Language and Cognition - Newcastle University · 2018-11-20 · Linguistic Processing Language → Cognitive organisation Cognitive organisation → Language Summary Languageasacognitivesystem

Language and Cognition

Rachael Bailes

SEL1008

Tuesday 20th November 2018

Linguistic Processing Language → Cognitive organisation Cognitive organisation → Language Summary

Outline

Linguistic ProcessingLanguage as a cognitive system

Language → Cognitive organisationSpeech ErrorsBilingualism and Executive Function

Cognitive organisation → LanguageMemory Structure: Priming

SummaryBonus: Memory and Cross-modal Effects

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Language as a cognitive system

• In discussions so far, we have established that languagesare not a phenomenon that’s ‘out there’ (‘there’s no suchthing as languages’, in some sense)

• We’ve abstracted away from a lot of messiness in order tothink about what the language system actually looks like

• That is, we care about competence• We have distinguished between I and E-language, andI-language is ‘in the brain’

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Language as a cognitive system

• This means that language should have some characteristicsthat are determined by the cognitive system

• It also means that language should be able to tell us abouthow human cognition works

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Pop Quiz

• What do you call the instrument that allowed people to tellthe time by the shadow cast on its face during the day?

• What’s this actor’s name?

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Pop Quiz

• What do you call the instrument that allowed people to tellthe time by the shadow cast on its face during the day?

• What’s this actor’s name?

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Tip of the Tongue Effect

• A particular kind of disfluency: you know that you knowthe word, but cannot remember it. However, you canremember something about its form...

• First segment, length, ‘sounds like’, etc• Often similar words come to mind and seem impossible toput aside. This is blocking.

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TotT: Lexical competition

Sometimes a related word, (often a more common word, e.g.clock, watch) pops up whenever the speaker tries to find the(rarer) target word. Connected words compete.

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Speech Errors

• Errors show that related or similar words interfere• Slips of the tongue - substitution errors - usually involvesemantically or phonologically similar words

• Can you pass me the pepper? (target: salt)• Blends: mix of two words that are both semantically andphonologically similar:

• Buggage (baggage + luggage)• Not in the sleast (slightest + least)

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Speech Errors

• Performance errors happen the way they do as a result ofthe architecture we’re working with

• When things go wrong, they go wrong in particular ways• Studying these might inform us about the basic processesthat underpin production

Basic planning, retrieval, order of arrangement, final motorplan that results in audible speech...

• In other words, our performances can tell us some thingsabout the underlying structures and processing capabilitieswe have (ie, our competence), and how they’re actuallyrealised by our psychological hardware.

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Some Swimmers Sink

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Speech Errors

• Hey joke have you heard the Mike about• I’d like a banana (target: I’d like an apple)• The Lord is a shoving leopard

• Suggest that the order of units has been fixed, but that thechoice of words is undecided until a later stage.

• Suggest function words are added late- e.g. an apple → abanana, the articles adapt to the realised noun, not theintended one

• Substitutions are within the same syntactic categories, i.e.nouns for nouns, verbs for verbs

• Errors that violate phonotactics are very rare - e.g. shovingleopard is a permissible onset exchange

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Speech Errors

• Hey joke have you heard the Mike about• I’d like a banana (target: I’d like an apple)• The Lord is a shoving leopard

• Suggest that the order of units has been fixed, but that thechoice of words is undecided until a later stage.

• Suggest function words are added late- e.g. an apple → abanana, the articles adapt to the realised noun, not theintended one

• Substitutions are within the same syntactic categories, i.e.nouns for nouns, verbs for verbs

• Errors that violate phonotactics are very rare - e.g. shovingleopard is a permissible onset exchange

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Speech Errors

Motley et al (1982) also showed another type of editor at work:• They had participants read pairs of words, normally andbackwards, within a short time limit - this induced anumber of speech errors

• Some pairs were meant to induce taboo expressions• hit shed

• People were less likely to produce speech errors when theresult would have been taboo words

• Galvanic skin responses suggested that the phrases weregenerated internally, but just not expressed

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Substition Errors in Pan. Paniscus• Bonobos Kanzi and Panbanisha are trained and veryproficient in using symbols for communication

• They cannot articulate speech, but can point to lexigramson a lexigram board

• They make lexical substitution errors too!

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Substition Errors in Pan. PaniscusLyn et al (2007):• These errors are not random; e.g. if Kanzi is asked to say‘blackberry’, he is more likely to select the lexigram foranother fruit.

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Representation StructureYoun et al (2016):

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Summary

• Speech errors are non-random; they affect the naturaljoints and units of language

• This gives us evidence about which units are‘psychologically real’

• Substitution errors, and the connections that appear tolead to errors, can give us an idea about howrepresentations may be cognitively arranged and activated

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An observation

Some strings produced by bilinguals look sort of like thesubstitutions we just saw:• Yo anduve in a state of shock pa dos dias // I walked in astate of shock for two days

• Devo mandare un application form // I need to send anapplication form

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An observation

• If retrieving items in order to produce utterances is amatter of competition, then there is more competition forbilingual speakers

• Potentially nearly every word or structure has at least oneother candidate that is not just strongly related, butsynonymous

• If related words are activated in the course of normalprocessing, bilinguals need to make use of some mechanismthat suppresses the irrelevant items

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Executive Function

Executive functions, or cognitive control, are a set of processesthat cognitively control behaviour (particularly goal-orientedbehaviour)• Attentional control, cognitive inhibition, inhibitory control,working memory, and cognitive flexibility

Of particular interest in the case of bilingualism, areinhibitory control and task switching.• i.e.to meet the goal of communicating with a particularinterlocutor, the bilingual needs to (1) switch between thecorrect linguistic systems at the right time, and (2) inhibit(disregard) irrelevant information they may have cognitiveaccess to

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Stroop Task

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Bilingualism and Inhibitory Control

Hypothesis: since bilinguals need to exercise their inhibitorycontrol and task switching more often in the course of languageprocessing, they perform better than monolinguals on tests of

executive function.

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17 5yo English monolinguals, 17 5yo English-French bilinguals

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Summary

• The ability to selectively attend to the target language andinhibit the intrusion of the non-target language,strengthens executive function

• This effect is present in nonlinguistic domains, so we mightthink about how these different components are arrangedwithin one cognitive system (i.e. one brain)

• The nature of the switching might also make us thinkabout how language itself is cognitive arranged (arebilinguals dealing with competing grammars?)

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Priming

• We measure the effects of having processed an item (prime)on the processing of a subsequent item (target)

• This effect reflects a relationship between mentalrepresentations of the prime and the target

• syntactic, lexical, semantic, phonological competitionbetween representations, etc.

• These are thought to be caused by ‘spreading activation’ -memory retrieval is easier when related items have alreadybeen activated

• Effects are measured with reaction time (RT), or errors, orproduction records

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Priming

• Priming effects are very well established in a number ofdomains: perceptual (object/category recognition),conceptual, and emotional (kindness priming)

• If this is how things are cognitively structured, perhapsthis also applies to language

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Semantic and Phonological Priming

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Syntactic PrimingActive vs passive structural priming:

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Syntactic PrimingPrepositional Object (PO) structures (e.g. ‘the boy gave thechalk to the girl’) and Double Object (DO) structures (e.g. ‘theboy gave the girl the chalk’)

Priming increased the likelihood of producing a particularsyntactic form by an average of 12% (Potter & Lombardi, 1998)

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An observation

People use language in dialogue with other people, and thisexposes us to linguistic structures. Exposure to linguisticstructures primes those structures, and makes us more likely toproduce similar structures in turn.

Hypothesis: If exposure to (PO/DO) syntactic structures hasa priming effect, then we would expect speakers to co-ordinatewith each other in their production of syntactic structures.

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Branigan, Pickering & Cleland, (2000)

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Branigan, Pickering & Cleland, (2000)

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Summary

• ‘Spreading activation’ is a general principle about howmemory is structured and activated when accessed, andthis leads to priming effects

• Priming applies to all levels of linguistic structure; when a(phonological/semantic/syntactic) representation isactivated, related items are also activated, and readilyavailable

• Individuals can be primed by various; interlocutorslinguistically prime each other

• Cognitive principles can help explain linguistic phenomenaat the level of the individual, and in interaction (andmaybe it could scale up even more)

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Summary

• In general, studying language as an integratedpsychological phenomenon gives us a better picture of howit is implemented

• Performance can tell us certain things about competence(as well as vice versa) - but we need to have those conceptsclear before we start to investigate

• Language, as a cognitive system, is subject to cognitiveconstraints (and interacts with other cognitive systemswithin the organism)

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Bonus: Memory and Cross-modal Effects

Memory can be broadly divided into two types:• Declarative: discrete pieces of information, consciouslyrecollected, or recognised.

• Procedural: unconsciously used pieces of complex skills,“muscle memory”.

• 1. Habits, sequences (esp. motor) learned through repeatedpractice.

• 2. Reflexes and fine motor adjustment.(Much of this is synthesized from Eichenbaum 2012.)

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Bonus: Memory and Cross-modal Effects

• Ask Joel about the rat experiments demonstrating thatlearning a spatial location is unconsciously co-encoded withvisual information

• It’s very difficult to override this unconsciously acquiredencoding

• So, when acquiring a certain set of representations, theprocedural elements of that experience may also be encoded

• This is why you feel odd walking down an escalator thathas broken down.

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The McGurk Effect

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsfidRq2tw

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsfidRq2tw

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Language and Cognition - Newcastle University · 2018-11-20 · Linguistic Processing Language → Cognitive organisation Cognitive organisation → Language Summary Languageasacognitivesystem