PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

What is Language and how is it related to Cognitive Psychology?

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

The ‘standard model’

Information ‘flows’ from one memory buffer to the next

Information

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

How is semantic memory structured? Networks

Long term memory: Organization

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

Letter RecognitionA Feature Detection based theory

Selfridge’s Pandemonium system, 1959

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

Summing up Psycholinguistic view

Language and cognition are inextricably linked Notice that almost all of the experiment demonstrations

involved language elements as stimuli