Language - Cognitive Psychology, Slides of Cognitive Psychology

Download Language - Cognitive Psychology and more Slides Cognitive Psychology in PDF only on Docsity!

LANGUAGE

JOHN WENDELL CAÑARES ARIANDA LEILLA ESGUERRA NICOLE PATRICIO

LANGUAGE

 The use of a systematic method for putting words together in order to

communicate with others It also allows us to consider things and processes that we

can't see, hear, feel, touch, or smell at the moment. These objects can contain

concepts that don't have a physical manifestation.

 Not all communication—the exchange of ideas and feelings—takes place through

words. Nonverbal communication, such as gestures or facial expressions, can be used

to enhance or suggest communication in different ways.

PROPERTIES OF LANGUAGE

1. Communicative: Language permits us to communicate with one or more people who share our language. Example: You can write what you are thinking and feeling so that others may read and understand your thoughts and feelings 2. Arbitrarily symbolic: Language creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and what it represents: an idea, a thing, a process, a relationship, or a description. Referent - the thing or concept in the real world that a word refers to. 2 principles underlying word meanings ▪ The Principle of Conventionality - meanings of words are determined by conventions—they have a meaning upon which people agree. ▪ The Principle of Contrast - different words have different meanings. Thus, when you have two different words, they represent two things that are at least slightly different. 3. Regularly structured : Language has a structure; only particularly patterned arrangements of symbols have meaning, and different arrangements yield different meanings.

PROPERTIES OF LANGUAGE

4. Structured at multiple levels : The structure of language can be analyzed at more than one level (e.g., in sounds, meaning units, words, and phrases). Example:

• Sounds (p and t)
• Words (pat, tap, pot, top, pit, and tip)
• Sentences, such as (Pat said to tap the top of the pot, then tip it into the pit).
• Larger units of language, such as paragraph or book. 5. Generative, productive : Within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances. The possibilities for creating new utterances are virtually limitless. Productivity - refers to our vast ability to produce language creatively. 6. Dynamic : Languages constantly evolve. Individual language users coin words and phrases and modify language usage. Example:
• Netiquette, emoticon, webinar (All of these words have been created just in recent years).

BASIC COMPONENTS OF WORDS

• (^) PHONEMICS- study of the particular phonemes of a language.
• (^) PHONETICS- study of how to produce or combine speech sounds or to represent them with

written symbols.

• (^) MORPHEME- the smallest unit of meaning within a particular language.

Example: The word recharge contains two morphemes, “re-” and “charge,” where “re”

indicates a repeated action.

2 forms of morphemes—root words and affixes.

Root words are the portions of words that contain the majority of meaning. These roots cannot

be broken down into smaller meaningful units. They are the items that have entries in the

dictionary.

Affixes - include prefixes, which precede the root word, and suffixes.

Content morphemes - are the words that convey the bulk of the meaning of a language.

Function morphemes - add detail and nuance to the meaning of the content morphemes or help

the content morphemes fit the grammatical context.

• (^) LEXICON- the entire set of morphemes in a given language or in a given person’s linguistic

repertoire.

BASIC COMPONENTS OF SENTENCES

▪ Syntax

 refers to the way in which we put words together to form sentences. It plays a major role in

our understanding of language.

 Linguists consider the study of syntax to be fundamental to understanding the structure of

language. Sentence comprises at least two parts

Noun phrase - contains at least one noun (often the subject of the sentence) and includes all

the relevant descriptors of the noun (like “big” or “fast”). Verb phrase (predicate) - which

contains at least one verb and whatever the verb acts on, if anything.

Example: The cat chases the rat.

Noun phrase Verb Phrase

UNDERSTANDING WORDS

▪ Speech Perception

 (^) fundamental to language use in our everyday lives. Understanding speech is crucial to human communication. Viewed as different from other perceptual abilities because of both the linguistic nature of the information and the particular way in which information must be encoded for effective transmission. The problem we face when we try to understand what somebody else is saying is that no word sounds exactly the same when it is spoken across the various speakers who say the word. There is a lot of variability across people in the pronunciation of words. People speak faster or slower, or they may pronounce sounds differently depending on where they come from. Example: One of the author’s elementary school teachers pronounced “get” in a way that sounded like “git.”

UNDERSTANDING WORDS

▪ Coarticulation - pronounce more than one sound

at the same time. This overlapping of speech sounds may seem to create additional problems for perceiving speech, but is viewed as necessary for the effective transmission of speech information.

▪ 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

 (^) says that we start with an analysis of auditory sensations and shift to higher-level processing. We identify words on the basis of successively paring down the possibilities for matches between each of the phonemes and the words we already know from memory

THE VIEW OF SPEECH PERCEPTION

AS SPECIAL

▪ Categorical Perception

 (^) discontinuous categories of speech sounds. That is, although the speech sounds, we actually hear comprise a continuum of variation in sound waves, we experience speech sounds categorically.  (^) This phenomenon can be seen in the perception of the consonant–vowel combinations ba, da, and ga. A speech signal would look different for each of these syllables. Some patterns in the speech signal lead to the perception of ba. Others lead to the perception of da. And still others lead to perception of ga.

▪ The Motor Theory of Speech Perception

 (^) we use the movements of the speaker’s vocal tract to perceive what he says. Observing that a speaker rounds his lips or presses his lips together provides the listener with phonetic information.

▪ McGurk effect

 (^) This effect involves the synchrony of visual and auditory perceptions: When watching a movie, an auditory syllable is perceived differently depending on whether you see the speaker make the sound that matches the pronunciation of the syllable or make another sound that does not match the syllable spoken. Example: Poorly dubbed movies can be confusing. You are vaguely aware that the lips are saying one thing, and you are hearing something else entirely

UNDERSTANDING

MEANING: SEMANTICS

▪ Denotation - is the strict dictionary definition of a word.

▪ Connotation - is a word’s emotional overtones, presuppositions, and other nonexplicit meanings. Vary

between people, there can be variation in the meaning formed. Example: The word snake, for many people, the connotation of snake is negative or dangerous. Others, say a biologist specializing in snakes (called a herpetologist), would have a very different and probably much more positive connotation for the word snake. How do we understand word meanings in the first place? We encode meanings into memory through concepts. These include ideas, to which we may attach various characteristics and with which we may connect various other ideas, such as through propositions. They also include images and perhaps motor patterns for implementing particular procedures.

UNDERSTANDING

SENTENCES: SYNTAX

▪ Syntax

 (^) the systematic way in which words can be combined and sequenced to make meaningful phrases and sentences (Carroll, 1986).  (^) Whereas studies of speech perception chiefly investigate the phonetic structure of language, syntax focuses on the study of the grammar of phrases and sentences. In other words, it considers the regularity of structure. Psycholinguists use the word grammar in a slightly different way

▪ Prescriptive Grammar

 (^) kind of grammar prescribes the “correct” ways in which to structure the use of written and spoken language.

▪ Descriptive Grammar

 (^) of greater interest to psycholinguists in which an attempt is made to describe the structures, functions, and relationships of words in language. Example : Mario said, “Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to out of up for?” Mario’s utterance might shiver the spine of any prescriptive grammarian. But Mario’s ability to produce such a complex sentence, with such intricate internal interdependencies, would please descriptive grammarians.

UNDERSTANDING

SENTENCES: SYNTAX

▪ Syntactical Priming  (^) we spontaneously tend to use syntactical structures and read faster sentences that parallel the structures of sentences we have just heard. Example: A speaker will be more likely to use a passive construction (e.g., “The student was praised by the professor”) after hearing a passive construction. He or she will do so even when the topics of the sentences differ. Another Example of Syntactical Priming is SENTENCE PRIMING.

▪ Speech Errors

 (^) we almost invariably switch nouns for nouns, verbs for verbs, prepositions for prepositions, and so on. Example: We may say, “I put the oven in the cake.” But we will probably not say, “I put the cake oven in the.”  (^) We usually even attach (and detach) appropriate function morphemes to make the switched words fit their new positions. Example: When meaning to say, “The butter knives are in the drawer,” we may say, “The butter drawers are in the knife.” Here, we change “drawer” to plural and “knives” to singular to preserve the grammaticality of the sentence.

UNDERSTANDING

SENTENCES: SYNTAX

Tree Diagrams

 (^) linguists often use tree diagrams, to observe the interrelationships of phrases within a sentence. Helps to reveal the interrelationships of syntactical classes within the phrase structures of sentences.  (^) In particular, such diagrams show that sentences are not merely organized chains of words, strung together sequentially. Rather, they are organized into hierarchical structures of embedded phrases.  (^) The use of tree diagrams helps to highlight many aspects of how we use language, including both our linguistic sophistication and our difficulties in using language. By observing tree diagrams of ambiguous sentences, psycholinguists can better pinpoint the source of confusion.

UNDERSTANDING

SENTENCES: SYNTAX

2 APPROACHES TO ANALYZING

SENTENCES

2. Transformational Grammar - a new approach to syntax. Rules guide the ways in which an underlying proposition can be arranged into a sentence. There are obviously many different sentences that can express the same proposition. 2 Phrase Structure ▪ Deep Structure - refers to an underlying syntactical structure that links various phrase structures through various transformation rules. ▪ Surface Structure - refers to any of the various phrase structures that may result from such transformations. Example:

• Susie greedily ate the crocodile
• The crocodile was eaten greedily by Susie Both have a relationship that cannot be seen just by looking at the phrase-structure grammar passive-voice sentences can be transformed into active-voice sentences using transformation rules.