PowerPoint-Pr

1
?
Cognitive Psychology Winter 2004 -Discussion
Section-
2

Language
3
Cognitive functions

• Perception

• Attention

Emotion Motivation Action

• Memory

• Imagery

• Language

• Language

• Reasoning, problem-solving

• Decision-making

4
Overview

• Wrapup of last time Midterm, diseases

• Language

• Sara

• Crain Steedman

5
The midterm All in all
6
Rosch Mervis

• Then
• Typicality effects in categorization

Rosch
Mervis
Louisville
Berkeley
Now
-Psychology of Meditation -Buddhist
Psychology -Eastern Religions, Embodiment
-Williams Syndrome -Genetic Neuropsychology
7
Williams Syndrome
Symptoms
Cognitive Mental retardation Poor learning
abilities Particularly poor drawing abilities
Social Normal, but overly friendly. Trusting
strangers.
Interests Strong affinity for music, language
8
Williams Syndrome
Prevalence 1 in 20,000 births. ? Rather rare
Etiology Genetically determined. Missing
material on Chromosome 7. Due to random
mutation.
Theoretical significance Basically the
opposite of Autism (which is much more common).
Cure and treatments None
Outlook Stable. Yet shortened life-expectancy.
9
FOP
10
FOP
11
FOP
Fibrodys plasia ossificans progressiva
Disease where one progressively ossifies,
meaning Turning into stone.
Symptoms Wounded tissue (like muscles) is not
replaced by that tissue, but by bone-like
structures. As the disease progresses, this
ossification becomes increasingly painful and
effectively paralyzes the person.
12
FOP
Prevalence 1 in 2,000,000 births. ? Extremely
rare
Etiology Genetic, but Unknown.
Mechanism Unknown.
Cure and treatments None
Outlook Progressive Paralysis, eventually fatal
13
Lifetime Prevalence Ratios
Depression 15
Schizophrenia 1100
Autism 1500
Williams Syndrome 120,000
FOP 12,000,000
14
Lifetime Prevalence Ratios
Depression
15
Lifetime Prevalence Ratios
Schizophrenia
16
Lifetime Prevalence Ratios
Autism
17
Lifetime Prevalence Ratios
Williams Syndrome
18
Lifetime Prevalence Ratios
FOP
19
Language
Fundamentals

• The cognitive ability of language is extremely
  rare in organisms. To our knowledge, only humans
  are able to use what we call language (with all
  the defining characteristics).

• From the viewpoint of neuroscience, as well as
  engineering, the human ability to express
  thoughts via language and understand expressions
  of others is uncanny (compared to programming
  languages).

• Particularly amazing are the facts that there are
  many ways to express any given thought and yet
  the very same statement can have different
  meanings in different contexts. And all that
  given the fuzzy system of everyday language with
  poorly defined concepts, etc.

20
Language

• This amazing feat is subject to extensive and
  intensive study. Both Linguistics and Cognitive
  Psychology (among others) are devoted to uncover
  its secrets.

? We wont even be able to scratch the surface.
But we dont have to. A primer how exciting it
can be is sufficient.

• Our very own Psych Department is particularly
  strong in the Psychology of Language and Language
  Development. Our Linguistics Department is ok. In
  Spring quarter, there are some exciting courses
  exclusively on this topic.

21
Language

• Defining characteristics More than communication

• Productivity An infinite number of utterances
  are possible in any language.

• Regularity However, these utterances are
  systematic in many ways. Only (relatively) few of
  the theoretically possible utterances are
  meaningful.

Example While sentences can be almost infinitely
long (mostly limited by working memory), they
only make sense if they are not a random
arrangement of words.
22
Language

• Language Myth 1

Claim Given enough monkeys and time, a monkey
would eventually re-type the bible/Shakespeares
work, etc. just by chance.

• Theoretical objection With all key-states, a
  conventional keyboard has at least 100 keys. A
  single page of the bible contains on average 3000
  characters. Lets assume we have 1000 monkeys,
  each of whom types one character per second, 24
  hours a day, 365 days a year since the
  beginning of the world, 20 Bln. Years ago. Given
  independence of key strokes (the optimal case for
  the monkeys and nothing they are actually capable
  of), what is the probability that one of the
  monkeys wrote a page of the bible since the
  beginning of the universe just by chance?

Well, in the time since the beginning of the
Universe, the monkeys were able to type
630,720,000,000,000,000,000 characters, given
these assumptions. Yet, the probability that ONE
PAGE is written correctly by chance is much lower
than 1e-300. (0.00(296 zeros)001). Effectively
zero.
?Even a 10-character random password is virtually
safe. There are 1100,000,000,000,000,000,000
possible combinations.
23

• Empirical objection Monkeys are not interested
  in typing at all. A 4 week long experiment in an
  English Zoo settled this issue once and for all

• Researcher Mike Phillips noted the first thing to
  happen was that the lead male got a stone and
  started bashingit (as quoted in Bernbaum,
  2003). He went on to note another thing they
  were interested in was in defecating and
  urinating all over the keyboard.

Eventually the six monkeysnamed Elmo, Gum,
Heather, Holly, Mistletoe, and Rowandid produce
five pages of text. However, that text was
composed primarily of the letter S, with the
letters A, J, L, and M added on rare occasions.
24
Language

• Phonemes The sounds of a language
• Morphemes The meaningful units of a language
• Syntax The structure of each sentence
• Semantics The study of meaning
• Pragmatics Social rules of effective
  communication

• Ironically, Language seems to be an implicit
  skill. Most people cant verbalize the rules by
  which they form sentences, yet they can use them.

25
Pragmatic rules
Gricean maximes

1. Quantity Make your contribution just as
   informative as required.
2. Quality Try to be truthful
3. Relation Try to be relevant
4. Manner Try to avoid ambiguity

These are just surface rules. They dont explain
anything. Yet, a lot bases on violations on it
E.g. Jokes.
26
Language

• Language comprehension
• Parsing problem.
• Filling in (if encountering noise)
• Taking context into account

• The short answer is We dont know much about the
  mechanics of language production and
  comprehension.

27
Language

• Language acquisition

• One word stage (over-inclusive)
• Two word stage

Inadequacy of Behaviorism. ? Postulation of
Universal Grammar.
Critical period (old) vs. Degree of immersion
(new)
28
Language
Language and thought The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

• If we cant talk about it, we cant think it,
  hence language guides thought. And cognition in
  general.

Picked up by feminist movement Enid The school
is sexist since the word semester obviously
prefers semen rather than ovaries. We should
replace it with ovester.

• BUT It has been shown that cultures that have
  only very few color names still can perceive all
  colors normally. Among other things. The
  hypothesis holds only mildly.

29
Language

• Language Myth 2

Eskimos (Inuit...) have 50 different words for
snow. (Hence, they are just as civilized as us
(Franz Boas)).
Not really. Its just an agglutinative language
(gluing morphemes). This basically means, that
you can make up new words by combining old ones.
That way, you end up easily at 50. Sounds
impressive in english, but its not. German is
similar (not that extremely).
30
Example
Germans have an infinite number of words for
ship
Dampfschiff Steamer Segelschiff Sailing
ship Schlachtschiff Battleship Flussschiff Sh
ip that operates in rivers Frachtschiff F
reighter Handelsschiff Merchantman ... ...
31
Sara

• Trying not to be a dick

• Excellence through excitement (not intimidation)

32
Crain Steedman
Hardcore theoretical linguistics
Stephen Crain
Mark Steedman
33
Crain Steedman

• Garden path sentences So called, because they
  lead the listener up the garden path to an
  incorrect understanding.

• Garden Path sentences exhibit local ambiguity.
  Hence, they are a good paradigm to study human
  language processing.

The man who hunts ducks out on weekends
The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in
Mississippi
34
Crain Steedman

• Specific Question How do we resolve local
  ambiguities in sentences?

• General Question Is Human language processing
  similar to artificial language processing?

• Alternatives We use a) Contextual strategies, b)
  Structural strategies, c) Both structural and
  contextual stragegies. D) Neither/something else.

35
Crain Steedman

• Logic and Methods

• Problem with other studies They were using the
  null context, hence falsely believing that it the
  nature of the garden path sentence is structural.

• Three studies were done that varied the context,
  presenting subjects garden path sentences and
  asking them to rate the grammaticality of the
  sentence. Using different kinds of contexts.

36
Crain Steedman

• Results and Conclusions

• Once context was controlled, there was no
  residual structural effect.

• ? Local ambiguities are resolved by reference to
  the semantic context.

• A garden path sentence is not a garden path
  sentence per se (by it's syntactic structure). It
  becomes a garden path sentence by particular
  contexts (including the null context).

• Hence, humans don't process language like an
  artificial language processor

37
Crain Steedman

• Problems

• Was this a scientific question?
• Wasnt the used material a little arbitrary?
• Since the brain DOES compute, how does it do it?
  This study doesnt help at all in that regard.

But generally, they are right

• People understand context based. It often doesn't
  really matter what you actually say. If I stand
  on your foot in the subway and say "Oh sorry, I
  did it intentional", you will most likely say
  "Oh, no problem".

• (Unless you are in New York, which is a different
  context altogether).