Exam 4 Study Guide

Cognitive Psych Exam 4 CREATEDATE 5/4/09 9:36 PM I. Language A. Linguistics: the academic discipline that takes language as its topic\ Psycholinguistics: the study of language as it is used & learned by people 1. Language as abstract system 2. Language as human behavior 3. Competence: underlying knowledge Performance: use of language, linguistic knowledge & cognitive psychology, how language is effected by everything II. Levels of language structure Ambiguity: everything we encounter has more than 1 interpretation and can be at any level Phonology ? sounds of language Morphology (lexical) ? formation of words, ex. band, band, bark Unambiguous words: ex. line, room ? 1 entry in dictionary with lots of sub headings Syntax ? formation of sentences, verb/adjective, Prepositional phrases: passangers should refrain from transporting any items of luggage without their knowledge Semantics ? meaning, ex. the shooting of the hunter was terrible ? was the hunter shot? Pragmatics ? the use of language Sarcasm: form of ambiguity Rhetorical questions: intended as statements Relationship of sound to meaning is: Arbitrary: nothing about a sound shows what something means Displacement: we can talk about things displaced in time, we can talk about something untrue Productivity (generativity): no limits to the number of sentences you can speak & understand III. Linguistic Rules & Processing A. They are implicit Competence: underlying knowledge of structure of language (knowledge gets filtered through all of our abilities) Performance: use of language B. Phonology: sound structure of language (units of speech sound) Phonemes: basic sound that compose a language, smallest unit of speech sound that makes a difference for meaning but does not have meaning (/b/ & /p/ are different phonemes in English because they make a difference to the meaning ? bin & pin) Phones: smallest unit of speech sound (ex. [ph] & [p] are phones, with [ph] a puff of air comes out) don?t have relevance to meaning Allophones: two realizations of a single phoneme ([ph] and [p] in English) Phonemes as abstract categories of sound: Coarticulation and the lack of invariant cues to phoneme identification: C. Processing phonological information Categorical perception: all the sounds falling within a set of boundaries are perceived as the same, despite the physical differenes among them (ex. the difference between the hard /k/ sound in cool and keep are perceived as belonging to the same category ? the /k/ phoneme) Speech in context: speech is conceptually driven processing ? words phrases and ideas that are already identified lead us to correct identification of new, incoming sounds D. Morphology: smallest unit of meaningful speech Free morphemes: can stand by itself (ex. book, tie) Bound morphemes: can?t stand by itself but changes meaning (?s (books) ?un (untie)) Morphological representation: Stems: Affixes: Pseydoprefixed words: word recognition Morphologically based speech errors: misplaced morphemes E. Syntax: sentence structure, arrangement of words as elements in a sentence to show their relationship to one another Requirements of grammar: Infinite number of sentences Intuitions: Grammatically: colorless green ideas sleep furiously Ambiguity: visiting relatives can be a nuisance Synonymy: the boy hit the ball/the ball was hit by the boy Phase structure grammar: the constitutes of the sentence, the word groupings and phrases that make up the whole utterance, and the relationships among those constituents ?rewrite rules? and tree diagrams: s(sentence) ( NP (noun phrase)+ VP (verb phrase) Noun Phrase ( Determiner + Noun Verb Phrase ( Verb + Noun Phrase Determiner = a, the Noun = boy, girl, snake Verb = chased, bit, kissed Tree diagrams reveal hierarchical structure of as sentence and the internal structure of the various parts as they relate to each other. phrase structure & ambiguity (wrestling cheerleaders): the constitutes of the sentence, the word groupings and phrases that make up the whole utterance, and the relationships among those constituents failures of P-S grammar: Problems with some kind of ambiguity (the shooting of the hunters was terrible) Difficulty with synonymy Intuitions about structural differences (john is eager to please / john is easy to please) deep structure: underlying relationships between grammar in sentence (ex. john is the subject of a sentence) (abstract representation of the sentence) surface structure: relationship of words in spoken sentence (john is the person) (might have more than one meaning) transformational rules: convert deep structure into a surface structure (a sentence ready to be spoken) IV. Processing & Syntactic information: Immediacy vs. ?wait and see?: immediacy of processing ? we build a sentence as we go Syntactic ambiguity: the women hit the man with flowers Garden-path sentences: early part of the sentence sets you up so that the later phrases in the sentence don?t make sense given the way assigned case roles in the first part (the sentence leads you down the garden path and you make wrong judgments before the sentence is over) Minimal attachment: decreases the burden on STM Late closure: when Madonna sings the song, it?s a hit ( late closure, makes sense When Madonna sings, the song is a hit ( early closure, doesn?t make sense V. Brain and Language: Methods Lesions: studying damaged areas in brain, not uniform among patients ERP: shows electrical activity in brain = bad spatial resolution Neuroimaging: measures homodynamic response = bad temporal resolution Lateralization & localization: differences/similarities of hemisphere Aphasias Broca?s aphasia: disrupted speech comprehension & syntax, problem with spoken language Wenicke?s aphasia: disrupted comprehension of spoken & written language, syntax (grammar) preserved Related disorders: Dyslexia/Alexia: inability to read Anomia: difficulty in getting semantic info to name objects Disturbed language: Disturbed thought: Language in the right hemisphere: Distance semantic associates: Nonliteral language: indirect requests, sarcasm, metaphor (topic & vehicle), idiom (conceptual metaphors underlying idiom) Coherence among sentences: VI. Language & Comprehension Product vs. Process: if you infer something, memory is product of comprehension to understand product, you must interpret process Offline measures: ex. Memory procedure, not good to use to figure out when something occurred Online measures: as it occurs Local coherence: tying together sentences with a common word or concept between them (ex. Jill bought a new sweater. Sweaters are often made of wool.) Reference: connections between two concepts ? sentences (ex. we got the beer out of the car. The beer was warm. VS. We got the beer out of the car. It was warm) Inference: process by which the listener or reader draws connections between concepts, determines the references of words and ideas, and derives conclusions from a message (mapping things we learned to something we already learned) (using info in semantic memory regarding info not explicitly given) Logical: (ex. if turtles were on a long and the fish swam beneath the turtles, the fish also went beneath the log) Bridging: process of constructing a connection between concepts, some sentences will not make sense unless an inference is drawn (ex. I dropped an egg on the floor. It was my last one so I had to go out for more) Elaborative: adding information to the representation of a text when it is not neccisary for comprehension Direct matching: (ex. I dropped an egg on the floor. The egg broke and made a mess) Global coherence: everything must relate, not just following sentences Schemata: structure of conversation Story grammar: VII. Reading A. The ?great debate? in reading: Using the sound system in visual processing: fluent adult readers use sound system Phonics vs. whole-word reading: sounding out the word and readying the word as a whole Recognizing words: Graphemes to phonemes: grapheme is unit in writing the corresponds to a phoneme (often 1 letter, but sometimes 2) Whole word: Differences among languages (orthographic transparency): written language is cultural invention Opaque (English): different pronunciations for each letter Transparent (Spanish, Korean, lots of others): one pronunciation for each letter the dual-route model: assembled phonology: sounding a word out, translates letter into sounds and puts them together lexicon: look up word in memory *advantage because it gives you the right pronunciation * either pathway is effective = modular discovering the routes: frequency regularity Semantics