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“ Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntrily produced symbols.
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Edward Sapir (1921)
“ A language is a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements.
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Noam Chomsky (1957)
Define: language

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Some generally agreed upon conclusions
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Symbolic
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Elements are used to represent something other than itself
Voluntary
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Language use is under our individual control
Language is systematic
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There is hierarchical structure that organizes linguistic elements
Modalities
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Spoken, written, signed (sign language)
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Assumed primacy of speech - it came first

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Linguistics
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Language in the world
Psycholinguistics
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Language in the mind
Neurolinguistics
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Language in the brain

Perception Attention Memory
Input
The cat chased the rat.
Language perception t c a
/k/
/ae/
/t/ cat
Word recognition
Syntactic analysis dog cap wolf tree yarn cat claw fur hat
S
NP VP the cat
V NP chased the rat
Semantic & pragmatic analysis

 It is the body of psychological experimentation that deals with issues of human memory, language use, problem solving, decision making, and reasoning.
“ Cognitive Psychology refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.
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Ulric Neisser (1967)
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Attention
Limited capacity resource
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Spotlight analogy
Resource pool
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Filtering capabilities
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Early selection
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Late selection
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Integration function
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Memory
Sensory Stores
Short-term memory
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Working memory
Long-term memory
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Declarative
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Episodic
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Semantic
Procedural

Information
Information ‘ flows ’ from one memory buffer to the next

 Properties
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High capacity
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Extremely fast decay
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Separate systems for different sensory modalities

 Properties
 rapid access (about 35 milliseconds per item)
 limited capacity (7+/- 2 chunks; George Miller, 1956 )
 fast decay, about 12 seconds (longer if rehearsed or elaborated)

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Increasing your STM span
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Chunking
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Grouping information together into larger units
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I’ll read a few more lists of words for you to recall
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Barn snow tree car rock book key plant dress cup slide lamp
Dog cat mouse shoe sock toe couch pillow blanket table desk chair
Down flowers the by with chased yellow several girls a river boy.
A boy chased several girls with yellow flowers down by the river.
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Notice that the previous two are the same words, but the syntax allows for grouping into meaningful ‘ chunks ’

 Properties
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Capacity: Unlimited?
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Duration: Decay/interference, retrieval difficulty
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Organization
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Multiple subsystems for type of memory
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Associative networks

Organization
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This theory suggests that there are different memory components, each storing different kinds of information.
Declarative
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Episodic - memories about events
Semantic - knowledge of facts
Procedural - memories about how to do things (e.g., the thing that makes you improve at riding a bike with practice).
The Multiple Memory
Stores Theory
Declarative
 episodic  semantic
Procedural

Organization
 How is semantic memory structured?
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Networks

Attention
“ Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.
Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence.
It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others…”
William James (1890)
However Britt Anderson recently writes:
“ There is no such thing as attention ”
(Frontiers in Psychology, 2011).

Attention
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Information bottleneck. There is so much info, only some is let through, while the rest is filtered out
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Early selection (e.g., Broadbent, 1958, Triesman, 1964)
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Late filters (Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963)
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Everything gets in, bottleneck comes at response level (can only respond to limited number of things)
Cocktail party effect , dichotic listening

Attention
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Only have so much ‘ energy ’ to make things go, so need to divide it and allocate it to processes
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Single pool (e.g., Kahneman, 1973)
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Central bank of resources available to all tasks that need it
Multiple pools (e.g., Navon & Gopher, 1979)
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Several banks of specialized resources – divided up in terms of input/output modalities, stages of info processing
(perception, memory, response output)
Dual task experiments

Attention
 Attention is used to ‘ glue ’ features together
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Feature integration theory & Visual search exps
Where’s Waldo Find the X
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O
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O
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X
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Pop out
Slow search

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Example :
Letter Recognition - How do we recognize a group of lines and curves as letters?
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Mechanisms
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Template matching
Feature detection and integration
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Information Flow
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Top-down vs. Bottom-up
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Modular vs. Interactive
Automatic vs. Controlled processing

A Feature Detection based theory
Selfridge ’ s Pandemonium system, 1959

 Terms come from computer science
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Bottom up (data driven) relies upon evidence that is physically present, building larger units based on smaller ones
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Top down (knowledge driven, context), using higherlevel information to support lower-level processes
E FROG
T E
C T

Interactive Activation Model (AIM)
Previous models posed a bottom-up flow of information (from features to letters to words).
IAM also poses a top-down flows of information
Nodes:
• (visual) feature
• (positional) letter McClelland and Rumelhart, (1981)
• word detectors
• Inhibitory and excitatory connections between them.

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Controlled processes
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Require resources
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Under some volitional direction
Slow, effortful
Automatic processes
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Require little attention
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Obligatory
Fast

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Psycholinguistic view
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Language and cognition are inextricably linked
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Notice that almost all of the experiment demonstrations involved language elements as stimuli