Key Terms and Concepts Chapter 8 - Understanding Language
Is Language Innate?
Psamtik – study to determine the prime language.
Linguistic Universals
All languages have a grammar
Nouns and verbs
Subjects and objects
Consonants and vowels
Basic word order (English is Subject, Object, Verb)
Greenberg (1963) subject precedes the object in 98% of languages.
Noam Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
Child- directed speech
Bickerton Bioprogram hypothesis
Pidgin and Creole Languages
The Birth of New Sign Language in Nicaragua
Reading
Phonics vs. Whole language approach - which approach is better?
Simple view of Reading (kendeou et al. 2009)
Eye Tracking Studies
Fixations - on content words vs. function words.
Saccades – vision is suppressed during
Regressions
E-Z Reader Model
Silent reading goes faster than reading aloud.
People remember more after silent reading than after reading aloud.
Once Mastered reading is automatic (Stroop effect)
Sound (phonological) effects on reading
Homophone study - van Orden (1987)
Errors in proofreading particularly frequent for homophones (e.g., there, they’re, their)
Tongue-twister effect (e.g., “Boris burned the brown bread badly.”).
Words can be read without phonology.
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Used for low frequency rather than high frequency words.
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Poor readers use phonology more than better readers.
Two Routes to Reading
Internal Lexicon
Graphemes vs. Phonemes
Indirect route used to read new words and pseudowords. (Coltheart et al, 2001)
Surface vs. Phonological Dyslexia
Consistency vs. regularity
The Dutch Language Union
Speech Perception
Speech is difficult to decode because:
Language is spoken very quickly (10 phonemes per sec).
Energy breaks do not correspond to breaks between words.
Co-articulation
Background noise
In poor listening conditions people adjust top-down or bottom-up processes to accommodate.
TRACE Model (McClelland and Elman, 1986)
Both bottom up and top down processes
individual processing units, or nodes, at three different levels:
• FEATURES (place & manner of production, voicing)
• PHONEMES
• WORDS
Word Superiority Effect
Lexical Identification Shift
McQueen (1991) found the Lexical Identification shift when bottom-up information was
degraded but not when it was not degraded.
Understanding Sentence
Grammar (syntax)
Semantic Information
Parsing
Garden Path Sentences
Garden-path model (Bever, 1970): you pick one structure early on, later have to revise if it isn’t
the right one.
Constraint-based model MacDonald et al., (1994)
Syntactic Heuristics (e.g., Verb bias)
Good Enough Theory Swets et al. (2008)
Pragmatics
Kintch Model (2000) of metaphor interpretation.
Metaphors are non-reversible.
Common Ground
Egocentric Heuristic (Keysar et al. 2000)
Gestures
(Kelly et al., 2010) congruent and incongruent gestures
Noise and Noise (2007)
Understanding Discourse
Drawing Inferences – going beyond the words.
Bridging Inferences (backwards)
Elaborative Inferences (forwards)
Calvo et al (2006) - Types of Inferences drawn depend on the readers goals.
Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity and Inferences
Seductive Detail Effect (Harp & Mayer, 1997).
The seductive details effect was stronger for people with low WM Capacity.
Schema Theory
Hitler Example, Sulin and Dooling, 1974
Situation Models
(Zwaan and Radvansky, 1998):