PSYC2001

Cognitive Psychology
Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience
E. Bruce Goldstein (4th Edition)

Visiting Lecturer: Mariyam Nashaya Hassan

Villa College
Agenda
● Discussion of Exam Format
● Discussion of Tutorials
● Student Presentation (Hanaan/ Nazeeh)
● Attendance
● Lecture/ Activity
Exam Format
The structure of the exam paper will be as follows:
Part A
4 questions - short answers (knowledge level) - students have to answer all questions (5 marks each)

Part B
3 questions - application level and higher-level questions
Students are required to answer only two questions - (20 marks each)
Sub parts 10 marks, 10 marks...etc - have 2 parts minimum

Part C - essay type - word limit (600 - 750 words roughly)

2 essay questions - Students are required to answer only one question (20 marks)

Exam paper - Total out of 80 marks

Important topics will be discussed on 29.04.2024

Tutorial Week 09

What are some differences between imagery and perception? What have most
psychologists concluded about the connection between imagery and perception?
Tutorial Week 10

● Semantic Network Approach- Knowledge

What is the basic idea behind the semantic network approach? What is the goal of this
approach, and how did the network created by Collins and Quillian accomplish this goal?
Tutorial Week 11

● Procedural memory- Long -Term Memory

What is procedural memory? Describe the mirror drawing experiment and other examples
from the chapter. Why is procedural memory considered a form of implicit memory?
Student Presentation time!

● Nazeeh and Hanaan

Note: There will be no student presentation next week due to assignment due dates.
Attendances

● Tutorial Attendance
● Class Attendance
Language
Chapter 11
What is
What is Language?
▪ Language: a system of communication using sounds or symbols
▪ Enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.
The Creativity of Human Language
▪ Human language can be distinguished from animal communication by its
creativity, hierarchical structure, governing rules, and universality.

▪ Hierarchical System: Components that can be combined to form larger

units

▪ Governed by rules: Specific ways components can be arranged

The Universality of Human Language
▪Deaf children invent sign language that is all their own
▪ All humans with normal capacities develop a language and learn to
follow its complex rules
▪ Language is universal across cultures
▪ Language development is universal across cultures
▪ Languages are “unique but the same”
▪ Different words, sounds, and rules
▪ All have nouns, verbs, negatives, questions, past/present tense
The Creativity of Human Language
▪Language provides a way of arranging a sequence of
signals
▪ Language makes it possible to create new and unique
sentences because it has a structure that is
▪ hierarchical
▪ governed by rules
In Cognitive Psychology
 Studying Language
● Paul Broca (1861) and Carl Wernicke (1874) identified areas in the frontal
and temporal lobes that are involved in understanding and producing
language.
● Modern research in the psychology of language blossomed in the 1950s
and 1960s, with the advent of the cognitive revolution.
● In 1957 B. F. Skinner, the main proponent of behaviorism, published a book
called Verbal Behavior in which he proposed that language is learned through
reinforcement.
● In 1957 linguist Noam Chomsky published a book titled Syntactic Structures in
which he proposed that human language is coded in the genes.
● Underlying basis of all language is similar.
● Children produces sentences that have never heard and that they have never
been reinforced.
● One of the central events in the cognitive revolution was Chomsky’s critique
of Skinner’s behaviorist analysis of language in 1959.
Psycholinguistics
 Psycholinguists
Psycholinguists: discover psychological process by which humans acquire and process language

The four major concerns of psycholinguistics:

1.Comprehension: How do people understand spoken and written language? This includes how people
process language sounds; how they understand words, sentences, and stories expressed in writing,
speech, or sign language; and how people have conversations with one another.
2.Speech production: How do people produce language? This includes the physical processes of
speech production and the mental processes that occur as a person creates speech.

3.Representation: How is language represented in the mind and in the brain? This includes how people
group words together into phrases and make connections between different parts of a story, as well as
how these processes are related to the activation of the brain

4.Acquisition: How do people learn language? This includes not only how children learn language, but
also how people learn additional languages, either as children or later in life.
 4 Levels of Analysis

Phonology Syntax Semantics Pragmatics

sounds structure meaning use

 Phonology

Sound resulting from specific

coordination of muscle movements
of face, mouth, and throat
 Linguistic Units
● Sentence - “The moderators talked to the players”

● Phrase - “The moderators – talked to the players”

● Word - “The”, etc.

● Morpheme; smallest language units adding meaning

○ “The -moderator –s – talk –ed”, etc.
○ Morphemes are the smallest units of language that have a definable meaning or a
grammatical function

● Phoneme; units of sound. (40 in English)

○ A phoneme is the shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a
word.
Words
 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
 Complications in Understanding Words
● Word Frequency Effect
● We respond faster to high-frequency words
● Rayner and Duffy (1986) fixation and gaze times
● Eye movements while reading
● Look at low-frequency words longer

Water
Motet a short piece of sacred choral music.
 Complications in Understanding Words
● Variable Word Pronunciation
● “Didjoo?” “Gonna”
● Use context to understand words with unfamiliar pronunciations.
● Speech Segmentation
● Perception of individual words even though there are no silences
between spoken words
● Context
● Understanding of meaning, sound and syntactic rules
● Statistical learning
 Speech Perception
•Where does one phoneme end and the other begin?
•No real gap between the sounds in a sentence, illusion of pauses!

It was found that the * e e l was on the shoe.

It was found that the * e e l was on the orange.

Phonemic restoration effect (Warren & Warren, 1970)

Participants listened to a sentence which contained a word from which a
phoneme was deleted and replaced with another noise (e.g., a cough)
Filling in sounds -, using context as a cue
 Speech Perception
•This “filling in” of the missing phoneme based on the context produced by
the sentence and the portion of the word that was presented is an example
of top-down processing.

•Phonemic restoration effect can be influenced by the meaning of the

words that follow the missing phoneme.
 Understanding Ambiguous Words
• Lexical Ambiguity: Words can often have
more than one meaning (Bug)

• When ambiguous words appear in a

sentence, we usually use the context of the
sentence to determine which definition
applies.

• Context often clears up ambiguity so rapidly

that we are not aware of its existence.
 Understanding Words
•The word superiority effect refers to the
finding that letters are easier to recognize
when they are contained in a word than
when they appear alone or are contained in a
non word.
•Letters presented visually are easier to
recognize when in a word.
•Letters are affected by their surroundings
Sentences
 Understanding Sentences
● Semantics: meanings of words and sentences
● Syntax: specifies the rules for combining words into sentences
● Parsing: mentally groups the words into phrases
● Helps listener create meaning
 Syntax
•Ordering of words and phrases according to rules

Specifies the relationship between the words of a sentence

Phrase Structure
“Jack is reading a book” S-V–O

75% of the world’s languages use S-V-O word order exceptions: Japanese
S-O-V, Welsh &
Arabic? Dhivehi?
V-S-O
 Semantics
•The Meaning in Language

Morphemes (smallest unit of language that

has meaning)
trees = tree + -s
free morphemes: Flower, Hat, happy
bound morphemes: un- happy, -s
(prefixes and suffixes)

Understanding of sentences-
semantics rather than syntax
 Parsing
— Syntax ignores meaning.
— Chomsky notes ambiguity in language.

“The boy saw the statue in the park with the telescope”
“Flying planes can be dangerous”
“They are cooking apples”
 Parsing
• Parsing: The grouping of words into phrases
(Central process for determining meaning of a
sentence)

• Grouping into phrases is a major determinant of

the meaning of a sentence. This process has been
studied by using ambiguous sentences.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A-FDN7-gyo
 Parsing
•Put the apple on the towel into the box

Two approaches to deal with ambiguity:

• Brute force: Try all solutions.

• Heuristics: Make a guess and go with it.

 Parsing
•Usually, syntax and semantics work together
•Sentences are often ambiguous because parsing is ambiguous
•Often, once syntax is clear, semantics is clear
 What guides Parsing?
Morphemes signal syntactic role (Bever,
1970) “He quickly….”
The extra linguistic context.

Rise and fall of speech, intonation and pauses (prosody)

Pragmatic Assumptions
“What happened to the roast beef?” “The dog looks
happy”
Language Production
 Language Production
Language area (left frontal brain)

Broca's area: associated with language production

Wernicke's area: associated with language comprehension

Neurological Disorder - Aphasia:

Language deficit or difficulty, due to physical damage, infections or tumors or
birth defects
 Broca's Aphasia
Ability to understand language but impaired ability to speak coherently
Coast Guard story (Gardner, 1975):
E: Why are you in the hospital?
P: [Points to paralyzed arm] Arm no good. [Points to mouth] Speech...can't
say...talk, you see.
E: What happened to make you lose speech?
P: Head, fall, Jesus Christ, me no good, str, str...oh Jesus...stroke.
E: Could you tell me what you have been doing in the hospital?
P: Yes, sure. Me go, er, uh, speech...two times...read...wr...ripe, er, rike, er,
write...practice...get-ting better.
 Wernicke's Aphasia
Inability to comprehend language and to produce meaningful discourse
⚫Gardiner, 1975:
“Boy, I'm sweating, I'm awful nervous, you know, once in a while I get
caught up. I can't mention the tarripoi, a month ago, quite a little, I've
done a lot well, I impose a lot, while on the other hand, you know what I
mean, I have to run around, look it over, trebin and all that sort of stuff.

Make up words to substitute deficit

 Syntax and Semantics
• Semantics without syntax
– If you wants now million dollars, “give it to me” say.
– Broca’s aphasia: halted, contentful speech

● Syntax without semantics

– Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
– Wernicke’s aphasia: flowing, meaningless speech
 Pragmatics
The social rules that underlie language use

- Rules of conduct for polite conversations

- Effective discourse

We are sensitized to violations of conversational rules

 Class Activity
Count from 1 to 3 as I point to you.
 Class Activity
Group 1: Parsing (Find phrases with ambiguity in the local
language)
Group 2: Pragmatics (What are the pragmatics in our language)
Group 3: Creativity and universality of language (Apply these
concepts to our language)