Ch 5 - words
1. describe content words and function words
2. Describe priming task and semantic priming effect
3. why is the supramagrinal gyrus important ?
CONTENT WORDS - these words are what make up most of language.
They include NOUNS, VERBS and ADJECTIVES (people, places, animals, things, events, and properties of objects)
open class - they change over time, old words out and new words in
FUNCTION WORDS
-these are limited in number and stay fairly stable over time.
-make up much less of the language
-closed class
-PREPOSITIONS (of, at, in, to, from)
-DETERMINANTS (the, a, some)
, CONJUNCTIONS (and, because)
2. pair of words is presented and participant makes a lexical decision task on second word. Effect --> target words yield faster reaction when they are related
3. it might be where phonological word forms are stored
1. Describe Heritage language, societal language, dominant language, and lingua franca
2. describe 3 generation pattern
1. heritage language - spoken in immigrant's country of origin.
societal language - spoken by majority in given society
dominant language - language of political and economic power in given society
lingua franca - second language in common to all ethnic groups in given society
2. In first gen, heritage language is dominant with varying degree of fluency in L2.
In second gen, learns heritage language at home but prefers societal language, which is dominant
in 3rd gen - speaks only societal language
Describe linguistic determinism, linguistic relativity, and innatism.
Linguistic determinism - The world is perceived and organized entirely from language
Linguistic relativity - language influences perception & thought about the world
innatism - perceptual and cognitive processes are not influenced by language
1. what is lemma and lexeme
2. Describe the components of a syllable
3. Describe the photo-word inference task and the semantic interference effect & semantic facilitation effect
1. Lemma - most basic form of a word.
Lexeme - all possible forms a word can take
2. onset - initial consonant
rime - vowel (nucleus) and final consonant (coda)
3. Task: participants sees a picture and a word and names the picture and ignores the word.
Semantic interference - taxonomical relation yield slower reaction time
Semantic facilitation - thematic relations yield faster reaction times - no competiton for selection.
Describe code switching & bilingual sensitivity
A change from one language to another in one phrase.
sensitivity:
-bilingual accommodation - sensitivity to ethnic identity of interlocutor in selecting which language to use.
-receptive bilingualism - ability to understand another language without speaking it.
1. Describe color perception and focal colors
2. Sorting task
3. delayed match to sample task
1. visible light is on a spectrum but we see distinct colors (innate or learned?). languages differ in amount of basic color terms (evidence for linguistic relativity). However, languages show consitent patterns of color categorization (evidence for innatism)
2. Sort color swatched into groups - blue-green speakers agree on boundary but grue speakers disagree.
3. See color swatch, delay, match color - Grue speakers do worse on this task. Suggests the label helps our memory.
1. Describe the Chinese room argument
2. Describe the symbol grounding problem
3. Describe embodied representation
1. philosophical demonstration that meaning cannot derive solely from arbitrary symbols
2. much like the chinese room argument, AI can use understand that response A is appropriate to question B, but they don't have a semantic representation of what A or B mean, so How can a system connect those abstract symbols to real-world meaning?
3. In humans, we can place meaning to these symbols based on the perceptual and motor experience it evokes. We can understand an apple by thinking about how it looks, smells, tastes, etc. There is evidence from neuro-imaging studies - areas in brain that perceive and act overlap.
1. Describe cross-language priming in lexical decision task
2. what are translation equivalents vs inter-lingual homographs
1. L1 affects word judgments in L2 (example: Spanish - English = slow reaction times for NOCHE - which is a word in Spanish but not English
2. translation equivalents are two words in two different languages that mean the same thing (chien = dog)
interlingual homographs are words in two different languages that mean different things (false friends)
1. describe categorical perception of emotion.
2. Name the gender systems and what they are
1. cross cultural research suggests there are 6 basic facial expressions : happy, sad, fear, surprise, anger, disgust.
- people consistently match emotions to pictures
-picture naming - varys between and within cultures
-picture matching - even more disagreement.
2. Semantic gender system - classify nouns and pronouns according to their natural type (English)
Formal gender system - classify pronouns and nouns and arbtitrarily assign gender to objects. (french, spanish)
no gender system - same pronoun for all referents.
1. Describe word learning and what is involved
- S shaped
- Until 18 months word learning is slow, Vocab spurt occurs around preschool years. Some reasons for this may be that around 18 months they can master the phonology, their memory has improved, and they have increased social interactions.
-Receptive vocabulary refers to word set they understand the meaning to
-Productive vocabulary refers to the word set they can produce.
-Fast mapping - ability to learn words from very few exposures.
Referential uncertainty - no direct link between word and the object or event it refers to.
Whole object assumption - new word refers to entire object, not just part of it.
Taxonomic assumption - children seem to understand words represent concepts. So new word extends to other similar referent (assumed doggie refers to all dogs or similar animals and not just this dog)
Mutual exclusivity assumption - no 2 words mean the exact same thing (tail cant mean doggie so it must mean something about dog)
Slow mapping involves:
- learning words gradually after multiple exposures.
-Cross-sectional word learning - associating novel words and novel concepts by tracking co-occurence statistics.
-Joint attention - all participants focus attention on some object or event - reduces referential ambiguity
-Syntactic bootstrapping - use of syntactic information to infer meaning of verbs. (ing) (ed)
Affects on word learning - characteristics of word forms, word frequency, neighbourhood density, phonotactic probability
1. Explain bilingual disadvantage
&
weaker links hypothesis
Interference hypothesis
revised hierarchical model
sense model
1. smaller vocabulary, more difficulty retrieving words (tip of the tongue phenomenon). true for children and adults, no noticeable impact on daily life but measurable in lab.
weaker links - lower word frequencies in each language - split time (use each language less frequent) = less practice
Interference hypothesis - translation equivalents interfere and rarely mean the exact same thing. both languages are active at the same time - brain works harder to surpress other language.
revised model - separate lexicons for each language connected to common underlying concept.
Early in learning a second language (L2), bilinguals often:
Go from L2 → L1 → meaning
But as fluency improves, they can go L2 → meaning directly.
unbalanced bilingual priming - L1-L2 but not vice versa
sense model - Translation equivalents across languages don’t always share exact meanings (or “senses”).
bilinguals faster a translating concrete words than abstract words.
1. How do gender systems in L1 influence thinking in L2?
2. Thinking for speaking hypothesis
Paired-associate learning task - memorize unrelated word pairs (german-english - recalled patrick-apple cause apple is masc in german)
Picture description task - see picture of objects and write down words that come to mind - BRIDGE exampleClassifier
Mandarin - one pronound for grasping and separate for long slender thing JJapanese - same pronoun for both
(mandarin didnt like commercial where someone was holding a rope).
2. when we go to speak, we think in a way that our language requires us to. it doesnt constrain the way we think, but makes us think ing habitual ways of viewing the world.
1. Describe how words are stored.
2. Describe difference in young children and older children & adults in word association task
3. Network model vs spreading activation model
1. storage about words in LTM. Stored as set of phonemes (evidence from speech errors). Only lemma is stored (can generate past tense for non words - blicked, Inflectional suffix - grammar, derivational suffix - changes meaning and grammatical category - verb - noun)
Base frequency effect - frequency affects speed of recall.
MENTAL LEXICONthematic relation - based on frequency of co-occurence (dog, bone).
taxonomic relation - relationship based on category membership (dog, cat).
2. Young children - more thematic relations
Older - more taxonomic relations
3. NETWORK MODEL - mental lexicon as network of concepts connected by semantic links, hierarchical, more strict categories
SPREADING ACTIVATION MODEL - mental lexicon where activation of one node spreads to other nodes, non hierarchical, more flexible.
1. Name the brain region involved in EC, and shows greater activation in EC tasks in bilinguals
2. what is Heschl's gyrus3. Critical period hypothesis vs speech learning model
1. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
2. within auditory cortex, larger in lifelong bilinguals
3. Critical period - children have a biological advantage to learn language. greater plasticity. early life = language learning most successful
speech learning model - language learning not limited to critical period but l2 is influenced by l1.