Chapter 10 Readings (very detailed and helpful) SCIENCE OF BEHAVIOUR Edition 4
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Chapter 10: Language
Excluding page 305 (from "What happens if…") to page 308 ("…concepts they denote")
Prologue – Do Animals Have Language?
•Researchers believe some animals can learn language…Washoe, a female chimpanzee,
was one year old when she began to learn sign language; by the time she was four, she had a
vocabulary of more than 130 signs
•Chimpanzees lack the control of the tongue, lips, palate, and vocal cords that humans
have and cannot produce the variety of complex sounds that characterize human speech
•Humans clearly learn language more readily than chimpanzees do
•Languages: flexible systems that use symbols to express many meanings
•Most species can communicate with one another, but they don’t have language
•From the studies of primates learning sign language, true verbal ability is a social
behavior
•Psycholinguistics: a branch of psychology devoted to the study of verbal behaviour
SPEECH AND COMPREHENSION
Perception of Speech
•speech does not come to us as a series of individual words; we must extract the words
from a stream of speech
•people’s earliest attempts at written communication took the form of stylized pictures
Recognition of Speech Sounds:
•the auditory system performs a complex task in enabling us to recognize speech sounds
•like our ability to recognize faces visually, the auditory system recognizes the patterns
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underlying speech rather than just the sounds themselves
•using fMRI, researchers found than some regions of the brain responded more when
people heard human vocalizations (both speech and non-speech) than when they heard only
natural sounds…regions in which there was a large diff. were located in the temporal lobe, on the
auditory cortex
•when it comes to analyzing the detailed info of speech, the left hemisphere plays a
larger role
•phoneme: are elements of speech—the smallest units of sound that allow us to
distinguish the meaning of a spoken word (i.e. the word pin consists of three phonemes: /p/+/i/
+/n/
•voice-onset time: the delay b/w the initial sounds of a consonant (such as the puffing
sound of the phoneme /p/) and the onset of vibration of the vocal cords
•voicing is the vibration of vocal chords
•distinction b/w voiced and unvoiced consonants permits us to distinguish b/w /p/ and /b/
•the delay in voicing that occurs when you say pa is very slight: only 0.06 second
•phonemic discriminations begin with auditory processing of the sensory differences, and
this occurs in both hemispheres…however, regions of the left auditory cortex seem to specialize
in recognizing the special aspects of speech
osome areas responded to both natural and unintelligible speech, while others responded
only to speech that was intelligible—even if it was highly distorted
•perception of a phoneme is affected by the sounds that follow it
owe recognize speech sounds in pieces larger than individual phonemes (i.e. when sound
was followed by ift, the participants heard the word gift)
•morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning in language
•syntax of a particular language determines how phonemes can be combined to form
morphemes (i.e. the word fastest contains two morphemes, /fast/, which is a free morpheme, b/c
it can stand on its own and still have meaning, and /ist/, which is a bound morpheme)
•bound morphemes cannot stand on their own and must be attached to other morphemes to
provide meaning
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Recognition of Words in Continuous Speech: The Importance of Learning and Context:
•when people listen to nonsense sounds as words (i.e. dutaba) they showed the N100
(appears shortly after people hear the onset of a word) response
•even though speech is filled with hesitations, muffled sounds, and sloppy pronunciations,
we are able to recognize the sounds b/c of the context
•we take advantage of context when reading just as we do when speaking
Understanding the Meaning of Speech
Syntax:
•all languages have a syntax, or grammar
•our understanding of syntax is automatic
•syntactical rule: a grammatical rule of a particular language for combining words to
form phrases, clauses, and sentences
•fMRI studies have shown that as syntax becomes more complex or confusing, our brains
become more active
•syntactical rules are learned implicitly
•learning syntax and word meaning appears to involve different types of memory—and,
consequently, different brain mechanisms
•syntactical cues are signaled by word order, word class, function and content words,
affixes, word meanings, and prosody
oword order is important in English (i.e. if we say “The A Xs the B,” we are indicating that
the agent is A, the object is B, and the thing being done is X)
oword class refers to the grammatical categories (such as noun, pronoun, verb, adjective)
that we learn about in school (i.e. when we head a sentence containing the word beautiful,
we recognize that it refers to a person or a thing)
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