psy 369: psycholinguistics what is language and how is it related to cognitive psychology?
Post on 14-Dec-2015
222 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
What is language? What do you think language is? A difficult question to answer:
“Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntrily produced symbols.”
Edward Sapir (1921)
“A language is a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements.”
Noam Chomsky (1957)
Define: language
What is language? Some generally agreed upon conclusions
Symbolic Elements are used to represent something other than itself
Voluntary Language use is under our individual control
Language is systematic There is hierarchical structure that organizes linguistic
elements Modalities
Spoken, written, signed (sign language) Assumed primacy of speech - it came first
Studied from a variety of perspectives Linguistics
Language in the world Psycholinguistics
Language in the mind Neurolinguistics
Language in the brain
Language is complex
Overview of comprehension
The cat chasedthe rat.
Input
catdogcapwolftreeyarncat
clawfurhat
Wordrecognition
Language perception
ca
t
/k//ae/
/t/
Syntacticanalysis
cat
S
VP
ratthe
NP
chased
Vthe
NP
Semantic &pragmaticanalysis
Perception MemoryAttention
What is Cognitive Psychology? It is the body of psychological experimentation that deals with issues of human
memory, language use, problem solving, decision making, and reasoning.“Cognitive Psychology refers to all processes by which the sensory input is
transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.” Ulric Neisser (1967)
Limited capacity resource Spotlight analogy Resource pool
Filtering capabilities Early selection Late selection
Integration function
Attention Memory Sensory Stores Short-term memory
Working memory Long-term memory
Declarative Episodic Semantic
Procedural
Sensory memory
Properties High capacity Extremely fast decay Separate systems for different sensory modalities
Short term memory
Properties rapid access (about 35 milliseconds per item) limited capacity (7+/- 2 chunks; George Miller, 1956) fast decay, about 12 seconds (longer if rehearsed or
elaborated)
Short term memory
Increasing your STM span Chunking
Grouping information together into larger units
I’ll read a few more lists of words for you to recall
Barn snow tree car rock book key plant dress cup slide lamp Dog cat mouse shoe sock toe couch pillow blanket table desk chair Down flowers the by with chased yellow several girls a river boy. A boy chased several girls with yellow flowers down by the river.
Notice that the previous two are the same words, but the syntax allows for grouping into meaningful ‘chunks’
Long term memory
Properties Capacity: Unlimited? Duration: Decay/interference, retrieval difficulty Organization
Multiple subsystems for type of memory Associative networks
Long term memory: Organization
This theory suggests that there are different memory components, each storing different kinds of information.
Declarative Episodic - memories about
events Semantic - knowledge of facts
Procedural - memories about how to do things (e.g., the thing that makes you improve at riding a bike with practice).
The Multiple Memory Stores Theory
Declarative
Procedural
episodic semantic
Attention
“ Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others…”
William James (1890)
However Britt Anderson recently writes: “There is no such thing as attention”
(Frontiers in Psychology, 2011).
Attention: An information filter Information bottleneck. There is so much info,
only some is let through, while the rest is filtered out Early selection (e.g., Broadbent, 1958, Triesman, 1964) Late filters (Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963)
Everything gets in, bottleneck comes at response level (can only respond to limited number of things)
Cocktail party effect, dichotic listening
Attention: Limited resource Only have so much ‘energy’ to make things go,
so need to divide it and allocate it to processes Single pool (e.g., Kahneman, 1973)
Central bank of resources available to all tasks that need it Multiple pools (e.g., Navon & Gopher, 1979)
Several banks of specialized resources – divided up in terms of input/output modalities, stages of info processing (perception, memory, response output)
Dual task experiments
Attention: Integration
Attention is used to ‘glue’ features together Feature integration theory & Visual search exps
XX
X
XXX
X
X
X
XX
X
XX
X
Find the X
OO
X
OOX
X
X
O
OX
XOOX
Pop out
Slow search
Where’s Waldo
Other Common Theoretical Issues Example:
Letter Recognition - How do we recognize a group of lines and curves as letters?Mechanisms
Template matching Feature detection and integration
Information Flow Top-down vs. Bottom-up Modular vs. Interactive
Automatic vs. Controlled processing
Terms come from computer science Bottom up (data driven) relies upon evidence that is
physically present, building larger units based on smaller ones
Top down (knowledge driven, context), using higher-level information to support lower-level processes
Bottom-up & Top-down
E FROG T EC T
Word RecognitionInteractive Activation Model (AIM)
McClelland and Rumelhart, (1981)
Nodes: • (visual) feature• (positional) letter• word detectors
• Inhibitory and excitatory connections between them.
Previous models posed a bottom-up flow of information (from features to letters to words).
IAM also poses a top-down flows of information
Automaticity
Controlled processes
Require resources Under some volitional direction Slow, effortful
Automatic processes Require little attention Obligatory Fast
top related