LANGUAGE
What Is Language?
– System of communication using sounds or
symbols.
– Express feelings, thoughts, ideas, and
experiences.
The Creativity of Human Language
– Hierarchical system
– Components that can be combined to form larger units.
– Governed by rules
– Specific ways components can be arranged.
The Nature of Language
Language is:
• conventional.
– Shared by the society in which it is spoken.
• dynamic.
• a tool for human communication.
• universal.
The Universality of Language
– Deaf children invent sign language that is all their own.
– All humans with normal capacities develop a language and learn to
follow its complex rules.
– Language is universal across cultures.
– Language development is similar across cultures.
– Languages are “unique but the same”.
– Different words, sounds, and rules
– All have nouns, verbs, negatives, questions, past/present tense
Studying Language in Cognitive Psychology
– B.F. Skinner (1957) Verbal Behavior
– Language learned through reinforcement.
– Noam Chomsky (1957) Syntactic Structures
– Human language coded in the genes.
– Underlying basis of all language is similar.
– Children produce sentences they have never heard and
that have never been reinforced.
Studying Language in Cognitive Psychology
– Psycholinguistics: Discover psychological process
by which humans acquire and process language:
1. Comprehension
2. Speech production
3. Representation
4. Acquisition
Understanding Words
– Lexicon: All words a person understands.
– Semantics: The meanings of words and sentences.
• Literal meaning vs. figurative meaning
«I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner.»
(Hannibal Lecter, Silence of the Lambs)
– Phonemes: Individual sound units.
• In Turkish, the pronunciation of each letter corresponds to one
phoneme (29 phonemes)
– Morphemes: Smallest meaningful units of a word.
• Example: apple vs. apples
Hierarchical Organization of Language
Methods of Studying
Word Recognition
• Naming Task
• Lexical Decision Task
• Semantic Categorization Task
• T-Scope Experiments
• Recording ERPs
• Self-Paced Reading
• Eye-Movement Studies
Methods of Studying
Word Recognition
• Naming task - presented with a word in
isolation and asked to name it as quickly as
possible
Methods of Studying
Word Recognition
• Lexical Decision Task – presented with a
letter string and asked to judge whether it is a
word or not
Methods of Studying
Word Recognition
• Semantic Categorization Task – presented
with a letter string and asked to categorize it
Methods of Studying
Word Recognition
• Self-Paced Reading – presented with a
sentence, part by part, with the reader
controlling the pace
Methods of Studying
Word Recognition
• Eye Movement Studies – monitor readers’
eye movements while they silently read
sentences
Eye Movements in Reading
• Eye-movements while reading:
– Are NOT smooth
– Are NOT all left to right (10-15% regressions)
– Are NOT random
• Fixations – the time spent focused on a given location
during reading (average = 250ms)
• Saccades – the movements of the eyes during reading
(average = 7 characters)
Where to fixate next?
• Knowing where to fixate next is driven largely
by low-level factors
• We tend to land just to the left of the center of
the word
When to move the eyes?
• Knowing when to move the eyes is driven
largely by cognitive factors
• We move our eyes after we have finished
processing the word; processing takes longer
for more difficult words
• There are processing differences due to
various lexical, syntactic, and discourse
factors
Understanding Words
Phonemic restoration effect
• a top-down process in which the listener uses context to restore
phonemes missing from the speech signal
• It was found that the *eel was on the shoe.
• It was found that the *eel was on the orange.
• It was found that the *eel was on the table.
* was a cough but it was heard as the missing phoneme
appropriate in the given context.
Understanding Words
Speech segmentation
• Perception of individual words even though there are no silences
between spoken words.
• Listeners must categorize sounds they hear into one of the many
classes of sounds that exist in their language
• This is a hard task because
(1) the environmental context often interferes with the speech signal
(2) the variability of the speech signal itself
– the voice of the speaker (high vs. low pitch)
– rate of speech (fast vs. slow)
Speech Perception
• Speech is perceptually special
• To comprehend speech, we must impose an absolute or
categorical identification on the incoming speech signal
– categorical perception
Continuous = Actual sounds Discrete = Actual perception
Infants and Speech Perception
• Very young infants can discriminate all of the possible
phonemic contrasts in the world’s languages
• We lose the ability to make non-native contrasts at about
1 year
• Japanese: /ra/ vs /la/
• We become specialized to perceive our own language –
we learn to ignore differences that aren’t meaningful
Speech Perception
• Listeners use both auditory and visual modes in the
process of speech perception
• Combining the two inputs increases reliability
• McGurk Effect
Understanding Words
• To what extent are the letters within words processed
serially vs. in parallel?
W-O-R-D vs. WORD
• Reicher (1969)
– Presented participants with words (e.g., read),
nonwords (e.g., erad), or individual letters (d)
– Greater accuracy when a word was presented than
when a nonword or a single letter was presented -
word superiority effect
– We process all of the letters in a (short) word in parallel
Understanding Words
• Word frequency effect
– Some words occur more
frequently than others in a
particular language
– We respond more rapidly to
high-frequency words like than
to low-frequency words
– In English: home occurs 547
times per million words, and
hike occurs only four times per
million words.
Rayner et al.2003
Understanding Ambiguous Words
• Lexical ambiguity
– Words often have multiple meanings.
– Meaning dominance
• Some meanings of words are used more frequently than others
• Dominant meanings are:
• accessed faster
• recognized more easily
• harder to suppress
Understanding Sentences
– Semantics
• The meanings of words and sentences
– Syntax
• The rules for combining words into sentences
– “The cats won’t eat”
– “The cats won’t bake”
– “The cat chased the bird”
– “Cat bird the chased”
Understanding Sentences
• Semantics and syntax are processed in different brain areas:
Semantics
(understanding meaning)
Syntax
(understanding
sentence structure)
Understanding Sentences
• Broca’a aphasia:
• problems with speech production and syntax
• Wernicke’s aphasia:
• problems with speech comprehension and semantics
• “word salad”: produce meaningless sentences
Understanding Sentences
• Parsing
•The grouping of words into phrases
“The spy saw the man with the binoculars.”
Understanding Sentences
– Tanenhaus and colleagues (1995)
• Investigated how the context of a scene influenced parsing
– Visual world paradigm
• eye movements are recorded while participants looked at
the scenes and carried out instructions:
“Place the apple on the towel in the box.”
Understanding Sentences
– Tanenhaus and colleagues (1995)
– Visual world paradigm
– the context of a scene.
– Eye movements change when information suggests revision of
interpretation of sentence is necessary.
– Linguistic and nonlinguistic information used simultaneously.
Understanding Text and Stories
• Coherence:
– Representation of the text in one’s mind that creates clear
relations
▪ between parts of the text and
▪ between parts of the text and the story’s main topic.
• Inference: Readers determine meaning by going beyond the
information that is explicitly stated in the text:
Producing Language: Conversations
– Two or more people talking together.
– Dynamic and rapid.
Producing Speech: Conversations
– Given–new contract: Speaker constructs sentences so they
include
– Given information
– New information
– “New” can then become “given” information.
– Common ground
– The speakers’ mutual knowledge, belief and assumptions.
Culture, Language and Cognition
Language can influence cognition.
– Sapir-Wharf hypothesis
the nature of culture’s language can affect the way people think.
Culture, Language and Cognition
Language can influence cognition.
– Sapir-Wharf hypothesis
the nature of culture’s language can affect the way people think.
Winawer et al.2007