The document discusses language and its cognitive processing. It covers topics like what language is, its creativity and universality. Key theories on language from Skinner and Chomsky are outlined. Psycholinguistics aims to understand how humans acquire, comprehend and produce language. Challenges in understanding words and sentences are explored. Aphasias that interrupt language comprehension are also summarized. The production of speech in conversations follows given-new contracts and common ground.

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Chapter 11
Language

2. Only to be used with Cognitive Psychology 2nd EMEA Edition by E Bruce Goldstein & Johanna C van Hooff, ISBN
9781473774353 © Cengage Learning EMEA 2020
What Is Language?
• System of communication using sounds or
symbols.
• Express feelings, thoughts, ideas, and
experiences.

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The Creativity of Human Language
• Hierarchical system
– Components that can be combined to form larger units.
• Governed by rules
– Specific ways components can be arranged.

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The Universality of Language
• All humans with normal capacities develop a language and learn to follow its
complex rules.
• Language is universal across cultures.
• Language development is similar across cultures.
• Languages are “unique but the same”.
– Different words, sounds, and rules
– All have nouns, verbs, negatives, questions, past/present tense

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Studying Language in Cognitive Psychology
(1 of 2)
• B.F. Skinner (1957) Verbal Behavior
– Language learned through reinforcement.
• Noam Chomsky (1957) Syntactic Structures
– Human language coded in the genes.
– Children produce sentences they have never heard and that have
never been reinforced.

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Studying Language in Cognitive Psychology
(2 of 2)
• Psycholinguistics: Discover psychological process
by which humans acquire and process language:
1. Comprehension
2. Speech production
3. Representation
4. Acquisition

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Understanding Words
• Lexicon: All words a person understands.
• Semantics: The meaning of language.
• Lexical semantics: The meaning of words
– Each word has one or more meanings.

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Components of Words
• Phoneme (which refers to sound) is the smallest segment of speech that if
changed changes the meaning of the word. For example the word hut has the
phonemes h-u-t. Replace “t” with “g” and you have hug, or “h” with “b” and we
have but.
• Morphemes (which refer to meaning) are the smallest unit of language which
have a definable meaning or a grammatical function. For example the word “life”
has several phonemes but one morpheme as non of the components mean
anything other than the word in its entirety.
• But the word cellphone has two morphemes as “cell” and “phone” each
have an meaning in English.

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Complications in Understanding Words (1 of 2)
• Phonemic restoration effect
– When phonemes are perceived in speech when the sound of
the phoneme is covered up by an extraneous noise.
– Warren (1970) demonstration.
• Perceiving individual words in sentences
– “Didjoo?” “Gonna”
– Use context to understand words with unfamiliar pronunciations.

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Complications in Understanding Words (2 of 2)
• Speech segmentation
– Perception of individual words even though there are no silences
between spoken words.
– Understanding of meaning.
– Understanding of sound and syntactic rules

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Understanding Ambiguous Words
• Lexical ambiguity
– Words often have multiple meanings.
• Meaning dominance—some words are used more frequently than
others
– Biased dominance
 When words have two or more meanings with different dominance.
– Balanced dominance
 When words have two or more meanings with about the same
dominance.

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Understanding Sentences (1 of 2)
• Semantics: meanings of words and sentences.
• Syntax: rules for combining words into sentences.
• Sentences are merely strings of words in sequence.
• Parsing: mentally groups the words into phrases
– helps the listener create meaning.

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Understanding Sentences (2 of 2)
• Garden path sentences
– Sentences that begin by appearing to mean one thing,
but then end up meaning something else.
• Temporary ambiguity
– When the initial words are ambiguous, but the meaning
is made clear by the end of the sentence.

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When Understanding Sentences is Interrupted
Wernicke’s aphasia is caused by damage to Wernicke’s area of the brain. It is
characterized by notable impairment in the understanding of spoken words
and sentences. It also typically involves the production of sentences that have the
basic structure of the language spoken but that make no sense. Treatment for
patients with this type of aphasia frequently involves supporting and encouraging
non-language communication.
Broca’s aphasia is caused by damage to Broca’s area of the brain. It is
characterized by the production of agrammatical speech at the same time that
verbal comprehension ability is largely preserved.

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• Global Aphasia: the combination of highly impaired speech production and
comprehension. It is caused by lesions to both Broca’s area and Wernicke’s
area
• Anomic Aphasia: involves difficulties in naming objects or in retrieving words.
The patient may recognize an object but simply be unable to retrieve the
words that correctly identifies it.

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Understanding Text and Stories (1 of 2)
• Coherence:
– Representation of the text in one’s mind that creates
clear relations
 between parts of the text and
 between parts of the text and the story’s main topic.

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Understanding Text and Stories (2 of 2)
• Inference: Readers create information during reading not
explicitly stated in the text:
– Anaphoric: connecting objects/people
– Instrument: tools or methods
– Causal: events in one clause caused by events in previous
sentence.

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Producing Language: Conversations
• Two or more people talking together.
• Dynamic and rapid.

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Producing Speech: Conversations (1 of 2)
• Given–new contract: Speaker constructs sentences so they
include
– Given information
– New information
– “New” can then become “given” information.
• Common ground
– The speakers’ mutual knowledge, belief and assumptions.

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Producing Speech: Conversations (2 of 2)
• Syntactic coordination
– Using similar grammatical constructions.
• Syntactic priming
– Production of a specific grammatical construction by one
person increases chances other person will use that
construction.
– Reduces computational load in conversation.

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Culture, language and cognition
• Language can influence cognition.
• Sapir-Wharf hypothesis
- the nature of culture’s language can affect the way people
think.