Unit 2: Language

Unit 2. Language 13 Hours

a). Language acquisition: stages of language acquisition, nature and nurture, beyond the first
years, animal language; Reading: perceptual issues in reading, lexical processes in reading;
b). Language and thought: differences among languages, bilingualism and dialects, slips of the
tongue, metaphorical language;
c). Language in a social context: speech acts, conversational postulates, gender and language,
discourse and reading comprehension;
d). Neuropsychology of language: brain structure involved in language, aphasia, autism, lesion
studies and event-related potentials research.
Self-study: Autism
 Language acquisition: stages
of language acquisition, nature
and nurture, beyond the first
years, animal language;
Reading: perceptual issues in
reading, lexical processes in
reading;
Language acquisition
• Vocalizations in infancy
• 6 months – babbling - rich variety of speech sounds with interesting intonation patterns;
the sounds are generally totally meaningless.
• One word utterances - even though children know many words, they never put them
together to make multiword phrases
• Children will also overextend their words. Thus, the word dog might be used to refer to any
furry four-legged animal
• The one-word stage, which lasts about 6 months, is followed by a stage in which children
will put two words together.
• The two-words correspond to about a dozen or so semantic relations, including agent-
action, agent-object, action-object, object-location, object-attribute, possessor-object,
negation-object, and negation-event
• Multi-word: After two-word stage, there is no three-word stage, they are of different
lengths.
• Telegraphic speech - the speech of children roughly between the ages of 18 and 30 months.
This is usually in the form of two-word expressions up to the age of about 24 months (see
two-word stage) and thereafter is characterized by short but multiword expressions (e.g.,
dog eat bone). - omitting such unimportant function words as the and is
• Possible errors:
• Singular and Plural
• Word order
• C. Chomsky (1970) found that children had difficulty comprehending
sentences such as John promised Bill to leave, interpreting Bill as the
one who leaves. The verb promise is unusual in this respect—for
instance, compare John told Bill to leave, which children will properly
interpret.
• By the time children are 6 years old, they have mastered most of their
language, although they continue to pick up details at least until the age
of 10.
• Studies of the rate of word acquisition by children produced an estimate
of more than five words a day
• An interesting feature of early-childhood speech is that children produce
sounds that they will not use in the particular language that they will learn.
• Moreover, they can apparently make acoustic discriminations among
sounds that will not be used in their language.
• For instance, Japanese infants can discriminate between /l/ and /r/, a
discrimination that Japanese adults cannot make (Tsushima et al., 1994).
• Similarly, English infants can discriminate among variations of the /t/
sound, which are important in the Hindi language of India, that English
adults cannot discriminate (Werker & Tees, 1999).
• It is as if children enter the world with speech and perceptual capabilities
that constitute a block of marble out of which will be carved their particular
language, discarding what is not necessary for that language.
Critical Period for Language Acquisition

• Generally, young children are said to learn a second language easier.

• However, linguistic exposure, type of exposure, willingness to learn etc. can affect this.
• In careful studies in which situations have been selected that controlled for these factors, a
positive relation is exhibited between children’s ages and rate of language development
(Ervin-Tripp, 1974). That is, older children (older than 12 years) learn faster than younger
children.
• Even though older children and adults may learn a new language more rapidly than
younger children initially, they seem not to acquire the same level of final mastery of the
fine points of language, such as the phonology and morphology
• the ability to speak a second language without an accent severely deteriorates with age
• In one study, Johnson and Newport (1986) looked at the degree of
proficiency in speaking English achieved by Koreans and Chinese
as a function of the age at which they arrived in America.
• All had been in the United States for about 10 years.
• In general, it seems that the later they came to America, the
poorer their performance was on a variety of measures of syntactic
facility.
• Thus, although it is not true that language learning is fastest for
the youngest, it does seem that the greatest eventual mastery of
the fine points of language is achieved by those who start very
young.
• Weber-Fox and Neville (1996) studied the effects of age of acquisition of
language processing.
• They compared Chinese- English bilinguals who had learned English as a
second language at different ages.
• Measured ERP of sensitivity to syntactic violations in English.
• English monolinguals show a strong left lateralization in their response to
such violations, which is a reflection of the left lateralization of language.
• Figure compares the two hemispheres in these adult bilinguals as a
function of the age at which they acquired English.
• Adults who had learned English in their first years of life show strong left
lateralization like those who learn English as a first language.
• If they were delayed in their acquisition to ages between 11 and 13, they
show almost no lateralization.
• Those who had acquired English at an intermediate age show an
intermediate amount of lateralization.
• Interestingly, Weber-Fox and Neville reported no such critical period for
lexical or semantic violations.
• Learning English as late as 16 years of age had almost no effect on the
lateralization of their responses to semantic violations.
• Thus, grammar seems to be more sensitive to a critical period.
• An interesting study of first-language acquisition was done
by Newport and Supalla (1990).
• They looked at the acquisition of American Sign Language,
one of the few languages that is sometimes acquired as a
first language in adolescence or adulthood.
• Deaf children of speaking parents are sometimes not
exposed to the sign language until adolescence or later and
consequently acquire no language in their early years.
• Deaf people who acquire sign language as adults achieve a
poorer ultimate mastery of it than those who acquire it as
children
Reading

• involves perception, language, memory, thinking, and

intelligence
When Reading Is a Problem—Dyslexia
• difficulty in deciphering, reading, and comprehending text
• Problems in phonological processing
Developmental dyslexia
Acquired dyslexia/Alexia
 Processes involved in reading, that are
impaired in Dyslexia

Phonological awareness Phonological Reading Phonological coding in working Lexical Access

memory
Refers to awareness of the sound structure Reading words in isolation Involved in remembering strings of Refers to one’s ability to retrieve
of spoken language. Individuals with dyslexia often have more phonemes that are sometimes confusing phonemes from long-term memory
Phoneme-deletion task. Eg: Say ‘Goat’ trouble recognizing the words in isolation Might be measured by comparing working Whether one can quickly retrieve a word
without ‘t’ than in context. When given context, they memory for confusable versus non- from long-term memory when it is seen.
Phoneme Counting task – how many use the context to figure out what the confusable phonemes.
different sounds are there in the word word means. For example, a child might be assessed for
‘fish’(three) how well he or she remembers the string
t, b, z, v, g versus the string o, x, r, y, q.
Most people will have more difficulty with
the first string. But individuals with
dyslexia, who have problems in
phonological coding in working memory,
will have particular trouble.
Perceptual issues in reading

• Able to recognize the letter even when its presented in a wide array of
typestyles and typefaces. (Orthographic elements).
• Translate the letter into a sound, creating a phonological code (relating to
sound). (This is difficult in English. Eg: Reading ‘ghoti’ as ‘fish’)
• After translating the sounds, we sequence the sounds in order to form a
word.
• Identify the word and find its meaning.
• The process repeats with the next word; and form a sentence.
 George Bernard Shaw, playwright, observed the illogicality of English
spellings. He suggested that, in English, it would be perfectly reasonable to
pronounce “ghoti” as “fish.” You would pronounce the “gh” as in rough, the
“o” as in women, and the “ti” as in nation. That brings up another
perplexing “Englishism”: How do you pronounce “ough”? Try the words
dough, bough, bought, through, and cough—had enough?
Skills to master while learning to read:
• Lexical Processes: used to identify letters and words. They also
activate relevant information in memory about these words.
• Comprehension Processes: used to make sense of the text as a
whole (Ref. to discourse and comprehension)
Lexical Processes in Reading

Fixations and Reading Speed

• When we read, our eyes do not move smoothly along a page or even along a line of text. Rather,
our eyes move in saccades—rapid sequential movements—as they fixate on successive clumps
of text.
• Readers fixate for a longer time on longer words than on shorter words. They also fixate longer
on less familiar words than on more familiar words.
• The last word of a sentence also seems to receive an extra long fixation time - “sentence wrap-
up time”.
• Readers fixate up to about 80% of the content words in a text. These words include nouns, verbs,
and other words that carry the bulk of the meaning.
• It appears that we can extract 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.
• These characters include letters, numerals, punctuation marks, and spaces.
• Saccadic movements leap an average of about seven to nine characters between successive
fixations. So some of the information we extract may be preparatory for subsequent fixation
Lexical Access
• The identification of a word that
allows us to gain access to the
meaning of the word from
memory
• Lexical access is an interactive
process. It combines information
of different kinds, such as the
features of letters, the letters
themselves, and the words
comprising the letters
• Investigators developed an
interactive-activation model
suggesting that activation of
particular lexical elements
occurs at multiple levels. Activity
at each level is interactive.
Interactive-Activation Model (Rumelhart &
McClelland)

• distinguishes among three levels of processing following visual input—

• the feature level,
• the letter level, and
• the word level.
• The model assumes that information at each level is represented separately in memory.
• Information passes from one level to another bidirectionally.
• First, it is bottom-up, starting with sensory data and working up to higher levels of cognitive
processing.
• Second, it is top-down, starting with high-level cognition operating on prior knowledge and
experiences related to a given context.
• The interactive view implies that not only do we use the visually or orally perceptible
features of letters to help us identify words, but we also use the features we already know
about words to help us identify letters. For this reason, the model is referred to as
“interactive”
This model is used to explain the word superiority effect
(WSE) which refers to a phenomenon where people recognize
letters more easily if presented within words as compared to
isolated letters, and to letters presented within non-word
(orthographically illegal, unpronounceable letter array) strings.
The effect was first described by Cattell (1886), and important
contributions came from Reicher (1969) and Wheeler (1970).
Language and thought:
differences among
languages, bilingualism
and dialects,
slips of the tongue,
metaphorical language;
Differences among Languages

• Different languages comprise different lexicons and different syntactical structures.

• Lexicon: the vocabulary of a language
• Syntax: the set of rules that describes how words and phrases in a language are arranged into
grammatical sentences
• Example (Lexicon): the Garo of Burma distinguish among many kinds of rice;
Nomadic Arabs have more than 20 words for camels;
• Example (Syntax): in describing past actions in English, we indicate whether
an action took place in the past by changing (inflecting) the verb form. For
example, walk changes to walked in the past tense. In Spanish and German,
the verb also must indicate whether the agent of action was singular or plural
and whether it is being referred to in the first, second, or third person. In
Turkish, the verb form must additionally indicate whether the action was
witnessed or experienced directly by the speaker or was noted only indirectly.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis / The Whorfian
Hypothesis

• States that the semantic structure of a particular language determines the

structure of mental categories among its speakers.
• Language limits our thought processes
• Because languages differ in how they refer to basic categories and
dimensions, such as time, space, and duration, native speakers of these
languages are assumed to show corresponding differences in their ways of
thinking.
• the language or languages one grows up learning and speaking thus
determine the way one perceives the world, organizes information about
the world, and thinks
• U.S. linguists Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–
1941)
• Sapir–Whorf hypothesis; Whorfian hypothesis
• Linguistic relativity refers to the 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.
• Thus, according to the relativity view, the Garo would think about rice
differently than we do.
• There is some evidence that word learning may occur, in part, as a
result of infants’ mental differentiations among various kinds of
concepts (Carey, 1994; Xu & Carey, 1995, 1996). So it might make
sense that infants who encounter different kinds of objects might
make different kinds of mental differentiations. These differentiations
would be a function of the culture in which the infants grew up.
Whorf (1956) stated the hypothesis as follows:
“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native
languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the
world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare
every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is
presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be
organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic
systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into
concepts, and ascribe significance as we do, largely because we
are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an
agreement that holds through our speech community and is
codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of
course, an unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory.”
• Whorf believed that the language or languages one grows up
learning and speaking thus determine the way one perceives the
world, organizes information about the world, and thinks.
• Based his hypothesis on the observation that each language differs
in how it emphasizes various aspects of the world.
(For example, he observed that the Eskimo language has several
words for snow, whereas English has one)  Evidences against this
argument have also been presented (Pullum, 1991).
Eg: English has a number of words to describe basic colors, but the
language of the Dani, an Indonesian agricultural group, has only two:
mili for dark or black and mola for white or light
Eleanor Rosch (formerly Heider) conducted a series of studies that directly tested the Whorfian hypothesis. If
Whorf is correct, then the Dani should have great difficulty perceiving or remembering colors not named in
their language (such as green versus yellow), relative to speakers of English, whose language names each
color. Dani-speaking and English-speaking participants were shown various color chips. Some depicted basic
or focal colors—chips considered to be the best examples of basic color terms (say, a very green green, as
opposed to a blue green). Others depicted non-focal colors, those that English speakers would describe as a
combination of focal colors or as a shade of a focal color (such as light pink, scarlet, olive green, aquamarine).

• Heider (1972) presented participants with a chip of either a focal or a nonfocal color,
typically for 5 seconds. Thirty seconds later, they were shown 160 color chips and
asked to point to which one matched the chip they had just seen. Like English
speakers, and contrary to Whorf ’s hypothesis, Dani speakers much better if the initial
chip showed a focal rather than a nonfocal color.
• In another experiment, Rosch (1973) asked participants to learn
new, arbitrary names for colors. Once again, Rosch found that
Dani speakers, like English speakers, performed better when the
colors shown were focal rather than nonfocal
• Apparently, then, even if a language does not mark particular
differences, it does not always prevent its speakers from either
perceiving those differences or learning them, contrary to
Whorf’s hypothesis
• Some have argued that because Rosch’s task depended so
heavily on color perception (which may have physiological
determinants), it is not as crucial a test of Whorf’s hypothesis as
it was claimed to be.
• Alfred Bloom (1981) – Counterfactuals
Native English speaking versus Chinese speaking populations
(Pg 378 – Galotti)
• Consider a milder form of linguistic relativism—it is that
language may not determine thought, but that language
certainly may influence thought.
 • Do bilinguals think differently from monolinguals?
• Does bilingualism make thinking in any one language more difficult, or does it
enhance thought processes?
• Contradictory results

Bilingual • When bilinguals are balanced

bilinguals, who are roughly
Bilingual
speakers tend to

ism and equally fluent in both languages,

and when they come from
middle-class backgrounds. In
have smaller
vocabularies and
their access to

Dialects these instances, positive effects

of bilingualism tend to be found.
lexical items in
memory is slower
• Executive functions, which are (Bialystok,
located primarily in the prefrontal 2001b; Bialystok
cortex and include abilities such & Craik, 2010)
as to shift between tasks or
ignore distracters, are enhanced
in bilingual individuals.
• Even the onset of dementia in
bilinguals may be delayed by as
 Additive • Additive bilingualism: a second language is
acquired in addition to a relatively well-
and developed first language.
• Subtractive bilingualism: elements of a
Subtractiv second language replace elements of the first
language.
e • Additive form results in increased thinking ability.

Bilingualis • Subtractive form results in decreased thinking

ability
m • Individuals may need to be at a certain relatively
high level of competence in both languages for a
positive effect of bilingualism.
• Children from backgrounds with lower
socioeconomic status (SES) may be more likely
to be subtractive bilinguals than are children
from the middle SES. Their SES may be a factor
in their being hurt rather than helped by their
bilingualism.
Simultane
ous and
Sequentia
l • Simultaneous Bilingualism: When A Child
Bilingualis Learns Two Languages From Birth
• Sequential Bilingualism: When An Individual
m First Learns One Language And Then Another
 • Age – mastery of a language usually depends on early
acquisition; however, there are individual differences.
A study on second language acquisition found that age
Factors and proficiency in a language are negatively correlated
(Mechelli et al., 2004).
influencing • Similarity to the first language: learning completely novel
a second phonemes in a second language may be easier than learning
phonemes that are highly similar to the phonemes of the
language first language.

acquisition
 Single and Dual system hypothesis of
bilingualism

• The single-system hypothesis suggests that two languages

are represented in just one system or brain region
• Dual-system hypothesis suggests that two languages are
represented somehow in separate systems of the mind
• When recovery of language after trauma is studied,
sometimes the first language recovers first; sometimes
the second language recovers first. And sometimes
recovery is about equal for the two languages.
• Recovery of one or both languages seems contingent on
age of acquisition of the second language and on pre-
incident language proficiency, among other factors.

A 32-year-old French-German bilingual who suffered

from a stroke and subsequent aphasia was trained in
German but was given no training in French. The
researchers found significant recovery of German,
but his German language abilities did not transfer to
his French abilities (Meinzer et al., 2007).
The results of these studies on dual pathway for bilingualism is ambiguous, however it suggests at least
some duality of structure
• Two investigators mapped the region of the cerebral cortex relevant to language use in two
of their bilingual patients being treated for epilepsy.
• Mild electrical stimulation was applied to the cortex of each patient.
• Electrical stimulation tends to inhibit activity where it is applied. It leads to a reduced
ability to name objects for which the memories are stored at the location being stimulated.
• The results for both patients were the same.
• Some areas of the brain showed equal impairments for object naming in both languages.
• But other areas of the brain showed differential impairment in one or the other language.
• The results also suggested that the weaker language was more diffusely represented
across the cortex than was the stronger language.
• The results of this study suggest that some aspects of the two languages may be
represented singly; other aspects may be represented separately.
Slips of the tongue

• Slips of the tongue—inadvertent linguistic errors in what we say

• may occur at any level of linguistic analysis: phonemes, morphemes, or larger units of
language
• Freudian slip – repressed emotions
• Cognitive psychologists are intrigued by slips of the tongue because of what the lack of
correspondence between what is thought and what is said may tell us about how
language is produced.
• We have a mental plan for what we are going to say, but this plan is disrupted when our
mechanism for speech production does not cooperate with our cognitive one. Often,
such errors result from intrusions by other thoughts or by stimuli in the environment,
such as a background noise from radio talk show or a neighboring conversation
• Slips of the tongue may be taken to indicate that the language of thought differs
somewhat from the language through which we express our thoughts
 Metaphorical Language

• Non-literal, figurative use of language.

• Metaphors juxtapose two nouns in a way that positively asserts their similarities, while not disconfirming their
dissimilarities
Eg: I am drowning in a sea of grief.
• Similes introduce the words like or as into a comparison between items (e.g., The child was as quiet as a
mouse; The children fight like cats and dogs.)
Elements of a metaphor
• 4 key elements: Two are the items being compared, a tenor and a vehicle. And two are ways in which the items
are related.
e.g., The house was a pigsty
• The tenor is the topic of the metaphor (e.g., house).
• The vehicle is what the tenor is described in terms of (e.g., pigsty).
• The ground of the metaphor is the set of similarities between the tenor and the vehicle (e.g., both are messy).
• The tension of the metaphor is the set of dissimilarities between the two (e.g., people do not live in pigsties
but do live in houses).
Language in a social context:
speech acts, conversational
postulates, gender and
language, discourse and
reading comprehension;
• Pragmatics: the analysis of language in terms of its functional communicative properties
(rather than its formal and structural properties, as in phonology, semantics, and
grammar) and in terms of the intentions and perspectives of its users.
• personal space—the distance between people in a conversation or other interaction
that is considered comfortable for members of a given culture.
• Proxemics: the study of interpersonal spatial behavior. Proxemics is concerned with
territoriality, interpersonal distance, spatial arrangements, crowding, and other aspects
of the physical environment that affect behavior.
• Within a given culture, greater proximity generally indicates one or more of three
things. First, the people see themselves in a close relationship. Second, the people are
participating in a social situation that permits violation of the bubble of personal space,
such as close dancing. Third, the “violator” of the bubble is dominating the interaction.
• Personal space in virtual environment: eg- Video conferencing
Speech Acts: an
instance of the use of
speech considered as
an action, especially
with regard to the
speaker’s intentions
and the effect on a
listener. A single
utterance usually
involves several
simultaneous speech
acts
• Sometimes speech acts are indirect, meaning that we accomplish our goals in
speaking in an oblique fashion. One way of communicating obliquely is
through indirect requests, through which we make a request without doing so
straightforwardly
• for example, “Won’t you please take out the garbage?”
Types of Indirect Speech Acts
There are four basic ways of making indirect requests:
• asking or making statements about abilities;
• stating a desire;
• stating a future action; and
• citing reasons.
• Subsequent work showed that indirect speech acts often anticipate what
potential obstacles the respondent might pose. These obstacles are
specifically addressed through the indirect speech act
 • three-part theory of indirect speech.
• Its basic assumption is that communication is always a
mixture of cooperation and conflict
• According to the theory, indirect speech serves 3 purposes:
1. Plausible deniability (eg: bribing a policeman; sexual
Pinker’s overtures) - a cooperative listener can accept the
request, but an uncooperative one cannot react
Theory of adversarially to it.
2. Relationship negotiation: a person uses indirect
Indirect language because the nature of a relationship is
ambiguous. (eg: sexual overtures – not to offend the
Speech other person as there is no clarity in the relationship).
The emotional costs of a mismatch in the assumed
relationship type can create a need for plausible
deniability and, thereby, select for indirectness even
when there are no tangible costs.
3. Language as a digital medium of indirect as well as direct
communication.
• Language allows a sentence to generate common knowledge
• to propagate a message with high fidelity, and
• to serve as a reference point in coordination games
• This feature makes an indirect request qualitatively different from a direct
one even when the speaker and listener can infer each other’s intentions
with high confidence.
• Overt speech should be judged as certain in intent—that
listeners and overhearers should assess the probability of a
direct proposition as 1.0, with negligible variance among
people
• However, when it comes to indirect speech, even the most
direct innuendo should be perceived as admitting of
nonzero uncertainty, and with substantial variance.
• Overt speech, compared with indirect speech, should be
perceived as lossless in chains of gossip (the last link in a
chain should be as confident in the speaker’s intent as the
first) and in recursive embeddings of knowledge (the
speaker and hearer should be as confident in their
interpretation of the other’s interpretation of their
interpretation as they are in the simple interpretation
itself).
 • Pragmatic rules in conversation
• Effective conversation requires more than mere
utterances that are phonologically, syntactically,
Conversation and semantically appropriate
al Postulates / • Conversations thrive on the basis of a
cooperative principle, by which we seek to
Gricean communicate in ways that make it easy for our
listener to understand what we mean.
Maxims of
According to Grice, successful conversations follow
Cooperative four maxims/Conversational Postulates:
Conversation
Maxim of Maxim of Maxim of Maxim of
quantity quality relation manner
 Violated by being either too
informative or less informative

Be Relevant

Be “The individual member of the social

Clear, community often receives information via
Brief, visual, symbolic channels”
Orderly
“People Read”
 • Young girls are more likely to ask for help than young boys
• Older adolescent and young adult males prefer to talk about political
views, sources of personal pride, and what they like about the other
person. In contrast, females in this age group prefer to talk about
feelings toward parents, close friends, classes, and their fears (Rubin
et al., 1980).
• Women seem to disclose more about themselves than do men

Gender and (Morton, 1978).

• Tannen has suggested that male–female differences in conversational
Language style largely center on differing understandings of the goals of
conversation. These cultural differences result in contrasting styles of
communication – might lead to conflict.
• Men see the 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 (Tannen, 1990, 1994).
• Women, in contrast, seek to establish a connection between the two
participants, to give support and confirmation to others, and to reach
consensus through communication.
• To reach their conversational • Men enjoy connections and rapport. But
goals, women use because men have been raised in a gender
conversational strategies that culture in which status plays an important
minimize differences, establish role, other goals take precedence in
equity, and avoid any conversations.
appearances of superiority on • Tannen has suggested that men seek to
the part of one or another assert their independence from their
conversant. conversational partners. In this way, they
• Also affirm the importance of indicate clearly their lack of acquiescence to
and the commitment to the the demands of others, which would indicate
relationship. They handle lack of power.
differences of opinion by • Men also prefer to inform (thereby indicating
negotiating to reach a the higher status conferred by authority)
consensus that promotes the rather than to consult (indicating
connection and ensures that subordinate status) with their conversational
both parties at least feel that partners.
their wishes have been
• The male partner in a close relationship thus
considered. They do so even if
may end up informing his partner of their
they are not entirely satisfied
plans.
with the consensual decision.
• In contrast, the female partner expects to
be consulted on their plans.
• Gender differences in the written use of language have also been
observed (Argamon et al., 2003). For example, a study that analyzed
more than 14,000 text files from 70 separate studies found that women
used more words that were related to psychological and social
processes, whereas men related more to object properties and
impersonal topics (Newman et al., 2008).
• Not conclusive results. Other studies have stated that writing style
depends on the kind of blog rather than gender. (Herring & Paolillo,
2006).
Discourse and reading comprehension

• Discourse involves units of language larger than individual sentences—

in conversations, lectures, stories, essays, and even textbooks
• By adulthood, most of us have a firm grasp of how sentences are
sequenced into a greater whole (discourse structure). From our
knowledge of discourse structure, we can derive meanings of sentence
elements that are not apparent by looking at isolated sentences.
• For understanding
discourse, we often rely
not only on our
knowledge of discourse
structure but also on our
knowledge of a broad
physical, social, or
cultural context within
which the discourse is
presented.
• Our understanding of
the meaning of a
paragraph is influenced
by our existing
knowledge and
expectations
Comprehendi • Semantic encoding is the process by which we translate
sensory information (that is, the written words we see) into a

ng Known meaningful representation.

• Sometimes we cannot semantically encode the word because
Words: its meaning does not already exist in memory. We then must
find another way in which to derive the meanings of words,
Retrieving such as from noting the context in which we read them.
• Knowledge of vocabulary helps in comprehension
Word • In one study, recall of the semantic content of a passage was

Meaning from much better when participants had a greater relevant

vocabulary (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982).

Memory • In children, vocabulary size is positively related to

performance on a number of semantic-understanding tasks,
including retelling (both written and oral), decoding ability,
and the ability to draw inferences across sentences (Hagtvet,
2003).
• A number of studies suggest that in order to grasp meaning
of a sample of text with ease, one should know
approximately 95% of the vocabulary (Nation, 2001; Read,
2000).
• Still other studies suggest that, for one to enjoy reading a
text, one needs to understand about 98% of the vocabulary
(Hu & Nation, 2000).
Comprehendi • Whenever we cannot semantically encode a word because its
meaning is not already stored in memory, we must engage in
ng Unknown some kind of strategy to derive meaning from the text. In
general, we must either search for a meaning, using external
Words: resources, such as dictionaries or teachers, or formulate a
meaning. Using context cues, we formulate the meaning

Deriving based on the existing information stored in memory.

• Vocabulary is mostly learnt indirectly
Word • One study found that the ability to figure out meanings of
words from context was impaired in children with low reading
Meanings comprehension. If those children had good vocabularies,
however, direct instruction could help them learn the
from Context meanings of new words just as well as did children with high
reading comprehension (Cain, Oakhill, & Lemmon, 2004).
• Studies have found that people with large or small
vocabularies (high verbal/ low verbal) learn word meanings
differently. High-verbal participants perform a deeper analysis
of the possibilities for a new word’s meaning than do low-
verbal participants. In particular, the high-verbal participants
used a well-formulated strategy for figuring out word
meanings. The low-verbal participants seemed to have no
clear strategy at all (van Daalen-Kapteijns & Elshout-Mohr,
1981; see also Sternberg & Powell, 1983).
 • Walter Kintsch’s model of text comprehension
Comprehendi • We don’t store words, but ideas – in the working memory
ng Ideas: • The representational form for these fundamental ideas is
Propositional the PROPOSITION - briefest unit of language that can be
independently found to be true or false
Representatio • For example, the sentence, “Penguins are birds,
ns and penguins can fly” contains two
propositions. You can verify independently
whether penguins are birds and whether
penguins can fly.
• In general, propositions assert either an action
(e.g.,flying) or a relationship.
• According to Kintsch, propositions that are thematically central to the
understanding of the text will remain in working memory longer than
propositions that are irrelevant to the theme of the text passage.
• Kintsch calls the thematically crucial propositions
macropropositions.
• He further calls the overarching thematic structure of a
passage of text the macrostructure.

Experiment:
• asked participants to read a 1,300-word text passage
• had to summarize the key propositions in the passage
immediately, at one month, or at three months after
reading the passage.
• After three months, Participants recalled the
macropropositions and the overall macrostructure of the
passage about as well as could participants who
summarized it immediately after reading it.
• However, the propositions providing nonthematic details
about the passage were not recalled as well after one
month and not at all well after three months.
Comprehendi
ng Text Based
on Context
and Point of • People who read the passage from the
View (Ref. Pg viewpoint of a cat burglar remembered far
more about the contents of the home.
396 – • In contrast, those who read from the viewpoint
Sternberg) of a homebuyer remembered more about the
condition of the house.
 • A mental model may be viewed as a sort of internal working
model of the situation described in the text, as the reader
understands it. In other words, the reader creates some sort
of mental representation that contains the main elements of
the text.

Representi • represented in a way that is relatively easy to grasp or at

least that is simpler and more concrete than the text itself

ng the text • A given passage of text or even a given set of propositions

may lead to more than one mental model.

in mental • For example, suppose that you read the sentence, “The loud
bang scared Alice.” You may form a picture of Alice

models becoming scared on hearing a loud noise. Or you may

access propositions stored in memory regarding the effects
of loud bangs. You can form more than one mental model
based on the sentence, and might need to modify it
depending on what the next sentence is. Eg: “She tried to
steer off the highway without losing control of the car,” or
“She ducked to avoid being shot.”
• Your ability to comprehend the text depends on your ability
to form a new mental model. You can hold in mind only a
limited number of mental models at any given time.
Therefore, when one of the models is incorrect, it must be
rejected to make room for new models.
Neuropsychology of Language
Ref. Pg 432-Pg440 Sternberg
 • Broca’s Area

Brain • Wernicke’s Area

Word Recognition
Structures • Research studying the metabolic activity of the brain and
involved in the flow of blood in the brain during the performance of
various verbal tasks, using fMRI, have found that the
Language middle part of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) responds
more strongly to speech sounds than to non-speech sounds.
The response takes place in both sides of the STS, although
it is usually stronger in the left hemisphere. Interestingly, it
does not matter whether words or pseudo-words are
presented. This means it is unlikely that processing of
semantic information takes place here.
 • The evidence comes from studies involving patients with
Alzheimer’s disease, aphasia, autism, and many other
The Brain disorders
There are five brain regions that are involved in the storage
and and retrieval of meaning (Binder, 2009):

Semantic • the ventral temporal lobes, including middle and inferior

temporal, anterior fusiform, and anterior parahippocampal
Processing gyri;
• the angular gyrus;
• the anterior aspect (pars orbitalis) of the inferior frontal
gyrus;
• the dorsal prefrontal cortex; and
• the posterior cingulate gyrus.
• activation of these areas takes place mostly in the left
hemisphere, although there is some activation in the right
hemisphere
• It is suspected, however, that the right hemisphere does
not play a significant role in word recognition
• Some other subcortical structures (e.g., the basal ganglia
and the posterior thalamus) also are involved in linguistic
function. These structures remain poorly understood,
however.
 • ERPs
• a certain ERP called N400 (a negative potential 400
milliseconds after stimulus onset) typically occurs when
individuals hear an anomalous sentence.
• Thus, if people are presented a sequence of normal
sentences but also anomalous sentences (such as “The
The Brain leopard is a very good napkin”), the anomalous sentences
will elicit the N400 potential.
and Syntax • Moreover, the more anomalous a sentence is, the greater
the response shown in another ERP, P600 (a positive
potential 600 milliseconds after the stimulus onset;)
• The P600 effect seems to be more related to syntactic
violations, whereas the N400 effect is more related to
semantic violations.
 The brain • There is some evidence that the brain mechanisms
responsible for language learning are different from those
and responsible for the use of language by adults.
• In general, the left hemisphere seems to be better at
language processing well-practiced routines.

acquisition • The right hemisphere is better at dealing with novel stimuli.

• A possibly related finding is that individuals who have
learned language later in life show more right-hemisphere
involvement.
 Brain • Recent imaging studies of the post-traumatic recovery of
linguistic functioning find that neurological language
plasticity functioning appears to redistribute to other areas of the
brain.
and • Thus, damage to the major left hemisphere areas
Language responsible for language functioning sometimes can lead
to enhanced involvement of other areas as language
functioning recovers.
• It is as if previously dormant or overshadowed areas take
over the duties left vacant
The Brain and Sex Differences in
Language Processing
An fMRI study of men and women asked participants to perform
one of four tasks:
1. indicate whether a pair of letters was identical;
2. indicate whether two words have the same meaning;
3. indicate whether a pair of words rhymes; and
4. compare the lengths of two lines (a control task).
On letter recognition and Word-meaning tasks,
both male and female participants showed activation in
the left-temporal lobe.
On Rhyming tasks, only the inferior (lower) frontal
region of the left hemisphere was activated for men. For
women the region in both hemispheres were activated.
This result suggested that men localized their
phonological processing more than did women.
 (Kimura, 1987)

One interpretation of Kimura’s findings is that the role of the posterior region
in linguistic function may be different for women than it is for men.

• Men seem to show more left • Women show more bilateral,

hemisphere dominance for symmetrical patterns of linguistic
linguistic function than the women. function.
• Aphasic men showed a more varied
pattern of lesions, when compared • Most aphasic women showed
to women. Aphasic men were more lesions in the anterior region,
likely to show lesions in posterior although some aphasic women
regions rather than in anterior showed lesions in the temporal
regions. region.
Women show less lateralization of linguistic function
Women may be better able to compensate for any possible loss of
function due to lesions in the left posterior hemisphere through
functional offsets in the right posterior hemisphere.
Difficulties in studying brain lesion patients:
• Naturally occurring lesions are often not easily localized to a discrete
region of the brain, with no effects on other regions. (Eg: when
hemorrhaging or insufficient blood flow causes lesions, the lesions also
may affect other areas of the brain. Thus, many patients who show
cortical damage also have suffered some damage in subcortical
structures. This may confound the findings of cortical damage.)
• Researchers are able to study the linguistic function of patients only after
the lesions have caused damage. Prior functioning is often unknown.
• Unethical to create lesions in patients
 • Researchers have found that stimulation of particular
points in the brain seems to yield discrete effects on
particular linguistic functions (such as the naming of
objects) across repeated, successive trials. For example, in
a given person, repeated stimulation of one particular
point might lead to difficulties in recalling the names of
Electrical objects on every trial. In contrast, stimulation of another
point might lead to incorrect naming of objects.
stimulation • In addition, information regarding brain locations in a
specific individual may not apply across individuals. Thus,
studies for a given individual, a discrete point of stimulation may
seem to affect only one particular linguistic function. But
across individuals, these particular localizations of function
vary widely.
• The effects of electrical stimulation are transitory. Linguistic
function returns to normal soon after the stimulation has
ceased.
• One study examined electrical stimulation of the brains of
bilingual speakers. The researchers found different areas of
the brain were active when using the primary versus the
secondary language to name items. There was, however,
some overlap of active areas with the two languages.
• Evidences from electrical stimulation studies have shown
that although females generally have superior verbal skills
to males, males have a proportionately larger (more
diffusely dispersed) language area in their brains than do
females. Counterintuitively, therefore, the size of the
language area in the brain may be inversely related to the
ability to use language
 Kimura (1981)
The Brain • the locations of lesions that would be expected to disrupt
speech also disrupt signing.
and Sign • hemispheric pattern of lesions associated with signing
deficits is the same pattern shown with speech deficits, i.e.,
Language all right-handers with signing deficits show left-hemisphere
lesions, as do most left-handers. But some left-handers
with signing deficits show right-hemisphere lesions.
 Aphasia

Wernicke’s Aphasia Broca’s Aphasa Global Aphasia Anomic Aphasia

• damage to Wernicke’s area • damage to Broca’s area of the • combination of highly impaired • difficulties in naming objects or
• notable impairment in the brain comprehension and production in retrieving words.
understanding of spoken words • characterized by the production of speech. • The patient may look at an
and sentences. of agrammatical speech at the • It is caused by lesions to both object and simply be unable to
• It also typically involves the same time that verbal Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas retrieve the word that
production of sentences that comprehension ability is largely • researchers found 32% of corresponds to the object.
have the basic structure of the preserved aphasias immediately following • Sometimes, specific categories
language spoken but that make • Eg: “Stroke … Sunday … arm, a stroke involved both Broca’s of things cannot be recalled,
no sense. They are sentences talking—bad” and Wernicke’s such as names of living things
that are empty of meaning. • gist of the intended sentence is
• Eg: “Yeah, that was the pumpkin maintained, but the expression
furthest from my thoughts” and of it is badly distorted.
• “the scroolish prastimer ate my • Broca’s area is activated during
spanstakes” – neologisms imagined or actual sign
• Treatment includessupporting production
and encouraging non-language
communication
• [Link]
• [Link] Broca’s Aphasia
• [Link] Wernicke’s Aphasia
 • developmental disorder characterized by
abnormalities in social behavior, language, and
cognition
• Children with autism show abnormalities in many
areas of the brain, including the frontal and parietal
lobes, as well as the cerebellum, brainstem, corpus
callosum, basal ganglia, amygdala, and hippocampus
• Children with autism usually are identified by around
Autism 14 months of age, when they fail to show expected
normal patterns of interactions with others.
• When they interact with someone, they are more
likely to view their lips than their eyes.
• About half of children with autism fail to develop
functional speech
3 core features of Autism
• impaired communication
• impaired reciprocal social interaction and
• restricted, repetitive and stereotyped patterns of
behaviors or interests.
• Echolalia - they repeat, over and over again, speech they have heard. Sometimes the
repetition occurs several hours after the original use of the words by someone else.
• May have problems with the semantic encoding of language.
• Autism as resulting from an extreme male brain (Pg 438- Sternberg)
• Executive Dysfunction theory of Autism
• Executive functions include abilities to control and regulate other abilities and behaviors.
For example, when you initiate or terminate an action, or monitor your behavior to see if
it helps you in achieving your goals, you are using executive functions.
• This theory describes the repetitive motion observed in autism, as well as difficulties in
planning, mental flexibility, and self-monitoring (Hill, 2004).
• The executive dysfunction theory views autism as associated with dysfunction in the
frontal lobes.
References
Galotti, k.M. (2014). Cognitive Psychology: In and Out of the Laboratory. (5 th Edn.). New Delhi: SAGE
Publications India Pvt Ltd.
Sternberg, R.J. (2009). Cognitive Psychology. (5th Edn.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

[Link]