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Block 3 Unit 2 Language Processing - Comprehension and Language Expression

1) Explain language in your words.

Language can be described as a system of communication that uses sounds or symbols to convey thoughts and meanings. It's a dynamic process involving multiple levels of analysis including the sounds of speech, the structure of sentences, and the meaning of words. Language is used to communicate intentions, motives, feelings and beliefs.

2) What are the three functions of language?

The three main functions of language are:

• To convey meaning.
• To facilitate social interaction.
• To represent ideas and events, both concrete and abstract, that are not tied to the present.

3) Explain surface structure and deep structure.

• Surface structure refers to the actual arrangement of words in a sentence as it appears on the surface. It is the way a sentence is spoken or written.
• Deep structure refers to the underlying meaning of a sentence. It represents the abstract representation of a sentence, before any transformations are applied. The deep structure contains the core concepts of a sentence and their relationships.

4) Note the various experimental tasks that have been used to study language comprehension. Have you run into any of them before in this course?

Researchers have used several experimental tasks to study language comprehension, including:

• Reading tasks, where subjects read sentences and their reading time is measured. This can reveal processing load for different types of sentences.
• Sentence writing tasks, in which subjects read sentences then write them and the time to complete this task is measured.
• Rating tasks in which subjects rate words according to their structure, phonemics or semantic aspects.
• Recognition tasks in which subjects recognise encoded words based on how deeply they are processed. These tasks were not specifically encountered in previous units according to the conversation history.

5) It is intuitively obvious that context facilitates word interpretation, but how can it interfere with interpretation?

Context generally facilitates word interpretation by providing a framework for understanding meaning. However, context can also interfere with interpretation when it leads to:

• Misinterpretation: A particular context may bias an individual toward an incorrect understanding of a word.
• Ambiguity: A context may introduce multiple interpretations of a word or phrase where only one interpretation is intended.
• Inhibition: The context may inhibit one reading of an ambiguous word even when that is the intended meaning.

6) What is the role of context and expectations in the interpretation of speech? How has the influence of context been studied experimentally?

• Role of Context: Context provides a framework for interpreting the meaning of spoken words and sentences. It helps listeners to fill in missing information, resolve ambiguities, and understand the speaker's intentions. Context can be both verbal and situational.
• Role of Expectations: Listeners' expectations based on prior knowledge and experiences influence how they interpret speech. They may rely on what they expect to hear, which can speed up the comprehension process but may also lead to errors.
• Experimental Studies: The influence of context is studied by manipulating the context in which words or sentences are presented, and observing how this affects the comprehension process. This can involve comparing the processing times of words in different contexts, or the accuracy of recognition or recall in different contexts.

7) What are several major features of language development?

Although not a focus of this unit, language development is described in other units as a process that progresses from simple phonemes to morphemes, then phrases and sentences. Language development is generally marked by increasingly complex syntax, an expanded vocabulary, and increased use of abstract terms. The sources also state that development involves learning how to use language to communicate intentions, motives and feelings.

8) Compare and contrast the role of speech perception, syntax and semantics in the development and understanding of language.

• Speech Perception: This is the process of recognizing and interpreting the sounds of speech and it is fundamental to understanding language. It involves distinguishing between phonemes.
• Syntax (Grammar): This refers to the rules that govern how words combine to form phrases and sentences. It involves understanding the order of words and their relationships to each other.
• Semantics: This focuses on the meaning of words and sentences. It involves understanding the relationship between words and their referents and the ability to comprehend the intended meaning of an utterance.
• Comparison: All three – speech perception, syntax and semantics – are crucial for both language development and comprehension. Speech perception enables us to receive language. Syntax provides the grammatical framework, and semantics adds meaning to words and sentences.

9) What are the different processes involved in language comprehension?

Language comprehension involves several interacting processes:

• Perception: Initial processing of sensory input, including analysis of sound waves (speech) or visual symbols (written text).
• Lexical access: Retrieving information about words from the mental lexicon, including their meaning, pronunciation, and grammatical properties.
• Syntactic parsing: Analysing the grammatical structure of sentences to understand the relationships between words.
• Semantic interpretation: Constructing the meaning of words and sentences using context and background knowledge.
• Propositional representation: Representing the meaning of a sentence or discourse in terms of propositions which are meaning units.
• Discourse analysis: Understanding how sentences and paragraphs relate to each other within larger units of communication such as a conversation or an essay.

10) The exposition of Kintsch’s model is necessarily abstract and therefore difficult to comprehend. Preserve in your reinstated searches! See if you can use it to deal with a new example of text selected from another course.

Kintsch’s model of comprehension incorporates several key factors:

• Propositional representation: The text is broken down into basic meaning units called propositions, which represent ideas, relationships, and concepts.
• Working memory: This is where propositions are held and processed during comprehension.
• Long-term memory: This is where background knowledge is stored, which is used to make inferences and understand the text more fully..
• Inference-making: The reader (or listener) actively uses their background knowledge to fill in gaps in the text and create a coherent understanding.
• Reader's role: In this model the reader is an active participant in the process, not just a passive recipient of the text. They construct a mental representation of the text, based on both the text and the reader's existing knowledge.

12) Give an example of a humorous violation of one of Grice’s four maxims of successful conversation.

Grice's maxims are principles of cooperative conversation:

• Quantity: Be as informative as required, but not more.
• Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false or lack adequate evidence.
• Relation: Be relevant.
• Manner: Be clear, brief, and orderly.

Humorous Violation Example (Maxim of Quantity):

Scenario: Two friends, Alice and Bob, are talking.

Alice: "Did you have a good day?"

Bob: "Oh my god, my day was… well, let me tell you. I woke up at exactly 7:03 am, not 7:02 or 7:04, but 7:03. Then, I brushed my teeth for precisely two minutes, using exactly 1.5 centimeters of toothpaste. After that, I made toast, which took 1 minute and 47 seconds in the toaster, and I spread exactly 7 grams of butter on it. I then…"

Humor: Bob is violating the Maxim of Quantity by providing far more detail than necessary. Alice only asked if he had a *good* day, not for a minute-by-minute account of his morning routine. The humor comes from the unexpected and excessive detail.

Connecting to Kintsch (Briefly): In this example, Alice constructs a simple situation model: "Bob had a day." Bob's response floods her with unnecessary propositions (times, measurements), making integration difficult. The mismatch between the expected simple situation model and the complex textbase creates the humor.

This demonstrates how a violation of a conversational maxim can be humorous by disrupting the expected flow of information and creating a cognitive mismatch.