Chapter 11 - Language

Question 1

What are the uses of human language?

Answer 1

It allows us to think and act in complex social ways.
1. Coordinate large groups
2. Transfer knowledge
3. Past consideration and future planning

Question 2

Is human language unique?

Answer 2

Most scientists agree that primates have forms of communication but they qualitatively differ from language.

Question 3

What facets is animal communication limited in?

Answer 3

1. Quantity
2. Quality
3. Structure

Question 4

What is quantity as an aspect of animal communication?

Answer 4

• Use relatively few signals
• Communication restricted to exchanging information about food sources

Question 5

What is quality as an aspect of animal communication?

Answer 5

• Communicate about their immediate environment
• Humans discuss abstract concepts and past/future events

Question 6

What is structure as an aspect of animal communication?

Answer 6

• Animal languages do not have grammar
• Humans combine words in novel ways with infinite combinations

Question 7

What is productivity/digital infinity?

Answer 7

The ability to combine words in an infinite amount of new and meaningful combinations.

Question 8

What is the naturist perspective of language acquisition?

Answer 8

Chomsky believed that we are born with the innate capacity to learn language.
- Ability to recognize that language components exist (words, syntax) from birth
- Which words and which syntax are learned through experience

Question 9

What is the nurturist perspective of language acquisition?

Answer 9

Behaviourists (Skinner) believe that language is acquired through the same mechanisms as skill learning.
- Trial and error with reinforcement for ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ language.
- Modeling other people’s language

Question 10

What is universal grammar (Chomsky)?

Answer 10

Humans have basic scaffolding for syntax, but specific details need to be learned through experience.
- Proposed linguistic abilities resulted from rapid mutations in the brain across a brief evolutionary span.

Question 11

What is FOXP2?

Answer 11

A gene that is important in human language development.
Those with mutations often have Developmental Verbal Dyspraxia.
- Affects the ability to pronounce syllables and words
- Regulates vocal communication in other animals too

Question 12

What is poverty of the stimulus?

Answer 12

The argument that children acquire complex grammatical knowledge despite receiving limited, imperfect, and ambiguous linguistic input, suggesting that some aspects of language structure must be innate.

Question 13

What is child-directed speech (CDS)?

Answer 13

A type of speak directed to children that can accelerate children’s language acquisition.
Often involves motherese, including exaggerated vowels, repetition, and a songlike cadence which can help children to begin identifying sounds.
Infants show a preference for this type of speech with increased looking times at motherese versus normal cadenced speech.

Question 14

What is the head-turn task in infants and IDS/CDS?

Answer 14

Babies are conditioned to turn their heads when they hear a change in a speech sound.
Infants whose mothers used more motherese showed better performance on the head turn task.

Question 15

What are the three basic aspects of language that are necessary to understanding speech?

Answer 15

1. Phonological
2. Lexical
3. Parsing

Question 16

What are phonemes?

Answer 16

The smallest unit of speech that distinguish one word from another.
The sounds that make up speech.

Question 17

What are morphemes?

Answer 17

Smallest meaningful units of language.
Must convey some meaning on their own or in combination with other units of speech.

Question 18

What are phonic properties?

Answer 18

The actual sounds the speaker is making, involving phonemes and morphemes.

Question 19

What is the phonemic restoration effect (Warren)?

Answer 19

Recorded a spoken sentence and then removed an individual phoneme and replaced it with a non-speech sound.

Question 20

What are mouth movements in phonological ambiguity?

Answer 20

Peoples’ mouths make characteristics movements when they speak.

Question 21

What is lip reading?

Answer 21

An auxiliary speech processing mechanism both when sound is and is not available.

Question 22

What is the McGurk effect?

Answer 22

Occurs when we view visual articulations of a phoneme while hearing auditory signals from a different phoneme.
We often hear a phoneme that is different from both visual and auditory.
Demonstrate we use more than just auditory input for language comprehension.

Question 23

What is the lexical decision task (LDT)?

Answer 23

1. A string of letters is presented.
2. Participants decide if they represent a real word or not (as fast as possible).
   (People are better at recognizing real words when they are more common.)

Question 24

What are homographs?

Answer 24

Words that are spelled the same but have multiple meanings.

Question 25

What is parsing?

Answer 25

Breaking up a sentence into its constituent parts to determine meaning.

Question 26

What is a garden-path sentence?

Answer 26

A case in which most people always derive the incorrect parsing, leading to an interpretational ‘dead end’.

Question 27

What is the syntax-first approach?

Answer 27

Parsing of a sentence is first derived based on principles of grammar alone, regardless of the meaning of words. This suggests we do not take the meaning of the words into consideration when parsing a sentence when determining which grammatical category they belong to.

Question 28

What are typical parsing behaviours (late closure)?

Answer 28

We tend to attach incoming words to the phrase we are currently processing rather than assuming they belong to a different phrase that is still coming up.

Question 29

What is prosody?

Answer 29

A speakers’ patterns of stress and intonation.

Question 30

What is punctuation as prosody?

Answer 30

Use of periods, commas, etc. to disambiguate language.

Question 31

What is discourse processing?

Answer 31

The ability to understand language that is at least several sentences long. Involves making inferences about the text itself.

Question 32

What is causal inference?

Answer 32

The assumption that something mentioned at one stage in a sequence leads to something later on.

Question 33

What is necessary inference?

Answer 33

The only way to make sense of certain phrases is based on referring to previous information.

Question 34

What is elaborative inference?

Answer 34

Information is inferred from the text even though it is not necessary to understand the text itself.

Question 35

What is online discourse processing?

Answer 35

Inferences actively being generated while people are listening to or reading a text.

Question 36

What is offline discourse processing?

Answer 36

Inference taking place in memory after initial encoding.

Question 37

What is instrumental interference?

Answer 37

The instrument or tool that is likely to be used for a task in inferred even though it is not vital to the text understanding.

Question 38

What are neurolinguistics?

Answer 38

Devoted to understanding the neural underpinnings of language.

Question 39

What are characteristics of Broca’s area?

Answer 39

Located in the frontal lobe. Essential for language production. Broca’s area is somewhat involved in language comprehension (complex sentence processing).

Question 40

What are characteristics of Wernicke’s area?

Answer 40

Located in the temporal lobe. Essential for language comprehension.

Question 41

What is the arcuate fasciculus?

Answer 41

An extensive band of fibers deep in the brain that connect them directly. Absent in many mammals and less pronounced in non-human primates.

Question 42

What is the hemispheric specialization of language production and processing?

Answer 42

Language production mainly occurs in the left hemisphere, but the right hemisphere seems to be important for higher-order language processing.

Question 43

What is linguistic relativity?

Answer 43

The specific language we speak determines the kinds of thoughts we can do and have.

Question 44

What do linguistic universalists believe?

Answer 44

Difference among languages are fairly superficial and tend to express the same basic ideas in different ways.

Question 45

What is evidence for limited linguistic relativity?

Answer 45

Languages with distinct names for colours are better at distinguishing colours