PSYC 310 1st Edition Lecture 17Outline of Last Lecture I. ImageryII. Spatial or Propositional?III. Interactions of Imagery & PerceptionIV. Imagery & the BrainOutline of Current Lecture I. The Universality of LanguageII. Studying Language in Cognitive PsychologyIII. Perceiving and Understanding WordsIV. Understanding SentencesCurrent LectureI. The Universality of Languagea. Deaf children invent sign languageb. All cultures have a languagec. Language development is similar across culturesd. Languages are “unique but the same”i. Different words, sounds and rulesii. All have nouns, verbs, negatives, questions, past/present tenseII. Studying Language in Cognitive Psychologya. B.F. Skinner (1957) Verbal Behaviori. Social consequences (praise) can make a behavior more likely in the future (reinforcement)ii. Language learned through reinforcement1. Words pronunciations and meanings, grammar rules, etc.b. Noam Chomsky (1957) Syntactic Structuresi. Human language coded in the genesii. Underlying basis of all language is similarc. Chomsky’s Response to Skinner’s Verbal Behaviori. Children produce sentences they have never heard and that have never been reinforcedThese notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor’s lecture. GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes, not as a substitute.ii. Said reinforcement can’t account for thisd. Behaviorists’ responsei. Chomsky focused too much on the form of speech and did not understand that abstract rule following can also be reinforcede. Cognitive Psychologists are not satisfied with the behaviorist account of languagef. Psycholinguistics: try to discover psychological process by which humans acquire and process languagei. Comprehensionii. Speech Productioniii. Representationiv. AcquisitionIII. Perceiving and Understanding Wordsa. Lexicon: all words a person understandsb. Phoneme: shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of the wordi. Sounds, not lettersii. This can vary by culturec. Morphemes: smallest unit of language that has meaning or grammatical functioni. Could be a word or part of a word (like “s”)1. E.g. dogs, cats, tables2. E.g. Utilitarianism, Utilit|arian|ismd. Phonemic restoration effecti. “Fill in” missing phonemes based on context of sentence and portion of word presentede. Speech segmentation: perceiving individual words in a constant flow of speechi. Contextii. Understanding of meaningiii. Understanding of sound and syntactic rulesiv. Statistical learning1. Which combination and sequences are more likely to occur?v. Lexical decision task1. Read a list of words and non-words silently2. Say “yes” when you read a wordvi. Word Frequency Effect1. Frequency=rate of use in our language2. Respond more rapidly to high frequency wordsvii. Eye movements while reading1. Look at low-frequency words longerviii. Context Effects1. Attempt to figure out what a sentence means as we read itix. Lexical Ambiguity1. Words have more than one meaning2. Context clears up ambiguity after all meanings of a word have been briefly accessedx. Lexical priming1. Presentation of a word primes all meanings of that worda. E.g. bug (insect and spying device)2. RT in lexical decision task faster for words related to the priming wordIV. Understanding Sentencesa. Components of language are not processed in isolationb. Semantics: meanings of words and sentencesc. Syntax: rules for combining words into sentencesd. Event-related potential and brain imaging studies have shown syntax and semantics are associated with different mechanismse. Parsing: mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrasesf. Syntactic ambiguity: more than one possible structure, more than one meaningg. Syntax-first approach to parsingi. Grammatical structure of sentence determines parsing1. Semantics can re-arrange parsing if necessaryii. Late closure: parser assumes new word is part of the current phraseiii. Garden-path model1. “He told her children are noisy.”h. Interactionist approach to parsingi. Semantics influence processing as one reads a sentenceii. Some sentences with syntactic ambiguity are never misunderstoodi. Tannenhaus and coworkers (1995)i. Eye movements change when information suggests revision of interpretation of sentence is necessaryii. Syntactic and semantic information used simultaneously1. “Put the apple on the towel into the