PSYB57 Final: Language
Psycholinguistics
The study of linguistic behaviour. How we learn, understand and produce lamguage.
Functions for language
1. Coordinate in large groups.
2. Communicate knowledge.
3. consider the past and plan for the future.
Differences of language in animals vs humans
Animals are capable of language, but they differ in quantitly (they can communicate with far less means), quality (they can't communicate abstract concept) and structure (they don't have grammar and syntax).
Grammer and syntax are the biggest source of difference.
Animals can be taught some lnaguage, but they don't show the same ability to generate new, complicated thoughts and sentences.
Language/syntax
Symbols that can be combined into a large number of combinations.
Productivity/digital infinity
Ability to combine words in novel ways.
Debate about language acquiscition
Behaviouralists believe that language is learned just like every other skill, through trial and error, with rewards and by modeling after parents.
But we might have an innate ability to learn language from birth. The basic concepts and protential for language learning are thrre, we only need to learn the details.
Universail grammer
A set of syntactic linguistic rules common across all human languages.
FOXP2 gene
Important to lamguage developement in humans and vocal communication in animals.
Mutations will cause developmental veral dyspraxia: inability to pronounce certain syllabals and words.
Evidence why language might be innate
Grammar is often too ambiguious and rules can't be learned.
Poverty of stimulus: grammar can't be learned based on experience alone.
Example of ambiguous grammar
Moving the "is" to the front of a sentence can make it a question
Poverty of stimulus
rules of grammar can't be learned on experience alone.
Adult immigrants are exposed to it and sometimes can't grasp the grammar of that new language so they speak pdigin (quai-language with no full grammer) instead.
Chilfren of immigrants exposed to 2 languages speak creole ( combination that is fully expressive with grammar.
Deaf isolates.
Deaf isolates
Deaf people who are not exposed to any sign language will develope their own.
Language development
Unless there is a disorder, everyone will learn language at around the same pace/timing.
Starting with before birth, children can isolate the voice of their mother and their native language.
Factors that help lamguage development
infant-directed speech/child-directed speech/motherese.
Babies prefer it.
Helps identify beginnings and ends of sounds.
Language compresion
The understanding of a message conveyed by someone else.
It is chollengeing, like the perception of other forms of stimuli.
3 aspects of language that could be ambiguous
Phonological
Lexical
Parsing
Phonetic properties
actual sounds that the speaker is making.
Language structure
sentences, phrases, morphemes, phonemes
Phonenes
Smallest unit of speech
Morphemes
Smallest unit of meaningful speech.
Ambiguity with phonetic properties and their solutions.
You can't always tell what sounds are playing, so you use contect in speech perception. You can infer what sounds/words you hear based on its surrounding speech. Phonemic restoration effect. You can also use lip reading/visual representation to guess.
Speech segmentation is difficult because people don't pause between words so we can't tell where one morpheme begins and the other ends. We encode the frequency with which different sounds appear togehter and identify likely words.
Lexical processing
Determining the meaning of individual words.
Problem with lexical and how its solved
There is ambiguity with what a sound means since a word can mean mamy different things.
Context can help. The first interpretation of the word will be the most frequent one. Then the brain generates several possibilities and you pick the best one. \aMBGIGUOUS WORD WILL ACTIVATE MULTIPLE MEANINGs and context can block out the incorrect ones. People ar ebetter at recognizing real words when they are common.
Lexical decidion task
Homophones
Words that sound the same but mean different things
Homographsz;
words that are spelled the same but have meanings/pronounciations.
Parsing
Breaking up a sentence into its constituted parts.
Garden-path sentence
A sentence where people always derive the incorrect parsing, leading to a dead interpretation that must be reparsed. This is done so quickly that we often don't remember.
Clause
Group of words that exprrss a full idea of someone/something.
Syntaxx-first approach
parsing of a sentence is derived based on grammer alone, no regard for meaning of the words, just their category (verb, noun, etc)
Wrong, because semantics does play a role.
Late closure
As long as it makes grmatical sense, we attach words to phrases we are currently processing than assuming they belong to different phrases coming up.
Context and parsing
intentions of a speaker may be discernible from both the words and the shared understanding of what the speaker is trying to say.
Sem enviornment/perception can help them discern the same meaning.
Extra linguistic methods to disambiguate parsing
Prosody
Prosody
Patterns of stress, pitch and inotation that convey critical information beyond just word usage.
Punctuational prosody is when puntucation is used like prosody
Discourse processing and what it utilizes
Ability to understand language that is several sentences long.
Long and short term memory.
Anaphoric inferences
guess about which antecednece is being referenced by an anaphoric in a following sentence.
Antecedent and anaphor definitions
word in the first sentence
Word referenceing an antecedent in a later sentence.
Casual inference
Assumption that something mentioned at one stage of a sequence leads to something later on.
Backward inference
previous information is needed to process current information.
AKA deductive inference, neccesary inference.
Elaborative inference and when it is used.
Inferred information not necessary to properly understand the text.
Depends on whether there is enough context for it.
The golf example
Instrumental inference
tHE TOOL THAT IS TYPICALLY ISED To perform a task is inferred from the text even when its not vital to understanding it.
Information for inferences
Comes from pre-existing knowlege, it is integrated into the text to compregend it. then it also helps with storage of text because it is made mor emeaningful
Neurolinguistics
a branch of linguistics concerned with the relationship between linguistic behaviour and the structure of the brain.
Areas of the brain for language
Wernicke's area in the temporal lobe.
Broca's area in the frontal lobe.
Arculate fasiculus
What brain part is used for what
Both brain parts for both comprehension and production, but wenicke's more for comprehention (along with broader temporal lobe) and broca's aread for production.
But damage to broca's area does not always cuse definciency and deficiency can happen without damage.
Brain hemisphericalization
Left hemisphere for language production.
Right demispere for highorder processing for discourse processing. Language deficts of less information and coherent words when lamaged. Involved in elaborative processing, inferences and especially narrative comprhension tasks.
Language universalists
People who believe that all lamguage fundementally express the same basic ideas
Linguistic relativity
sPECIFIC LAGUAGE WE speak effects areas of cognition and influences thinking and perception.
Sapir0Whorf hypothesis.
Russians who have more words for blue are better able to distinguish shades of blue to do. They either have more experteise, different concepts and categories used. Or they have experience, their attention are dirrected elsewhere when looking at blue.
Natural language processing
Subfield of AI specifically concerned with machines understanding and producing lamguage.
Used to measure lamguage in AI
General lamguage understaning evaluasiton benchmark (GLUE) and superGLUE.
Turning test
Synabench
Dynabench
Turning test
A machine is good at lamguage because a human judge can not tell the difference between the machine and human writing.
Language AI jobs
Generate summaries, evaluate writing tone/emotions, carrying conversation
Online discourse processing
Inferences actively being generates while people/listening to/reafing.encoding the sentence.
Offline discourse processing
inferences taking place after inital cosing.