Feb 27 Language

• Types of Paraphasia

  • Verbal Paraphasia
  • Phonemic (literal) Paraphasia
  • Neologisms Paraphasia
• Language is sculpted by our environment
• Aphasia is impaired language function, usually from brain injury
• Expressive aphasia


  • Intact language comprehension
  • Impaired speed production and articulation
• Language Responds Flexibility

  • Morphology (complexity) decreases with languages spoken by more people
  • Lexical tones are partly determined by climate
• Paraphasia refers to a speech disturbance resulting from brain damage
• Conduction Aphasia


  • Neural pathway from between Broca's and Wernicke's area
  • Speech production and comprehension intact
  • Impaired repetition
• Language

  • Symbolic: There are units to reference something else
  • Shared: It is common among a group of people
  • Purposeful: To communicate and translate thoughts
• Right hemisphere importance in language

  • Prosody and pitch to convey intonation, mood, attitude, gestural communication and overall comprehension
  • Right hemisphere important for higher-order non-literal language use
• Children are exposed to different learning situations yet converge on the same grammar
• Phonemes

  Smallest linguistic unit /d/, /o/, /g/
• Evidence that rules are not all innate
• Semantics

  The meaning
• Homophones

  Words that sound the same with different meanings
• Innateness Hypothesis

  • Humans are born with an innate capacity for language, suggesting that the ability to acquire language is hard-wired into the brain
  • We are born with principles of grammar
• Psycholinguistics

  • Interdisciplinary study of how language is processed and produced in the mind and brain, combining insights from psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, and neuroscience
  • The building blocks of language
• Children extract regularities from experiences to form rules
• Morphemes and Words

  Smallest meaningful units of language /dog/
• Language Comprehension

  1. Understanding the message – semantics – from language

  2. Resolving types of linguistic ambiguity
• Cross Modal Priming Task

  1. When did lexical decision SHORTLY after (short SOA) hearing the word bug: both meanings were active

  2. When did lexical decision at a DELAY (long SOA) from hearing the word bug: only context-biased meaning active
• Language acquisition

  1. Explicit training of language

  2. Trial and error reinforcement as well as modeling other people shapes language
• Universal Grammar

  • A part of the LAD that includes rules for all languages
  • Children only need to learn language-specific aspects to put “on top” of Universal Grammar
• Adult reformulations of children’s speech target the structure but not meaning
• Building blocks of language

  • Phonemes
  • Morphemes and Words
  • Syntax
  • Semantics
• Phonological Ambiguity

  Arises when a sequence of sounds can be interpreted as having more than one meaning due to similar phonetic realizations, leading to uncertainty or multiple interpretations of spoken language
• Syntax

  Rules that govern how words are arranged in a sentence
• Sentence Parsing

  Dividing a sentence into words and identifying them as nouns, articles, verbs
• Syntax First Approach

  We use grammatical rules to interpret a sentence as we hear/read it
• Colors Across Languages

  • Russian language discriminates between lighter ("goluboy") and darker ("siniy") blues, not English
  • Russian speakers faster for colors that fell into different blue categories than those from the same blue category, English speakers showed no effect
• Linguistic Universalists believe language and thought are independent
• Reasons for ambiguity in parsing

  • We hear sentences incrementally
  • There is often more than one way to parse a sentence (words can be nouns and verbs)
• Linguistic Relativity suggests that the structure of a language influences its speakers' perception and categorization of the world
• Forms of Dyslexia

  • Surface Dyslexia
  • Phonological Dyslexia
• Constraint Based Models

  Our understanding of language is guided by multiple cues and constraints, allowing for more flexible and efficient processing of ambiguous or complex sentences
• Garden Path Sentences have multiple syntax structures, interpreting a word one way leads to a faulty interpretation
• Non-grammatical information used in parsing sentences

  • Semantic and thematic context
  • Expectation
  • Frequency
• Language changes how we think and perceive, people who speak different languages think differently
• Dual Route Model of Reading

  Proposes two distinct pathways for processing written words: Phonological Route and Surface Route
• Aphasia: Impaired language function, usually from brain injury
• Brocca’s Aphasia: speech is halted and difficult to produce

  • Mostly just nouns and verbs
  • Typically writing is affected in a similar manner
  • Impairments range from deficits in producing certain words → problems generating all forms of language
  • Depends on amount of damage to Broca’s area