Cognitive Psychology: Language

Dr Jinger Pan
Language
• What is a language?
• How do we understand words, sentences, and text?
What is a language
• Langauge is a system of communication using sounds or symbols
that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and
experiences.
• Hierarchical structure
▫ Components that can be combined to form larger units (e.g.,
words  phrases  sentences)
• Governed by rules
▫ Specific ways components can be arranged
The Universality of Language
▫ All humans with normal capacities develop a language and learn to
follow its complex rules
▫ People with hearing deficits use sign languages
▫ 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
Studying Language in Cognitive Psychology
Psycholinguistics: discover psychological processes by which
humans acquire and process language.
▫ Acquisition: how do children acquire language?
▫ Speech production: how do people produce language?
▫ Representation: how is a language represented in the mind?
▫ Comprehension: how do we understand spoken and written
language?
Studying Language in Cognitive Psychology
• Components of language are not processed in isolation
• Understanding sentences involves more than just putting
together the meanings of words
• Sentences, like words, can have more than one meaning, and
this meaning is determined both by
▫ the context in which the sentence occurs
▫ our previous experience with our language
Studying Language in Cognitive Psychology
language

Phonology Morphology Semantics Syntax Pragmatics

(sounds) (words) (meaning) (sentences) (context)
Phonology
• Phonology is the study of the sounds of human speech

• Phonemes are the smallest units of speech sound.

• Note that because phonemes refer to sounds, they are not the
same as letters, which can have a number of different sounds
▫ "e" in "we" and "wet', and "e" in "some".
▫ “c” in “cat” and “k” in “kangaroo”
▫ “f” in “face” and “ph” in “photo”
Morphology
• Morphology is the study of word structure/word formation
• A morpheme is the smallest unit of language that has meaning or
grammatical function.
▫ Example 1: keyboard – 2 morphemes (key + board)
▫ Example 2: tables – 2 morphemes (table +s)
Lexicon & Lexical Semantics
• Semantics: meaning of words and sentences

▫ Lexicon: all words a person understands

▫ Lexical semantics: the meaning of words
– Each word has one or more meanings
– e.g., bank, bug

▫ Understanding sentence
 The pizza is too hot to eat/drink/cry.
Syntax
• Syntax is the system of rules specifying how words are combined
in sentences.
▫ Examples:
 English is a SVO language.
 Subject Verb Object
 The cat eats the mouse.

 Korean is a SOV language.

 Subject Object Verb
Pragmatics
• Interpretation of speaker meaning.
▫ Mary says to Andy: Please close the windows.
▫ If it is noisy outside, Andy interprets Mary’s speech as:
 it is noisy outside, please close the windows so as to keep the room quite.
▫ If it is windy outside, Andy interprets Mary’s speech as:
 it is windy outside, please close the windows so as to keep the room warm.
• She hasn't showered.
▫ She has never showered. / She hasn’t showered today.
• He is so tired that he could sleep for days.
▫ Could he really sleep for days?
Understanding Words
• Phonemic Restoration Effect
▫ “Fill in” missing phonemes based on context of sentence and
portion of word presented
▫ The role of meaning in perceiving sound and letters

• Richard Warren (1970)

▫ A sound stimulus: "The state governors met with their respective
legislatures convening in the capital city.”
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CJDEMj7jdw
▫ No participant noticed that the /s/ in legislatures was missing
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLPQZgYMJ7Q
Understanding Words
• Frequency, word length, word predictability
• We respond faster to high-frequency, short (or visually less complex) and
predictable words as compared to low-frequency, long (or visually more
complex), and unpredictable words.
• Evidence from eye movement
• Frequency (Inhoff & Rayner, 1986; Rayner & Duffy, 1986)
• The slow waltz/music captured their attention.
• Word length (Pan et al., 2014; Kliegl et al., 2004)
• A beautiful butterfly/bird is hanging onto a branch.
• Predictability (Kliegl et al., 2004)
 The cat that was chasing the mouse/horse was Katy’s cat.
Understanding Words
• Lexical ambiguity
▫ Words have more than one meaning, e.g. bank, bug
▫ All meanings of words are activated in the beginning
▫ Context clears up ambiguity after all meanings of a word have been
briefly accessed
 https://psych.hanover.edu/JavaTest/CLE/C
ognition_js/exp/lexicalDecision.html
• Priming paradigm
▫ Prime – Target
▫ Bread – Doctor (Unrelated)
▫ Nurse – Doctor (Related)
▫ Bread – Citxge (Filler)
▫ Nurse – Citxge (Filler)

bread-doctor
nurse-doctor

If the second word (target) is a

word, press z, if it is a nonword,
press m
• Positive priming: shorter RT on the target word (e.g., doctor) in
related (e.g., nurse) condition than unrelated (e.g., bread)
condition

• Negative priming: longer RT on the target word (e.g., doctor) in

related (e.g., nurse) condition than in unrelated (e.g., bread)
condition
 ▫ Lexical priming (Tanenhaus et al., 1979)

0 / 200ms delay
Prime (hear) Probe (read out)
Cond 1: She held a rose (noun) Rose can mean:
A type of flowers (Cond 1)
Cond 2: They all rose (verb)
Flower (noun) The past tense of rise (Cond 2)
Cond 3: She held a post (noun)
Cond 4: They all touch (verb) Context clears up
Activates both meanings the ambiguity
Priming effect:
0 delay
Cond 1 (e.g., 220 ms) – Cond 3 (e.g., 258 ms)
Cond 2 (e.g., 240 ms) – Cond 4 (e.g., 260 ms)

200 ms delay
Cond 1 (e.g., 240 ms) – Cond 3 (e.g., 265 ms)
Cond 2 (e.g., 280 ms) – Cond 4 (e.g., 270 ms)
Understanding Sentences
• Garden Path Sentences: Sentences that begin by appearing to mean one thing,
but then end up meaning something else

• Temporary Ambiguity
▫ Garden path sentences illustrate temporary ambiguity, because the initial
words of the sentence are ambiguous – they can lead to more than one
meaning – but the meaning is made clear by the end of the sentence.
 As the woman edited the magazine about fishing amused all the reporters.

▫ Parsing: how meaning is created by grouping of words into phrases

Understanding Sentences
• Syntax-first approach to parsing

• Proposed by Lynn Frazier (1979, 1987), states that as people read a

sentence, their grouping of words into phrases is governed by a
number of rules that based on syntax. If, along the way, readers
realize there is something wrong with their parsing, then they take
other information into account in order to reinterpret the sentence.

• The principle of late closure states that when a person encounters a

new word, the person’s parsing mechanism assumes that this word is
part of the current phrase.
• As the woman edited the magazine about fishing amused all the
reporters.

• According to late closure, readers would first interpret the magazine

as the object of the verb edited (so far so good). They would only
reanalyze when they encounter the verb amused. Late closure has
led us astray.

• Although it may seem strange that the language system would use a
rule that leads to errors, it turns out that late closure is useful
because it often leads to the correct parsing.

• Try this sentence: After the musician played the piano was wheeled
of the stage.
Understanding Sentences
• Constraint-based approach to parsing

• In addition to syntax, information contained in the words and in

the context within which a sentence occurs is used to make
predictions about how sentence should be parsed. (Kuperberg &
Jaeger, 2015).
• Influence of word meaning

▫ The dog buried in the sand was hidden.

▫ The tresure buried in the sand was hidden.
• Influence of story context (Thomas & Bever, 1970)

▫ The horse raced past the barn fell.

▫ There were two jockeys who decided to race their horses. One
raced his horse along the path that went past the garden. The other
raced his horse along the path that went past the barn. The horse
raced past the barn fell.
• Influence from scene context (Tanenhaus et al., 1995)

▫ Visual world paradigm: participants' eye movements to objects or

pictures in the visual workspace are recorded via an eye tracker as the
participant produces or comprehends a spoken language describing the
concurrent visual world

▫ Place the apple on the towel in the box.

The first part of the sentence resulted in two possible meanings:

▫ Put the apple on the towel

1. Referring to the position of the apple
2. Referring to the action that moves the apple to another place
Place the apple on the towel in the box (ambiguous)
Move the apple that’s on the towel to the box (unambiguous)
Place the apple on the towel in the box (ambiguous)
Place the apple that’s on the towel in the box (unambiguous)
Understanding of Text
• Use the relationships between sentences to create a coherent,
understandable story.

• As people read or hear a story, they create a situation model,

which simulates the perceptual and motor characteristics of the
objects and actions in a story.
▫ The runner jumped over the hurdel
 Create images of people, location, events
 • Stanfield & Zwaan (2001)

a1 He hammered the nail into the wall

a2 He hammered the nail onto the floor
b1 The ranger saw the eagle in the sky
b2 The ranger saw the eagle in the nest.
Additional learning materials
• Bilingual Brain Boost: https://neurosciencenews.com/bilingual-
memory-prediction-23836/

• The psycholinguistics of bilingualism - simultaneous language

acquisition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8XAVaZ3rOk&ab_channel=Marti
nHilpert

• Re-imagining our theories of language:

https://news.mit.edu/2023/re-imagining-our-theories-of-language-
0922
Readings
• Goldstein, E. B. (2019). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting mind,
research and everyday experience (5th ed.). Cengage Learning.
• Chapter 11