parsed components
✓ Sentences are organized in hierarchical structures of embedded phrases

A New Approach to Syntax: Transformational Grammar

✓ Relationship among different phrase structures that involve transformations of elements within
the sentences (Chomsky, 1957)
✓ Transformational grammar involves transformational rules (Chomsky, 1957)
✓ Rules guide the ways in which an underlying proposition can be arranged into a sentence

Deep structure = underlying syntactical structure that links various phrase structures through various
transformation rules

Surface structure = any of the various phrase structures that may result from such transformations

Relationships between Syntactical and Lexical Structures

✓ Each lexical item contains syntactical information, which indicates
The syntactical category of the items (noun, verb…)
The appropriate syntactical contexts in which the morpheme may be used (pronouns as subjects,
direct objects…)
✓ Any idiosyncratic information about the syntactical uses of the morpheme (treatment of irregular
verbs…) By making the mental lexicon more complex, the syntax is made simpler

Critics: too much focus on syntax, too less on meaning

✓ Thematic roles = ways in which items can be used in the context of communication
 ✓ Agent = “doer” of any action
✓ Patient = direct recipient of the action
✓ Beneficiary = indirect recipient of the action
✓ Instrument = means by which the action is implemented
✓ Location = place where the action occurs
✓ Source = where the action originated
✓ Goal = where the action is going

Reading
When Reading Is a Problem – Dyslexia
Dyslexia = the difficulty in deciphering, reading, and comprehending text
Impaired processes:
✓ Phonological awareness = sound structure of spoken language
✓ Phonological reading = reading words in isolation
✓ Phonological coding = remembering strings of phonemes that are sometimes confusing
✓ Lexical access = ability to retrieve phonemes from long-term memory

Kinds of dyslexia
✓ Developmental dyslexia: difficulty learning the rules that relate letters to sound
✓ Acquired dyslexia (brain injury)

Perceptual Issues in Reading

✓ Two basic kinds of processes

Lexical processes: used to identify letters and words; activate relevant information in memory about
these words

Comprehension processes : used to make sense of the text as a whole

Lexical Processes in Reading

Fixations and Reading Speed
✓ When reading the eyes move in saccades as they fixate on successive clumps of text
✓ Longer on longer words, unfamiliar words, and the last word in a sentence (“sentence wrap-up
time”)
✓ Readers fixate up to about 80% of the content words in a text
✓ Extraction of useful information from a perceptual window of characters about four characters to
the left
✓ of a fixation point and about 14 or 15 characters to the right of it
✓ Saccadic movements leap an average of about 7-9 characters between successive fixations

Lexical Access = the identification of a word that allows people to gain access to the meaning of the
word from memory

Interactive process: combines information of different kinds (features of letters, the letters themselves
the words comprising the letters…)
Interactive-activation model (McClelland, Rumelhart)
✓ Activation of lexical elements occurs at multiple levels: feature level, letter level, word level
✓ Activity at each level is interactive
✓ Information at each level is represented separately in memory
✓ Information passes from one level to another bidirectionally

Bottom-up and top-down processes

✓ Word-superiority effect: letters are read more easily when they are embedded in words than
when they are presented either in isolation or with letters that do not form words (Reicher-
Wheeler effect)

✓ Sentence-superiority effect: people take about twice as long to read unrelated words as to read
words in a sentence

✓ Context effects occur on a conscious and preconscious level

Intelligence and Lexical-Access Speed

✓ Lexical-access speed = the speed with which people can retrieve information about words stored
in long-term memory

Understanding Conversations and Essay: Discourse

✓ Discourse involves units of language larger than individual sentences
✓ Understanding discourse: knowledge of discourse structure and a greater context (physical,
social, cultural…)

Comprehending Known Words: Retrieving Word

Meaning from Memory
Semantic encoding
✓ the process by which people translate sensory information into a meaningful
✓ representation (representation is based on understand of the meanings of words)
✓ People with larger vocabularies can access lexical information more rapidly than those with
smaller vocabularies

Comprehending Unknown Words: Deriving Word

Meanings from Context
✓ Most of the vocabulary is learned indirectly through context information
✓ High-verbal people perform a deeper analysis of the possibilities for a new word’s meaning; they
used a well-formulated strategy for figuring out word meanings
✓ Low-verbal people seem to have no clear strategy

Comprehending Ideas: Propositional Representations

People extract the fundamental idea from groups of words and store them in a simplified
representational form in working memory (Kintsch)
✓ Representational form: propositions
✓ Propositions that are thematically central to the understanding of a text (=macro propositions)
will remain in working memory longer than propositions that are irrelevant to the theme
✓ Thematic structure = macrostructure
Comprehending Text Based on Context and Point of View
Varying the retrieval situations or cues can cause different details to be remembered

Representing the Text in Mental Models

✓ Creation of a mental representation that contains the main elements of a text
✓ Elements are simpler and more concrete than the text itself
✓ To form mental models, one must make at least tentative inferences about what is meant
✓ Passages of text that lead to a single mental model are easier to comprehend than are passages
that may lead to multiple mental models
✓ Bridging inference = an inference a reader/listener makes when a sentence seems not to follow
directly from the sentence preceding it

10. Language in Context

Language and Thought
Differences among Languages
✓ Different order of subject, verb, object
✓ Different ranges of grammatical inflections

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

✓ Linguistic = assertion that speakers of different languages have differing cognitive systems and
that these different cognitive systems influence the ways in which people think about the world
✓ Language may not determine thought but just influence it (facilitates it)
✓ Language affects perception
✓ Language affects encoding, storage, and retrieval

Linguistic Relativity or Linguistic Universals?

Linguistic universals = characteristic patterns across all languages of various cultures
Colors = A systematic pattern seems universally to govern color naming across languages
✓ All languages take their basic color terms from a set of 11 color names: black, white, red, yellow,
green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, gray
✓ When only some of the color names are used, the naming falls into a hierarchy of five levels
✓ Black – white - Yellow, green, blue Purple, pink, orange, gray
✓ Red - Brown
✓ Color names can have an impact on perception and cognition
Verbs and Grammatical Gender
✓ To be (Spanish vs. English)
✓ Put in/ put on – tight fit/ loose fit (English vs. Korean)
✓ Gender of objects (German vs. Spanish)
✓ Concepts = When fluent in more than one language, thought in influences according to which
language is spoken or being read in now
✓ Language and thought interact with each other throughout the life span

Bilingualism and Dialects

Bilingualism – An Advantage or Disadvantage?
Factors That Influence Second Language Acquisition
✓ There do not appear to be critical periods for second-language acquisitions
✓ Age and proficiency in a language are negatively correlated
 ✓ The kinds of learning experiences that facilitate second-language acquisition should match the
context and uses for the second language once it is acquired

Bilingualism: One System or Two?

✓ Single system hypothesis: two languages are represented in just one system or brain region
✓ Dual-system hypothesis: two languages are represented somehow in separate systems of the mind
✓ Individuals who suffered from brain injury: recovery of one or both languages seem contingent on
age of acquisition of the second language and on pre-incident language proficiency
✓ Some aspects of two languages may be represented singly, other aspects may be represented
separately

Language Mixtures and Change

✓ Prolonged contact between people of two different language groups sharing of the same
vocabulary
o pidgin = language that has no native speakers
o Pidgin can develop into a distinct linguistic form: own grammar becomes a creole
✓ Modern creoles may resemble an evolutionarily early form of language (=protolanguage)
✓ Dialect = regional variety of a language distinguished by features such as vocabulary, syntax, and
pronunciation
✓ Linguicism = a stereotype based on dialect

Neuroscience and Bilingualism

✓ Learning a second language increase of gray matter in the left inferior parietal cortex
positively correlated with proficiency
✓ Negative correlation between age of acquisition and density in the left inferior parietal cortex

Slips of the Tongue

Inadvertent linguistic error may occur at any level of linguistic analysis
Indicate that that language of thought differs somewhat from the language through which thought is
expressed
✓ Anticipation = usage of an element before it is appropriate in the sentence
✓ Perseveration = usage of language that was appropriate earlier
✓ Substitution = one element is substituted by another
✓ Reversal/ transposition = switch of two elements
✓ Spoonerisms = reversal of initial sounds of two words
✓ Malapropism = one word is replaced by another that is similar in sound but different in meaning
✓ Insertions or deletion/ blending of sounds

Metaphorical Language
✓ Juxtapose two nouns in a way that positively asserts their similarities, while not disconfirming
their dissimilarities
✓ Four key elements: items being compared ways in which the items are related
o tenor: topic of the metaphor
o vehicle: way in which the tenor is described in terms
o ground: set of the similarities between tenor and vehicle
o tension: set of dissimilarities

Comparison view: highlights importance of comparison

Anomaly view: emphasizes the dissimilarity

Domain-interaction view integrates aspects of comparison and anomaly view

Another view: metaphors are a non-literal form of class-inclusion statements

Language in a Social Context

Pragmatics = the study of how people use language

Use of language changes in response to contextual cues

Proxemics = the study of interpersonal distance or proximity

Interpersonal space is important in all kinds of interactions

10.2.1 Speech Acts, Direct Speech Acts

Speech acts: address the question of what you can accomplish with speech

Five basic categories based on the purpose of the acts (Searles’s taxonomy: Table 10.1)
Classifies almost any statement that might be made
Shows different kinds of things speech can accomplish
Shows the close relationship between language structure and language function

Indirect Speech Acts: Types

Four basic ways

o Asking of making statements about abilities
o Stating a desire
o Stating a future action
o Citing reasons

Often anticipate what potential obstacles the respondent might pose

Indirect requests that ask permission are judged to be the most polite
Indirect requests that speak to an obligation are judged as the most impolite

Pinker’s Theory of Indirect Speech

Communication is always a mixture of cooperation and conflict
Indirect speech gives the speaker the chance to voice an ambiguous request that the listener can accept
or decline without reaction adversely to it
o Indirect speech can serve three purposes
o Plausible deniability
o Relationship negotiation
o Language as a digital medium of indirect as well as direct communication

Characteristics of Successful Conversations

Conversations thrive based on a cooperative principle: people seek to communicate in ways that make it
easy for our listener to understand what they mean

Successful conversations follow four maxims/conversational postulates (Grice, 1967)

 o Quantity
o Quality
o Relation
o Manner

Gender and Language

Males: political views, sources of personal pride, what they like about the other person, object properties,
impersonal topics

Females: feelings toward parents, friends, fears; disclose more about themselves, psychological and social
processes

Differences in conversational style largely center on differing understandings of the goals of

communication

Males: world as a hierarchical social order in which the purpose of communication is to negotiate for the
upper hand, to preserve independence, and to avoid failure

Females: seek to establish a connection between the two participants, to give support and confirmation
to others, to reach consensus through communication

Do Animals Have Language?

✓ Chimpanzees = Able to use sign language Not as structures and organized as human language
o Not spontaneously acquired
o The gorilla Koko = Can use about 1000 signs
o Can communicate effectively with humans, expressing desires and thoughts, Evidence
suggests he is able to understand and use humor
o Seems to be able to use language in a novel way (combining signs in new ways, forming
entirely to signs)
✓ The parrot Alex = Could produce over 200 words Could express a variety of complex concepts
(present, absent, zero-like concept)
o Evidence suggests he was capable of novel combinations of words to form new ways of
expressing concepts

Aphasia
Aphasia = impairment of language functioning caused by damage to the brain
Wernicke’s Aphasia = Caused by damage to Wernicke’s area
Notable impairment in the understanding of spoken words and sentences
Involves the production of sentences that have the basic structure of language spoken but make no sense
Broca’s Aphasia = Caused by damage to Broca’s area
Production of agrammatical speech while verbal comprehension ability is largely preserved
Global Aphasia = Combination of highly impaired comprehension and production of speech
Caused by lesions to Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas
Anomic Aphasia = Involves difficulties in naming objects or in retrieving words (Sometimes specific
categories of things cannot be recalled)
Autism = a developmental disorder characterized by abnormalities in social behavior, language, and
cognition