Chapter 11
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 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
(1 of 2)
• 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.
• 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 meaning of language.
• Lexical semantics: The meaning of words
– Each word has one or more meanings.
Complications in Understanding Words (1 of 2)
• Phonemic restoration effect
– When phonemes are perceived in speech when the sound of the phoneme is
covered up by an extraneous noise.
– Warren (1970) demonstration.
– ‘The state governors met with their respective legilatures convening in the capital
city’
• Variable word pronunciation
– “Didjoo?” “Gonna”
– Use context to understand words with unfamiliar pronunciations.
Complications in Understanding Words (2 of 2)
• Speech segmentation
– Perception of individual words even though there are no silences
between spoken words.
– Context.
– Understanding of meaning.
– Understanding of sound and syntactic rules.
– Statistical learning.
Understanding Ambiguous Words
• Lexical ambiguity
– Words often have multiple meanings.
• Meaning dominance—some words are used more frequently than others
– Biased dominance
§ When words have two or more meanings with different dominance.
– Balanced dominance
§ When words have two or more meanings with about the same dominance.
Meaning Dominance
Figure 11.5 If there is no prior context:
(a) competition between equally likely meanings of a
word with balanced dominance results in slow
access;
(b) Activation of only the most frequent meaning of a
word with biased dominance results in fast access. If
there is context before a word with biased dominance:
(c) Activation of both the less frequent and most frequent
meanings results in slow access;
(d) Activation of only the most frequent meaning results in fast access. See text for
examples.
Understanding Sentences (1 of 3)
• Semantics: meanings of words and sentences.
• Syntax: rules for combining words into sentences.
• Sentences are merely strings of words in sequence.
• Parsing: mentally groups the words into phrases – helps the
listener create meaning.
Understanding Sentences (2 of 3)
• Garden path sentences
– Sentences that begin by appearing to mean one thing,
but then end up meaning something else.
• Temporary ambiguity
– When the initial words are ambiguous, but the meaning
is made clear by the end of the sentence.
Understanding Sentences (3 of 3)
• The garden path model of parsing
– Listeners use heuristics (rules) to group words into phrases.
– Grammatical structure of sentence determines parsing.
– Late closure: Parser assumes new word is part of the current
phrase.
Understanding Sentences: Story Context (1 of
3)
• Tanenhaus and coworkers (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 Sentences: Story Context (2 of
3)
Figure 11.8
(a)One-apple scene similar to the
one viewed by Tanenhaus et
al.’s (1995) participants.
(b)Eye movements made while
comprehending the task.
Understanding Sentences: Story Context (3 of
3)
Figure 11.9
(a)Two-apple scene
similar to the one
viewed by
Tanenhaus et al.’s
(1995) subjects.
Understanding Sentences: Story Context (4 of
3)
(b)Eye movements while comprehending the task.
Understanding Text and Stories (1 of 6)
• 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.
Understanding Text and Stories (2 of 6)
• Inference: Readers create information during reading not explicitly
stated in the text:
– Anaphoric: connecting objects/people
– Instrument: tools or methods
– Causal: events in one clause caused by events in previous
sentence.
Understanding Text and Stories (3 of 6)
• Situation model: mental representation of what a text is
about
– Represent events as if experiencing the situation.
– Point of view of protagonist.
Understanding Text and Stories (4 of 6)
Figure 11.13 Stimuli similar to those used in:
(a) Stanfield and Zwaan’s (2001)
“orientation” experiment and;
(b) Zwaan et al.’s (2002) “shape”
experiment. Subjects heard
sentences and were then asked to
indicate whether the picture was the
object mentioned in the sentence.
Understanding Text and Stories (5 of 6)
Figure 11.14 Results of Stanfield and
Zwaan’s (2001) and Zwaan et al.’s
(2002) experiments.
Subjects responded “yes” more rapidly
for the orientation, in (a), and the shape,
in (b), that was more consistent with the
sentence.
Based on: Stanfield, R.A. and Zwaan, R.A.
(2001). The effect of implied orientation
derived from verbal content on picture
recognition, Psychological Science, 12, 153–
156.
Understanding Text and Stories (6 of 6)
• Physiology of simulations
– Approximately the same areas of the cortex are
activated by actual movements and by reading related
action words.
– The activation is more extensive for actual movements.
Producing Language: Conversations
• Two or more people talking together.
• Dynamic and rapid.
Producing Speech: Conversations (1 of 2)
• 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.
Producing Speech: Conversations (2 of 2)
• Syntactic coordination
– Using similar grammatical constructions.
• Syntactic priming
– Production of a specific grammatical construction by one
person increases chances other person will use that
construction.
– Reduces computational load in conversation.
Syntactic Priming
Figure 11.17 Branigan et al. (2000) experiment.
(a) Participant (right) picks, from the cards laid out, a
card with a picture that matches the statement read by
the confederate (left).
(b) Participant then takes a card from the pile of
cards and describes the picture on the card to the
confederate. This is the key part of the experiment,
because the question is whether the participant on the
right will match the syntactic construction used by the
Based on: Branigan, H. P., Pickering, M. J. and confederate on the left.
Cleland, A. A. (2000). Syntactic co-ordination in
dialogue, Cognition, 75, B13–B25.
Culture, language and cognition
• Language can influence cognition.
• Sapir-Wharf hypothesis
- the nature of culture’s language can affect the way people think.
• .