LANGUAGE

LANGUAGE
LANGUAGE
LANGUAGE
LANGUAGE
GROUP 9
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
- is the psychology of our language as it
interacts with the human mind. It considers
both production and comprehension of
language (Gernsbacher & Kaschak, 2003a,
2003b; Wheeldon, Meyer, & Smith, 2003).
 What is
Language?
is the organized means of
combining words to
communicate with those
around us.

As Helen Keller demonstrated,

the words we use may be
written, spoken, or otherwise
signed (e.g., via American Sign
Language [ASL]).
 Properties of
Language
1. COMMUNICATIVE

Language permits us to communicate with

one or more people who share our
language.

2. ARBITATRILY SYMBOLIC

Language creates an arbitrary relationship

between a symbol and what it represents:
an idea, a thing, a process, a relationship, or
a description.
 Properties of Language

3. REGULARLY STRUCTURED

Language has a structure; only particularly

patterned arrangements of symbols have
meaning, and different arrangements yield
different meanings.

Principle of Conventionality
Principle of Contrast
Properties of Language

4. STRUCTURED AT MULTIPLE LEVELS

Thee structure of language can be

analyzed at more than one level (e.g., in
sounds, meaning units, words, and phrases).

Sounds
Words
Sentences
Larger Units of Language
(e.g, paragraph)
 Properties of Language

5. PRODUCTIVITY (GENERATIVITY)

Within the limits of a linguistic structure,

language users can produce novel
utterances. The possibilities for creating
new utterances are virtually limitless.

6. DYNAMICS

Languages constantly evolve.

 Phoneme
is the smallest unit of speech
sound that can be used to
distinguish one utterance from
another.
PHONEMICS: the study of
the particular phonemes of a
language.

PHONETICS: is the study of

how to produce or combine
speech sounds or to
represent them with written
symbols (Roca, 2003).
 the smallest unit of is the entire set of morphemes
Morphemes meaning within a Lexicon in a given language or in a given
particular language. person’s linguistic repertoire.

Sentences
Syntax A sentence at least has two parts:
refers to the way we put Noun phrase, which contains at least one
words together to form noun (like “man”) and includes all the
sentences. It plays a major relevant descriptors of the noun (like
role in our understanding of “big” or“fast”).
language. Verb phrase (predicate), which contains
at least one verb and whatever the verb
acts on (like “runs”), if anything.
Understanding words
 Speech perception
the process by which the sounds of
language are heard, interpreted, and
understood

Coarticulation
One or more phonemes begin while other
phonemes still are being produced

Speech segmentation.
the process of trying to separate the
continuous sound stream into distinct words
 there is often no pause between words, while at the
same time, there can be breaks within words. that is to
say, the recording of speech sound waves poorly
resembles what we hear.
this overlapping of speech sounds may seem to create
additional problems for perceiving speech, but
coarticulation is viewed as necessary for the effective
transmission of speech information (Liberman et al.,
1967). #us, speech perception is viewedas different
from other perceptual abilities because of both the
linguistic nature of the information and the particular
way in which information must be encoded for
effective transmission.
a spectrogram that records physical
sound patterns.
The View of Speech Perception
as Ordinary

TEMPLATE-MATCHING OR FEATURE-DETECTION
PROCESSES

Stages of neural processing

In another stage, these
In one stage, speech components are
sounds are analyzed into analyzed for patterns and
their components. matched to a prototype or
template
the speech we perceive it may differ from
the speech sounds that reach our ears:
Cognitive and contextual factors influence
our perception of the sensed signal.

For example, the

phonemic-restoration effect involves
integrating what we know with what
we hear when we perceive speech
The View of Speech Perception as Special

Categorical Perception
discontinuous categories of speech sounds

This phenomenon can be seen in the perception of

the consonant–vowel combinations ba, da, and ga.
Understanding Meaning: Semantics
Language is very diffcult to put into words.
—Voltaire
Semantic
the study of meaning in a language.

DENOTATION
CONNOTATION
the strict dictionary defnition is a word’s emotional overtones,
of a word. presuppositions, and other
nonexplicit meanings.
Understanding Sentences
 Syntax
an equally important part of the
psychology of language is the analysis
of linguistics structure. Not only words
convey meaning; the structure of
sentences does as well.

For example: "The man haunted the

lion" has a different meaning from "The
lion haunted the man".
 Grammar
- is the study of language in terms of noticing regular patterns.

Prescriptive Grammar Descriptive Grammar

-focuses on describing the
Describes when people focus on talking about
language that is used.
how language should be or ought to be used.

For example: When a doctor gives you a

prescription for medication. It often includes
directions about how you should take your
medication and what you should not do when
taking medication.
 Syntactical
Priming
Syntactic priming is the facilitation of
processing that occurs when a
sentence has the same syntactic form
as a preceding sentence. Syntactic
priming occurs reliably in studies of
language production.
 Speech
errors
-can involve entire or phonological
components within words. Word level
errors can be several subtypes,
including ; substitutions of words in the
utterance, additions of unintended
words, deletion of intended words, and
shifts in the order of intended words.

•Substitution Error example : producing

"the table is on the napkin" instead of
"the napkin is on the table".
©Jdcedit
 How do perceptual
processes interact
with the cognitive
processes of reading?
Reading
➔ is a complex process that involves,
at minimum, perception, language,
memory, thinking, and intelligence
(Adams, 1990, 1999; Garrod &
Daneman, 2003; Smith, 2004).
 Perceptual Issues in Reading

➔ A basic but important ➔ Perceive the correct ➔ Then, translate the

step in reading is the letter when it is presented letter into a sound,
activation of our ability in a wide array of creating a phonological
to recognize letters. typestyles and typefaces code (relating to sound).
—orthographic.
 Two Basic Kinds of Processes
Lexical Comprehension
Processes Processes
➔ used to identify letters ➔ used to make sense of
and words; activate relevant the text as a whole
information in memory about
these words
Fixations
➔ the point where your
eyes take a rest during the
reading process
➔ eyes move in saccades—
rapid sequential movements
—as they fixate successive
clumps of text
 Fixations in Reading
Super
califra
gilistic
expiali
Querulous!
docious
➔ Readers fixate ➔ They also fixate ➔ The last word of a
for a longer time on longer on less familiar sentence also seems to
longer words than words (e.g., querulous) receive an extra long
on shorter words. than on more familiar fixation time — “sentence
words (e.g., slay). wrap-up time.”
 Lexical Access
➔ An important aspect of reading; the
identification of a word that allows us to
retrieve the meaning of the word from
memory.
 Word-Superiority Effect
➔ Letters are read more easily
when they are embedded in words
than when they are presented
either in isolation or with letters
that do not form words.
➔ This effect is sometimes called
the Reicher-Wheeler effect.
Sentence-Superiority Effect
➔ People take about twice as long to read unrelated words as to
read words in a sentence.

➔ The sentence superiority effect is observed when the sequence is

syntactically correct (e.g., her friend dances well) compared with
ungrammatical scrambled sequences of the same words (e.g., dances
friend well her).
 Teaching How to Read

Phonics Whole-Word Whole-

Language
Approach Approach Approach
➔ Children are taught how ➔ Teaches children to ➔ Argues that words are
the letters of the alphabet recognize whole words, pieces of sentences and
sound and then progressively
without the analysis of reading should therefore
put them together to read
the sounds that make up be taught in connection
two letters together, then
three, and so on. the word. with entire sentences.
 Dyslexia
➔ The difficulty in deciphering, reading, and
comprehending text.

Impaired processes:
Phonological awareness = awareness of the
sound structure of spoken language
Phonological reading = reading words in isolation
Phonological coding = remembering strings of
phonemes that are sometimes confusing
​Lexical access = ability to retrieve phonemes
from long-term memory
Kinds of Dyslexia
Developmental Dyslexia
➔ The most well-known kind of dyslexia which refers
to the difficulty in reading that starts in childhood.

Acquired Dyslexia
➔ It is typically caused by traumatic brain damage.
 Intensive
Reading
Intensive reading is a method of
reading that is focused and in-depth. It
involves reading text carefully and
slowly, paying attention to details, and
looking up unfamiliar words and
concepts.

Intensive reading is typically used to gain

a deeper understanding of the text or to
understand a particular concept.
Reading is a
journey...
and the books are the wings that will take you
there.
Comprehending Known Words:
Retrieving Word
Meaning from Memory
 Semantic encoding - the process by which we
translate sensory information (i.e., the written
words we see) into a meaningful representation.

lexical access - we identify words

based on letter combinations

People with larger vocabularies are able to access lexical information more rapidly
than are those with smaller vocabularies (Hunt, 1978).

How to engage in Semantic Encoding:

1. the reader needs to know what a given word means.
2. Knowledge of word meanings (vocabulary) closely relates to the ability to
com prehend text.
- People who are knowledgeable about word meanings tend to be good readers
and vice versa.
3. readers simply cannot understand text well unless they know the meanings of
the component words.
Comprehending Unknown Words: Deriving Word
Meanings from Context

Larger vocabulary contributes to text comprehension is through

learningfrom context.

SEARCH FOR MEANING

1. dictionaries or teachers
2. formulate meaning
 Comprehending Ideas: Propositional
Representations
What factors in$uence our comprehension of what we read?

Walter Kintsch has developed a model of text comprehension based

on his observations:
According to the model, as we read, we try to hold as much information as
possible in working memory to understand what we read. We do not try,
however, to store the exact words we read in working memory. Rather, we
try to extract the fundamental ideas from groups of words. We then store
those fundamental ideas in a simpli"ed representational form in working
memory.
 Representational form for these fundamental ideas is the proposition.

EXAMPLE: “Penguins are birds, and penguins can fly” contains two
propositions. You can verify independently whether penguins are birds and
whether penguins can fly. In general, propositions assert either an action
(e.g., flying) or a relationship (e.g., membership of penguins in the category
of birds).
Comprehending Text Based on Context
and Point of View

What we remember from a

given passage of text depends
n our point of view.
 Representing Text in Mental
Models
Once words are semantically
encoded or their meaning is
derived from the use of
context, the reader still must
create a mental model of the
text that is being read.
THANK YOU FOR LISTENING!