Cognitive

Psychology
C H A P T E R 9:

LANGUAGE
Some of the questions we will explore in this chapter:

What properties characterize by language?

What are some of the processes involved in language?

How do perceptual processes interact with the cognitive processes of reading?

How does discourse help us understand individual words?

“I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers.
Suddenly, I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a
thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was
revealed to me.

I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that
was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it
light, joy, set it free! … Everything had a name, and each name gave
birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which
I touched seemed to quiver with life…. I learned a great many new
words that day … words that were to make the world blossom for me.”

- Helen Keller, Story of My Life

 Language is the use of an organized
means of combining words in order
to communicate with those around
us.

Not all communication—exchange of thoughts and

feelings—is through language.
Psycholinguistics
the psychology of our language as it interacts with the
human mind.
4 areas of study that have contributed to an
understanding of psycholinguistics:

Linguistics

Neurolinguistics

Sociolinguistics

Computational linguistics and

psycholinguistics
What is language?
 Almost 7,000 languages
spoken in the world today
 New Guinea is the country with the most languages in the
____________________
world—it has more than 850 indigenous languages.
Yunnan Province, China
 communicative

arbitrarily symbolic

regularly structured
Properties of
Language structured at multiple levels

generative, productive

dynamic
Properties of Language

01
communicative
Language permits us to
communicate with one
or more people who
share our language.
Properties of Language

01
02 Referent
arbitrarily symbolic the thing or concept in the real
Language creates an arbitrary world that a word refers to
relationship between a symbol
and what it represents.
Principle of conventionality
meanings of words are determined
05
by conventions

Principle of contrast
different words have different
meanings

Baum, arbol, tree

Properties of Language

03
regularly structured
Language has a structure; only
particularly patterned arrangements
of symbols have meaning, and
different arrangements yield different
meanings.
Properties of Language

04
structured at multiple
levels
The structure of language can
be analyzed at more than one
level.
Properties of Language

05 03
generative, productive
Within the limits of a linguistic
structure, language users can produce
novel utterances. The possibilities for
creating new utterances are virtually
limitless.
Properties of Language

06
dynamic
Languages constantly
evolve.

Examples
Netiquette (a blend of “network” and
“etiquette”)

Emoticon (a blend of “emotion” and “icon”)

Webinar ( a seminar held online)

 Phoneme

Basic components Morpheme

of words

Lexicon
 The Basic Components of Words

Phone
smallest unit of speech
sound, which is simply a
single vocal sound

Examples
a click of your tongue, pop of your cheek, gurgling
sound
The Basic Components of Words

Phoneme
smallest unit of speech sound that can
be used to distinguish one utterance in
a given language from another

Examples
the /f/ sound, the /s/ sound and the /i/ sound
Phonemics
in “sit” & “fit”
 The Basic Components of Words

Morpheme
the smallest unit of meaning within a
particular language

> “Recharge” contains two morphemes, “re” and

“charge”
> “Cable” consists of only one morpheme, “ca” and “ble”
do not have any meaning

“Pins”
The Basic Components of Words

Root words Affixes

the portion of the prefixes and suffixes
words that contain
the majority of
meaning precedes the
root word
follows the
root word
 The Basic Components of Words

Content morphemes
the words that convey the bulk of the meaning of
a language

Examples
the suffix –ist, the prefix
de–, the conjunction and,
or the article the
Function morphemes
add detail and nuance to the meaning of the
content morphemes, help the content
morphemes fit the grammatical context
 The Basic Components of Words

Lexicon
The entire set of morphemes in a given language
or in a given person’s linguistic repertoire
The Basic Components of Sentences

 Syntax
refers to the way in which we put words
together to form sentences

Noun phrase
contains
Theatyoung
least one
mannoun and includes all the
is sleeping.
relevant descriptors
NP of the noun (like “big” or
“young”)

Verb phrase (predicate)

contains at least one verb and whatever the verb acts on
The brown cow is jumping over the rusty fence.

HV MV
Understanding the Meaning of Words,
Sentences, and Larger Units

Semantics
the study of meaning in a language
Language
Comprehension
Understanding
Words

Coarticulation
the articulation of two or more speech sounds together,
so that one influences the other

Speech segmentation
the process of trying to separate the
continuous sound stream into distinct words
THE VIEW OF SPEECH
PERCEPTION AS ORDINARY

Phonetic Refinement Theory

It says that we start with an analysis of auditory
sensations and shift to higher-level processing
THE VIEW OF SPEECH
PERCEPTION AS ORDINARY

TRACE Model 3 levels of feature detection:

Level of acoustic features

Level of phonemes

Level of words
THE VIEW OF SPEECH
PERCEPTION AS SPECIAL

Categorical Perception
a phenomenon of perception of distinct
categories when there is a gradual change in a
variable along a continuum
THE VIEW OF SPEECH
PERCEPTION AS SPECIAL

The Motor Theory of

Speech Perception
according to this theory, we
use the movements of the
speaker’s vocal tract to
perceive what s/he says

McGurk effect
A perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an
interaction between hearing and vision in speech
perception
Understanding
Meaning: Semantics

Denotation
The strict dictionary definition of a word

Connotation
Word’s emotional overtones, presuppositions,
and other non-explicit meanings
Thank you!