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Language Cognitive Psychology

This document discusses key aspects of language and cognition, including: 1) It defines language and its six key properties, and examines views of speech perception. 2) It outlines objectives related to sentence structure, meaning, and reading difficulties. 3) It describes the basic components of language including words, sentences, meaning, and discourse. 4) It analyzes reading processes and challenges like dyslexia, examining perception, comprehension, and strategies to improve reading.

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Rica Abesamis
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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
200 views28 pages

Language Cognitive Psychology

This document discusses key aspects of language and cognition, including: 1) It defines language and its six key properties, and examines views of speech perception. 2) It outlines objectives related to sentence structure, meaning, and reading difficulties. 3) It describes the basic components of language including words, sentences, meaning, and discourse. 4) It analyzes reading processes and challenges like dyslexia, examining perception, comprehension, and strategies to improve reading.

Uploaded by

Rica Abesamis
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Group 1

Language
Cognitive Psychology
Language
This lecture aims to discuss what is language,
language comprehension, reading and understanding
conversations and essays thru discourse. It
describes the six key properties of language and
explains why do some view speech perception to be
special, whereas others consider speech perception
to be ordinary.
Objectives
The students are expected to:
○ Compare speech-is-ordinary and speech-is-special views,
mainly the categorical perception and phonemic
restoration.
○ Discuss how do phrase-structure diagrams reveal the
alternative meanings of ambiguous sentences.
○ Identify the transformation rules that govern the changing
of one sentence structure to another.
○ Develop practical suggestion that they can recommend to
make reading easier for someone who is having difficulty
reading.
What is Language?
Language is the use of an organized means of
combining words in order to communicate with those
around us. It also makes it possible to think about things
and processes we currently cannot see, hear, feel,
touch, or smell. These things include ideas that may not
have any tangible form.
What is Language?
Even so, not all communication—exchange of thoughts
and feelings—is through language. Communication
encompasses other aspects—nonverbal communication, such
as gestures or facial expressions, can be used to embellish or
to indicate.

Psycholinguistics is the psychology of our language as it


interacts with the human mind.
Properties of Language
Languages can be strikingly different, but they all have
some commonalities (Brown, 1965; Clark & Clark, 1977;
Glucksberg & Danks, 1975). No matter what language you
speak, language is:
1. Communicative
2. Arbitrarily Symbolic
3. Regularly Constructed
4. Structured at Multiple Levels
5. Generative Productive
6. Dynamic
The Basic Components of Words
Language can be broken down into many smaller units. The
smallest unit of speech sound is the phone, which is simply a
single vocal sound.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of speech sound that can be
used to distinguish one utterance in a given language from
another.
At the next level of the hierarchy after the phoneme is the
morpheme—the smallest unit of meaning within a particular
language.
The Basic Components of Words
Content morphemes are the words that convey the bulk of
the meaning of a language.
Function morphemes add detail and nuance to the meaning
of the content morphemes or help the content morphemes fit the
grammatical context.
The lexicon is the entire set of morphemes in a given
language or in a given person’s linguistic repertoire.
The Basic Components of Sentences
Syntax refers to the way in which we put words together to
form sentences.
A sentence comprises at least two parts.
The first is a noun phrase, which contains at least one noun
(often the subject of the sentence) and includes all the relevant
descriptors of the noun (like “big” or “fast”).
The second is a verb phrase (predicate), which contains at
least one verb and whatever the verb acts on, if anything.
The Basic Components of Sentences
Understanding the Meaning of Words,
Sentences, and Larger Text Units
Semantics is the study of meaning in a language.
Discourse encompasses language use at the level
beyond the sentence, such as in conversation,
paragraphs, stories, chapters, and entire works of
literature.
Understanding the Meaning of Words,
Sentences, and Larger Text Units
Speech sounds are very variable, but even if a word
sounds different every time, we hear it, we still need to be able
to figure out what word it is. What makes it even more
complicated is that often we pronounce more than one sound
at the same time. This is called coarticulation.
The View of Speech Perception as Ordinary
One approach to speech perception suggests that when
we perceive speech, we use the same processes as when we
perceive other sounds like the crowing of a rooster. These
kinds of theories emphasize either template-matching or
feature-detection processes.
● Phonetic Refinement Theory (Pisoni et al., 1985)
● TRACE Model (McClelland & Elman, 1986; Mirman et al.,
2008)
The View of Speech Perception as Ordinary
The View of Speech Perception as Special
One phenomenon in speech perception that led to the
notion of specialization was the finding of categorical
perception—discontinuous categories of speech sounds.
According to the motor theory, we use the movements of
the speaker’s vocal tract to perceive what he says.
Understanding Meaning: Semantics
In semantics, denotation is the strict dictionary
definition of a word.
Connotation is a word’s emotional overtones,
presuppositions, and other non-explicit meanings.
Taken together, denotation and connotation form the
meaning of a word.
Understanding Meaning: Semantics
Understanding Sentences: Syntax
Syntax is the systematic way in which words can be
combined and sequenced to make meaningful phrases
and sentences (Carroll, 1986).
Specifically, grammar is the study of language in
terms of noticing regular patterns.
Understanding Meaning: Semantics
Syntactical Priming
Just as we show semantic priming of word meanings in
memory (that is, we react faster to words that are related in
meaning to a prior presented word), we show syntactical
priming of sentence structures.
In other words, we spontaneously tend to use syntactical
structures and read faster sentences that parallel the
structures of sentences we have just heard (Bock, 1990;
Bock, Loebell, & Morey, 1992; Sturt et al., 2010).
Understanding Meaning: Semantics
Speech Errors
Other evidence of our uncanny aptitude for syntax
is shown in the speech errors we produce.
Analyzing Sentences: Phrase-Structure
Grammar
When we compose sentences, we seem to analyze and
divide them into functional components. This process is called
parsing.
A New Approach to Syntax: Transformational Grammar
In 1957, Noam Chomsky revolutionized the study of
syntax. He suggested that to understand syntax, we must
observe not only the interrelationships among phrases within
sentences.
Analyzing Sentences: Phrase-Structure
Grammar
Relationships between Syntactical and Lexical Structures
● The syntactical category of the item, such as noun versus
verb;
● The appropriate syntactical contexts in which the particular
morpheme may be used, such as pronouns as subjects
versus as direct objects; and
● Any idiosyncratic information about the syntactical uses of
the morpheme, such as the treatment of irregular verbs.
When Reading Is a Problem — Dyslexia?
People who have dyslexia—difficulty in deciphering, reading, and
comprehending text—can suffer greatly in a society that puts a high
premium on fluent reading (Sternberg & Spear-Swerling, 1999;
Terras et al., 2009).
Perceptual Issues in Reading
When you are reading, you somehow manage to perceive the
correct letter when it is presented in a wide array of typestyles and
typefaces.
When learning to read, novice readers must come to master two
basic kinds of processes: lexical processes and comprehension
processes.
Lexical Processes in Reading
Lexical processes are used to identify letters and words.
They also activate relevant information in memory about
these words.
Fixations and Reading Speed
When we read, our eyes do not move smoothly along a
page or even along a line of text. Rather, our eyes move in
saccades—rapid sequential movements—as they fixate on
successive clumps of text.
Lexical Processes in Reading
Lexical Access
An important aspect of reading is lexical access—the
identification of a word that allows us to gain access to the
meaning of the word from memory.
Intelligence and Lexical-Access Speed
Some investigations on information processing and
intelligence have focused on lexical-access speed—the speed
with which we can retrieve information about words (e.g., letter
names) stored in our long-term memories (Hunt, 1978).
Understanding Conversations and Essays:
Discourse
Discourse involves units of language larger than
individual sentences—in conversations, lectures,
stories, essays, and even textbooks (Di Eugenio, 2003).
Comprehending Known Words: Retrieving
Word Meaning from Memory
Semantic encoding is the process by which we
translate sensory information (that is, the written words
we see) into a meaningful representation.
Comprehending Unknown Words: Deriving Word
Meanings from Context
Using context cues, we formulate the meaning based on
the existing information stored in memory.
Comprehending Ideas: Propositional
Representations
People extract the fundamental idea from groups of words and
store them in a simplified representational form in working memory
(Kintsch)
● Representational Form: Propositions
● Propositions that are thematically central to the understanding
of a text (macro proposition) will remain in working memory
longer than propositions that are irrelevant to the theme
● Thematic Structure = Macrostructure
Comprehending Ideas: Propositional
Representations
Comprehending Text Based on Context and Point of View
● Varying the retrieval situations or cues can cause different details to be
remembered
Representing the Text in Mental Models
● Creation of a mental representations that contains the main elements of a text
● Elements are simpler and more concrete than the text itself
● To form mental models one must make at least tentative inferences about what is
meant
● Passages of text that lead to a single mental models are easier to comprehend
than are passages that may lead to multiple mental models
Bridging Inference = an interference a reader/listener makes when a sentence seems
not to follow directly from the sentence preceding it.
Group 1

Language
Any Questions?

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