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Note: Sa mga mag pe present po, may mga mga sentences po here na italicized. Wala po siya sa mismong presentation pero babasahin niyo siya. Tsaka kung kaya niyo pong gawan ng explanation, feel free po. Salamatt. LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND THINKING NATURE OF LANGUAGE Language- is a systematized way of putting words together in order to communicate. It enables us to interact with individuals in our immediate vicinity. It also enables us to think about processes and phenomena that are now invisible to our senses of sight, hearing, touch, and smell. These contain concepts that might not take the form of anything concrete. Communication- exchange of thoughts and feelings. Hellen Keller demonstrated, the words we use may be written, spoken, otherwise signed (e.g., via American Sign Language ASL). Psycholinguistics- is the study of the psychological effects of language on the brain. It takes into account both language use and language production. Understanding of psycholinguistics has considerably benefited from research in four fields. Four areas of study that have contributed greatly to an understanding of psycholinguistics: · Linguistics- study of language structure and change
· Neurolinguistics- study of the relationships among the brain cognition, and language. · Sociolinguistics- study of relationship between social behavior and language (Carroll, 1986; Holmes, 2013) · Computational linguistics and psycholinguistics- study of language via computational methods (Coleman, 2003; Clark, Fox, & Lapping, 2012; Sedivy, 2014)
Properties of Language
1. Communicative Language permits us to communicate with one or more people who share our language. It means that language enables us to interact and convey information with others who speak the same language. If people have a common language, they can use this as a tool to understand each other in which they exchange thoughts, feelings, and information. 2. Arbitrarily symbolic Language creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and its referent: idea, thing, process, relationship, or description. 3. Regularly structured Language has a structure; only particularly patterned arrangements of symbols have meaning, and different arrangements yield different meanings. 4. Structured at multiple levels The structure of language can be analyzed at more than one level such as sounds, in meaning units, in words, in phrases. 5. Generative, productive Within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances. The possibility for creating new utterances is virtually limitless. 6. Dynamic Languages constantly evolve.
“fast”). The second is a verb phrase (predicate), which contains at least one verb and whatever the verb acts on (like “runs”) if anything. PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION How do we understand language? One approach to this question centers on the psychological processes involved in speech perception. It also considers how listeners deal with the peculiarities resulting from the acoustic (relating to sound) transmission of language. A second, more linguistically oriented approach focuses on descriptions of the grammatical structure of languages. Finally, a third approach examines the psycholinguistic processes involved in language comprehension at the discourse macro-level of analysis. Speech Perception · To understand speech is crucial to human communication. · To understand speech perception, we consider some interesting phenomena of speech. · We also reflect on the question of whether speech is somehow special among all the various kinds of sounds we can perceive. · We are able to perceive speech with amazing rapidity. The View of Speech Perception as Ordinary · One main approach equates processes of speech perception with processes of auditory perception of other sounds. These kinds of theories emphasize either template matching or feature-detection processes. Such theories postulate that there are distinct stages of neural processing. In one stage speech sounds are analyzed into their components. · In normal conversation, we use lip reading to augment our perception of speech. It is particularly important in situations in which background noise may make speech perception more difficult. · The motor theory accounts for this integration quite easily because articulatory information includes visual and auditory information. However, believers in other theories interpret these findings as support
for more general perceptual processes. They believe these processes naturally integrate information across sensory modalities. Language Acquisition Stages of Language Acquisition Around the world, people seem to acquire their primary language in pretty much the same sequence and in just about the same way. In recent years, research on the development of speech perception finds the same overall pattern of progression. This pattern is from more general to more specific abilities. That is, as infants we are initially able to distinguish among all possible phonetic contrasts. But over time we lose the ability to distinguish nonnative contrasts in favor of those used in our native language environment. Within the first years of life, we humans seem to progress through the following stages in producing language:
- Cooing, which comprises mostly vowel sounds
- Babbling, which comprises consonant as well as vowel sounds; to most people's ears, the babbling of infants growing up among speakers from different language groups sound very similar
- One-word utterances; these utterances are limited in both the vowels and the consonants they utilize (Ingram, 1 999)
- Two-word utterances and telegraphic speech
- Basic adult sentence structure, with continuing vocabulary acquisition. Nature & Nurture ● Neither nature alone nor nurture alone adequately explains all aspects of language acquisition. ● Humans seem to be biologically preconfigured to acquire language. ● Several observations of humans support the notion that we are predisposed to acquire language. Imitation ● Children do exactly what they see others do. Sometimes children imitate the language patterns of others, especially their parents.
When learning to read, novice readers must come to master two basic kinds of perceptual processes: ● Lexical processes are used to identify letters and words. They also activate relevant information in memory about these words. ● Comprehension processes are used to make sense of the text as a whole. Fixations and Reading Speed When we read, our eyes make rapid consecutive movements known as saccades when they fixate on various chunks of text. Fixations ● This can vary in length and resemble a sequence of "snapshots" (Pollatsek & Rayner, 1989; Carpenter & Just, 1981). ● Longer words hold readers' attention longer than shorter ones do. Additionally, they focus longer on unfamiliar terms than they do on more common words (i.e., those that are used more frequently in the English language). ● A sentence's final word also appears to be given an extended period of fixation. "Sentence wrap-up time" (Carpenter & Just, 1 98 1) might be used to describe this. Lexical access ● An important aspect of reading ● The identification of a word that enables us to access the word's meaning from memory. ● It combines data from various processing levels, including the characteristics of letters, the letters themselves, and the words made up of the letters (Morton, 169). The processing of information occurs in both of the following two directions as it moves from one level to another: Bottom-up- starting from the sensory data and working up to higher levels of cognitive processing. Top-down- beginning with high-level cognition that draws from prior learning and experiences relevant to a particular context. Models for Word Recognition
1. Word effect of superiority
● occurs when letters are easier to read when they are part of words rather than when they are presented alone or with other letters that don't make words. The standard lexical-decision task is changed to examine the processing of letters in order to study the word-superiority effect.
2. Effect of sentence superiority ● It has been found that reading random words takes about twice as long as reading words in a sentence (Cattell, 1886).
Lesson 5 Language and Thought
Differences among Languages ● variations in the physical and cultural environments in which the languages arose and developed. ● syntactic structures of languages (order of subject, verb, object and the range of grammatical inflections) Linguistic Relativity & Linguistic Universals ● " We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices: of interpretation " Edward Sapir (1941/1964). ● Linguistic Universal is a characteristic pattern across all languages of various cultures and relativity. Bilingualism & Dialectics Bilinguals are people who can speak two languages ● Additive bilingualism- a second language is acquired in addition to a relatively well-developed first language. ● Subtractive bilingualism- elements of a second language replace elements of the first language. ● Simultaneous bilingualism- occurs when a child learns two languages from birth
Metaphors - used as a way of expressing thoughts. It contains four key elements, two are ways items are being compared, and two are ways in which the items are related. ● The tenor is the topic of the metaphor (e.g., house). ● The vehicle is what the tenor is described in terms of (e.g., pigsty). For example, consider the metaphor, "Billboards are warts on the landscape." The tenor is "billboards." The vehicle is "warts." ● The ground of the metaphor is the set of similarities between the tenor and the vehicle (e.g., both are messy). ● The tension of the metaphor is the set of dissimilarities between the two (e.g., people do not live in pigsties but do live in houses) LANGUAGE IN SOCIAL CONTEXT One aspect of context is the investigation of pragmatics, the study of how people use language. It includes sociolinguistics and other aspects of the social con text of language. Under most circumstances, you change your use of language in response to contextual cues without giving these changes much thought. Similarly, you usually un self consciously change your language patterns to fit different contexts. Speech Acts addresses the question of what you can accomplish with speech. This may be direct or indirect (request without doing so straightforwardly). Speech Acts Categories ● Speech acts is representatives ● Speech act is a directive ● Speech is a commissive ● Speech act is an expressive Indirect Speech Acts Types
- Asking or making statements about abilities
- Stating a desire
- Citing reasons Controversial Postulates In speaking to each other, we implicitly set up a cooperative. A cooperative principle, by which we seek to communicate in ways that make it easy for our listener to understand what we mean. According to Grice, successful conversations follow four maxims: the maxim of quantity, the maxim of quality, the maxim of relation, and the maxim of manner enterprise. ● Maximum of Quantity- you should make your contribution to a conversation as informative as required but no more informative than is appropriate.
● Maximum of Quality- your contribution to a conversation should be truthful. You are expected to say what you believe to be the case. ● Maximum of Relations- you should make your contributions to a conversation relevant to the aims of the conversation. ● Maximum of Manner- you should be clear and try to avoid obscure expressions, vague utterances, and purposeful obfuscation of your point. Gender and Language Conversations between men and women are sometimes regarded as cross-cultural communication (Tannen, 1986, 1990, 1994). Tannen has suggested that male-female differences in conversational style largely center on differing understandings of the goals of conversation. Cultural differences result in contrasting styles of communication. ● Men see the world as a hierarchical social order in which the purpose of communication is to negotiate for the upper hand, to preserve independence, and to avoid failure (Tannen, 1990, 1994). ● Women, in contrast, seek to establish a connection between the two participants, to give support and confirmation to others, and to reach consensus through communication. Discourse and Reading Comprehension Discourse involves communicative units of language larger than individual sentences-in conversations, lectures, stories, essays, and even textbooks (Di Eugenio, 2003). Cognitive psycholinguists who analyze discourse particularly are intrigued by how we are able to answer the questions posed in the preceding example. Often, for understanding discourse we rely not only on our knowledge of dis course structure. We also rely on our knowledge of a broad physical, social, or cultural context within which the discourse is presented (Cook & Gueraud, 2005; van Dijk, 2006 ). For example, observe how your understanding of the meaning of a paragraph is influenced by your existing knowledge and expectations. ● Semantic Encoding: Retrieving Word Meaning from Memory the process by which we translate sensory information into a meaningful representation that we perceive. This representation is based on our understanding of the meanings of words. To engage in semantic encoding, the reader needs to know what a given word means. Knowledge of word meanings (vocabulary) very closely relates to the ability to comprehend text. ● Acquiring Vocabulary: Deriving Word Meanings from Context ■ Learning from context is another way in which having a larger vocabulary contributes to text comprehension. Either search for a meaning, using
