Deck 11: Language

Question 1

How do the ideas of coherence and connection apply to some of the movies you have seen lately? Have you found that some movies are easy to understand whereas others are more difficult? In the movies that are easy to understand, does one thing appear to follow from another, whereas in the more difficult ones, some things seem to be left out? What is the difference in the "mental work" needed to determine what is going on in these two kinds of movies? (You can also apply this kind of analysis to books you have read.)

Answer 1

When watching a movie or reading a book, two basic ideas that help give a better understanding of the concept or leave a deeper impact are coherence and connectivity. When an individual establishes a relationship with events occurring in the book or movie with the real world events, it gives him better visualization and understanding. Along with this, a book or movie which is consistent and logical in its events helps individuals understand the movie or book better.
When individuals watch a movie or read a book, they establish a connection with the characters of the movie or the book. This way they can understand and enjoy the storyline better. This establishment of relationship between the person watching the movie or reading the book is possible because of the language and the ideas of coherence and connection. The language conveys the story of the characters in the book or movie. This information conveyed by the language is usually further read by the brain so as to have a deeper understanding of the entire situation.
Coherence is the quality of being logical and consistent, that is, the events that unfold are not unrealistic and also in line or consistent with what happens later or has happened previously in the book or movie. Connection is when the events occurring in the book or movie can be related to not just other events in the movie or book itself but further in real life. Sometimes, some movies or books are easier to understand than other movies or books. When watching a movie or reading a book, one always tries to connect the events taking place in the book or movie to real life, like the way people react or the way things go about. In most movies or books the things that happen are relatable. In the ones that are easier to understand there is usually continuity of events occurring. One thing usually appears after the other if they are inter-related. Whereas in the ones that are more difficult to understand, there are often ideas that are untouched. Thoughts and ideas are usually left off for the audience to figure out or sometimes the actions have an implied meaning. These types of movies or books usually require some amount of 'mental work' so as to decode the events happening in the movie or book. Questions like why a certain thing happened or how it happened when introduced in the form of an implication usually make it hard for the audience to understand.

Question 2

Next time you are able to eavesdrop on a conversation, notice how the give-and-take among participants follows (or does not follow) the given-new contract. Also, notice how people change topics and how that affects the flow of the conversation. Finally, see if you can find any evidence of syntactic priming. One way to "eavesdrop" is to be part of a conversation that includes at least two other people. But don't forget to say something every so often!

Answer 2

Conversation is said to be a spontaneous communication between two or more people. People often do not know what other person is going to say. According to researchers, conversation is one of the cognitive skills which are easy as well as complex. Eavesdropping is not a conversation but it involves hearing a private conversation of two or more people without their knowledge. Most of the private conversation between two or more people follows the given-new contract. One person can share the information known to other and other may share new information. If I am eavesdropping on a conversation involving two people, I would surely notice that their conversation will follow the given-new contract. This is also called as semantic conversation. According to given-new contract, the conversation includes two things which are given as follows:
i. Given Information: It is the information which is already known to the listener.
ii. New Information: It is the information which is unknown to the listener.
Thus, if I and other two persons in the conversation are familiar with the information being shared, then there is no use of eavesdropping. Eavesdropping is carried out by people only to collect new information which is not known to most of the people in an environment. During a conversation, speaking about a topic of interest will increase the reciprocity because it motivates and increases the engagement of people involved. When the topic is changed suddenly or the topic involved in a conversation is not of the interest of the other person, it will affect the flow of conversation. This would result in more one-sided interaction and it would not be an effective conversation.
Changing the topic can even mislead the people involved in the conversation. It would even mislead the person who is an eavesdropper in the conversation and wrong information can be passed on to the surrounding environment. Without coordination in the communication of people, the conversation becomes more complicated and difficult to carry out.
Syntactic priming is the tendency of a person to produce a sentence with the same construction which they hear from other person. It helps to coordinate the grammatical form of statements from two different persons involved in a conversation. It is more likely that the listener speaks with the same construction as the speaker did. Changing the topic can affect the syntactic priming and also lead to confusions in the conversation and even in eavesdropping.

Question 3

One of the interesting things about languages is the use of "figures of speech," which people who know the language understand but nonnative speakers often find baffling. One example is the sentence "He brought everything but the kitchen sink." Can you think of other examples? If you speak a language other than English, can you identify figures of speech in that language that might be baffling to English-speakers?

Answer 3

When conversing, people often tend to use phrases or figures of speech so as to get their ideas across better. Using phrases or figures of speech have a better impact and getting ones points across becomes easier. When phrases are introduced in conversations they usually give a deeper understanding of the topic in hand.
A  figure of speech  is speech using figurative language, which means using words that deviate from the actual definitions or meanings to be conveyed so as to achieve a better and more intricate as well as complex understanding of that particular idea or word. Using a figurative language heightens the impact of the particular idea or word. Figurative language is often achieved by presenting words in order for them to be equated, compared, or associated with other normally unrelated words or meanings.
An example of a figure of speech in French is s'habiller comme la chienne à Jacques, which means to dress in a poor fashion sense, especially if one wears dilapidated or old clothes. Another example is mieux vaut prévenir que guérir, which is actually the common old saying that prevention is better than cure.

Question 4

Newspaper headlines are often good sources of ambiguous phrases. For example, consider the following actual headlines: "Milk Drinkers Are Turning To Powder," "Iraqi Head Seeks Arms," "Farm Bill Dies In House," and "Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim." See if you can find examples of ambiguous headlines in the newspaper, and try to figure out what it is that makes the headlines ambiguous.

Question 5

People often say things in an indirect way, but listeners can often still understand what they mean. See if you can detect these indirect statements in normal conversation. (Examples: "Do you want to turn left here?" to mean "I think you should turn left here"; "Is it cold in here?" to mean "Please close the window.")

Question 6

It is a common observation that people are more irritated by nearby cell phone conversations than by conversations between two people who are physically present. Why do you think this occurs? (See Emberson et al., 2010, for one answer.)

Question 7

What is special about human language? Consider why human language is unique and what it is used for.

Question 8

What events are associated with the beginning of the modern study of language in the 1950s?

Question 9

What is psycholinguistics? What are its concerns, and what part of psycholinguistics does this chapter focus on?

Question 10

What are the two components of words?

Question 11

Describe the following demonstrations of how context helps with the perception of words and components of words: (1) phonemic restoration effect; (2) isolating words from conversations (Pollack and Pickett experiment); (3) speech segmentation.

Question 12

What is the word superiority effect? How has it been demonstrated?

Question 13

What does the corpus of a language tell us?

Question 14

What is the word frequency effect? How has it been studied (a) using the lexical decision task and (b) by measuring eye movements?

Question 15

What is lexical ambiguity? What is meaning dominance? How do meaning dominance and context determine how the meanings of ambiguous words are accessed while reading a sentence?

Question 16

What is semantics? Syntax? Describe how these two aspects of language have been studied using (a) neuropsychology and (b) the event-related potential.

Question 17

What is parsing? What are garden path sentences?

Question 18

Describe the syntax-first approach to parsing. Be sure you understand the principle of late closure.

Question 19

Describe the interactionist approach to parsing. How does it differ from the syntax-first approach?

Question 20

Describe the following lines of evidence that support the interactionist approach to parsing:
a. How meanings ofwords in a sentence affect parsing
b. How information in a visual scene affects parsing (the visual world paradigm)
c. How predictions based on world knowledge affect parsing
d. How predictions based on knowledge of language structure affect parsing

Question 21

What does the "fixing the birdhouse" experiment indicate about inference?

Question 22

What is coherence? Describe the different types of inference that help achieve coherence.

Question 23

What is the assumption behind a situation model? Describe what the following evidence tells us about this approach to understanding stories: (a) reaction times for pictures that match or don't match the orientations or shapes of objects in a story; (b) brain activation for action words compared to actual action; (c) predictions based on the situation.

Question 24

What is the given-new contract?

Question 25

What is common ground? How is it established in a conversation? Describe the "New York City" experiment.

Question 26

What is syntactic coordination? What is syntactic priming? Describe how the Branigan experiment used syntactic priming to demonstrate syntactic coordination.

Question 27

What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Describe the experiment on color perception that supports this hypothesis. Also describe the evidence that indicates that the hypothesis may hold for only one side of the visual field.