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 SapirEdward 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 Noam Chomsky (1957) Define: language

What is language?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 chased the rat. Input cat dog cap wolf tree yarn cat claw fur hat Word recognition Language perception c a t /k/ /ae/ /t/ Syntactic analysis cat S VP ratthe NP chased V the NP Semantic & pragmatic analysis PerceptionMemoryAttention

What is Cognitive Psychology?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) Ulric Neisser Limited capacity resource Spotlight analogy Resource pool Filtering capabilities Early selection Late selection Integration function AttentionMemory Sensory Stores Short-term memory Working memory Long-term memory Declarative Episodic Semantic Procedural

The ‘standard model’standard model InformationInformation ‘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)George Miller, 1956 fast decay, about 12 seconds (longer if rehearsed or elaborated)

Short term memory Increasing your STM spanSTM 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 Episodic Semantic - knowledge of facts Semantic Procedural - memories about how to do things (e.g., the thing that makes you improve at riding a bike with practice). Procedural 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”There is no such thing as attention (Frontiers in Psychology, 2011).

AttentionAttention: 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 Cocktail party effectdichotic listening

AttentionAttention: 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 Dual task

AttentionAttention: Integration Attention is used to ‘glue’ features together Feature integration theory & Visual search exps Feature integration theoryVisual search X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X Find the X O O X O O X X X O O X X O O X 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 Recognition A Feature Detection based theory Selfridge’s Pandemonium system, 1959Pandemonium

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 TE CT

Word Recognition Interactive 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