Language

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Pn. Naqiah Puaad

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Contents
 Definition & characteristics
 Language and the brain
– Aphasia
• Broca’s aphasia
• Wernicke’s aphasia

 Understanding words
– Effects of words: Word-superiority effect
– Effects of words in sentences: the role of
frequency & context
• Word-frequency effect
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Contents

 Understanding Sentences
– Parsing sentences
• Syntax first approach
• Semantics
• Interactionist approach

 Language and culture

– Culture can influence one’s use of
language
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Functions of Language: What do
you use language for?
 to communicate
– to memorize (rehearse, encode…)
– to compare and categorize
– to identify (e.g., inner states, feelings…)
– to enjoy (e.g., arts, poetry…)
– to think about something
– to discover new ideas or viewpoints

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Definition and Properties
 Language : a system of communication through
which we code and express our feelings, thoughts,
ideas, and experiences.
 One of several means of communication.
 Important properties of language
– a hierarchical structure and that is governed by rules -
allows creation of unique sentences, communicate
whatever we want to express …
• Hierarchical –words, phrases, sentences to a large text/story
• Rules – I eat bread and cheese this morning (permissible)
but Cheese eats this morning bread (not permissible)

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Milestones in the Study of L
 Wilhelm Wundt (1980)
– Language : mechanism of transforming thoughts into
sentences.
 Language…the earliest cognitive capacities to be
studied physiologically (by Paul Broca and Carl
Wernicke) which give insights into brain function:

Frontal lobe Temporal lobe

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Milestones in the Study of L
 The modern era of language research began in 1950s:
– B.F.Skinner (1957) – in Verbal behavior, proposed that language is
learned through the mechanism of reinforcement
• Children learn language by being rewarded for using correct
language, being punished for using incorrect language
– Noam Chomsky (1957) – proposed that human are genetically
programmed to acquire and use language
• Studying language is a way to study properties of the mind.
Disagree with the behaviorist ideas that the mind is not valid
topic of study in psychology

 1970s/1980s: Chomsky’s criticism of behaviorism led to the emerging

‘Psycholinguistics’- the field concerns with psychological study of
language
 1990s/today: Enormous specialization:
– Language acquisition
– Comprehension: Syntax vs. Semantics
– Speech production

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Understanding Words
 Impressive acquisition rate:
From 0 — 18years old: 75,000 (~12.1 words
per day)
 Person’s lexicon - all understandable words
of a person
 Perceiving letters and words
– Phoneme- the shortest segment of speech, if
changed, changes the meaning of a word
• E.g. bit : /b/, /i/, and /t/
• Replacing /b/ with /s/ ..becomes sit
• Replacing /i/ with /u/..becomes but 8
Perceiving letters and words

 Questions to consider:
– How does a letter’s presence in a word
affect our ability to identify it?
– How do we perceive separate words within
a sentence.
Answers to both involve meaning

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 Perceiving Letters and Words
 Are letters in words processed serially or in parallel?
 Word-superiority effect (Reicher, 1969; Wheeler, 1970) –
– Participants sees a stimulus- either a word, a single letter or a
string of letters that do not create a word – flashed for 25-40
msecs

Decision task:
Which of the two
letters has been
appeared before?

• Results:
• (a) Faster and more accurate than (b) and (c)
• letters are perceived more easily in words (based on context)
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– parallel processing
The Word-Superiority Effect

 Letters are perceived more easily in

words than when they are in isolation or
in non words
 Word-superiority effect: letters in
words are not processed letter by letter
but is affected by its surrounding
(context) = processed in parallel (selari)

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Perceiving Words in
Sentences
 Perceiving separate words you read on paper is
easy- each word is separated by a space, so easy to
tell one word from another
 However when we hear words in conversational
speech, these words are not separated by spaces,
pauses, even though they may sound like they are.
 When we look at the record of the physical energy
produced by conversational speech, we see that
speech signal is continuous, with either no
physical breaks in the signal or breaks that do not
correspond to the breaks we perceive between
words
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Perceiving Words in
Sentences
 Speech segmentation: the process of perceiving
individual words from the continuous flow of the
speech signals
 The problem of speech segmentation:
– No clear breaks between words in physical speech signal.
– Difficult to tell where one word ends and the other begins

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Accessing/Understanding Words

 What factors influence our ability to

access or understand words
– Frequency effects
– Context effects

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Accessing Words: Frequency
Effects
 Demonstration: Lexical Decision Task
 Carroll (1999): Word or non-word? (Say ‘yes’/’no’):
– List 1: Gambastya, revery, voitle, chard, wefe, cratily, decoy,
puldow, faflot, oriole, voluble, boovle, chalt, awry, signet,
trave,
crock, cryptic, ewe, himpola.
– List 2: Mulvow, governor, bless, tuglety, gare, relieve, ruftily,
history, pindle, develop, grdot, norve, busy, effort, garvola,
match, sard, pleasant, coin, maisle.
 Result:
– people read lists of common words (many in List 2) faster than
lists of less common words (many in List 1)
– Word-frequency effect - High-frequency words are recognized
and read faster than low- frequency words
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Accessing Words: Frequency
Effects
 Rayner et al. (2003): Eye-movements during reading
– ‘Sam wore the horrid coat though his pretty girlfriend
complained.’
– ‘Sam wore the horrid coat though his demure
girlfriend complained.’
 Result: Fixation is shorter at high frequency words
– Reaction time : High frequency word
(pretty) < low frequency word (demure)

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Accessing Words: Context Effect

 Easier to understand words that fit the

meaning
of a sentence. Example (Marslen-Wilson,
1990):
1.‘The Eskimos were frightened by the
walrus.’
2. ‘The bankers were frightened by the
walrus.’
– Walrus is understandable easier in 1st sentence

 Context helps to disambiguate (to clear up 17

lexical ambiguity, though perhaps not
Accessing Words: Context
Effects
David Swinney (1979) –Presented participants with tape
recording of a sentence.
‘Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been
plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he
found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of
the room.’
 Lexical-decision task at ‘bug’: After hearing the word bug,
participants were shown a word on nonword onto the screen
and asked to indicate whether it’s a word or nonword.
Measureed RT for ANT, SPY & SKY.
 Result:. Found out that participants accessed faster to 2
meanings of an ambiguous word “bug” – ANT and SPY (as
indicated by significant RTs) – but select rapidly the one that fit
the sentence

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 Summary: Words …

Summary of the two effects we described that influence the perception of

letters and words: (1) speech segmentation; and (2) the word-superiority
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effect.
 Summary: Words and in
Sentences

Summary of the four effects we described in connection with accessing

words: (1) short-term lexical ambiguity; (2) elimination of lexical
ambiguity; (3) how the context of a sentence can cause words to be 20
perceived faster; and (4) the word-frequency effect.
Understanding Sentences

 How do we understand sentences?

– Semantics
– Syntax
– Parsing a sentence

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Understanding Sentences

 To understand sentences, need to

distinguish the two properties of
sentences:
– Syntax: grammatical rules of combining
words into well-formed sentences.
– Semantics: meaning of words and
sentences.

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 Semantics vs. Syntax
 Physiological distinction in ERP (Osterhut et al., 1997):

 (a)The N400 wave of the ERP is affected by semantics. It

becomes larger (dark line) when the meaning of a word does
not fit the rest of the sentence.
 (b) The P600 wave of the ERP is affected by syntax. It
becomes larger (dark line) when syntax is incorrect. 23
Parsing a Sentence
 Parsing : Grouping a sentence into
phrases to determine its meaning. One of
the central process for determining meaning.
 Demonstration:
– The spy saw the man with the binoculars.
– Flying planes can be dangerous.
– He read the paper that he received yesterday.

=> Syntactic ambiguity :

due to multiple possible parsers (sentence-
analyzing mechanism) that determine the various
meanings of the sentence (based on how the
phrases are grouped) 24
Parsing a Sentence

 3 approaches to parsing a sentence:

• Syntax first approach
• Semantics
• Interactionist appraoch

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Parsing: The Syntax-First
Approach
 Parsing is primarily determined by
syntax and syntax-based rules.

 Syntax-based rules:
– Late Closure : when a person encounters
a new word, the parser assumes that this
word is part of the current phrase.

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Parsing: The Syntax-First
Approach
Eg. “Because he always jogs a mile seems like a sh
 distance to him”.

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Semantic Influences on
Parsing
Daniel Slobin (1966) compared the speed of participants to
understand these 2 sentences by presenting a picture along
with each sentences – say TRUE if the sentence below the
picture described it or FALSE if it did not.

 It takes longer to understand(verify) reversible sentences

as in (a). Need to identify the doer (who took the action)
and the done to (who received the action) 28
 Semantic Influences on
Parsing:
 The meaning of one word can affect the ability to
understand the entire sentence: Eg:
“The man recognized by the spy took off down the
street.”

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Semantic Influences on
Parsing:
 Another example:
“The van recognized by the spy took off down the
street”.

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Parsing: The Interactionist
Approach
 Claim: Syntax and semantics interact during
parsing, i.e., meaning affects early processing.
– Semantics come into play as a sentence is being
read
 Evidence: Eye-tracking studies (measuring the
fixation-durations.
– Trueswell et al. (1994):
– In his eye-movement study, he determined the
amount of time the participants’ eyes spent on
different parts of sentences 1 and 2.
1. ‘The defendant examined by the lawyer turned out
to be reliable’
2. ‘The evidence examined by the lawyer turned out
to be reliable’
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 Parsing: The Interactionist

Approach
Results of Trueswell at al.’s (1994):Semantics immediately affect
processing

 Readers spent more time on the phrase by the lawyer for sentence 1
(“The defendant….”) than for sentence 2 (“The evidence…”). Why?
Sentence 1 > ambiguous than sentence 2
– Defendant could examine something or be examined by someone else
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– Evidence, can only be examined
 Parsing: The Interactionist
Approach
 Tannehaus et al.(1995) use another approach of eye movements to
study how people process information in sentences
– He presented a picture that illustrate the objects mentioned in a
sentence, and to determine where participants look while they listen to
and trying to understand the sentence
“ Put the apple on the towel in the box”

1-apple: where? 2-apple: which?

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– Environmental context helps to disambiguate immediately
How do we understand Text or
Stories?
 Using inferences

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 Inferences in Text
Comprehension
 3 types: Anaphoric, Instrumental and Causal Inferences

 Anaphoric Inferences – connect an object/person in

one sentence to object/person in another sentence

1. Beatrice arrived. She was wearing the shirt, that her friend had
made. It was awful.

2.“… on our vacation time [we] go down to our ranch (…) There are
lots of ponds and I take the kids out and we fish. And then of course,
we grill them.” – quoted from George Foreman

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 Instrumental Inferences- inferences about
tools/methods
1. “He was pounding the nail when his father came
out…” (Was he using a hammer?)

2. “Shakespeare wrote Hamlet at his desk.” (Was it a

quill pen that he used for writing? Did he use a
laptop computer?)

 Causal Inferences – inferences about causal-effect

1.She took an aspirin. Her headache went away.
(we infer that aspirin caused the headache to go
away)

2.She took a shower. Her headache went away. (we 36

infer that shower caused the headache to go away)
Language and Culture:
 How does culture affects Language
 Yum (1991):
Japanese more indirect than US Amercians.
– “It is cold today” vs. “The door is open”
(to mean “please shut the door”)

 Fernald & Morikawa (1993)- observed interactions

between mother and her 6-19 month children
– American mothers uses twice as many object labels
e.g: “that’s a car. See that car? You like it? It’s got nice
wheels.”

– Japanese mothers were twice as likely to talk about

relationships & how to be polite.
e.g: “Here!It’s a vroom vroom. I give it to you. Now you give
this to me. Yes!Thank you.”
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How does thinking (cognition) affected by
Language?

Which two of the objects

Would you place together?

Objects like the ones Chiu (1972) used to determine which objects
Chinese and American children group together. 38
 Language & Cognition
(cont’d)

The results make sense: Americans are more object-oriented and

Asians are more relationship-oriented
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Summary
 Definition of Language
 Understanding words
– Effects of words: Word-superiority effect
– Effects of words in sentences: the role of
frequency & context
• Word-frequency effect

 Understanding Sentences
– Parsing sentences
• Syntax first approach
• Semantics
• Interactionist approach 40
Summary

 Language and culture

– Culture can influence one’s use of
language

 Language and the brain

– Aphasia
• Broca’s aphasia
• Wernicke’s aphasia

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 Kuatkan Iman
Kuatkan Azam
Kuatkan Semangat
&
Semuanya akan Berjaya.

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