My Notes
3 Psychological Mechanisms
Main Points
- The act of comprehending and producing language are performed within the constraints of our information-processing system. This system consists of working memory and long-term memory. Long-term memory comprises episodic and semantic memory.
- A number of issues regarding language processing have been raised. These include whether we primarily use serial or parallel process, whether we tend to use top-down or bottom-up process, whether language processes are primarily automatic or controlled, and the extent to which language processing displays modularity.
- Children appear to process information very differently than adults, but studies of the development of the processing system suggest that most of the system is developmentally invariant.
Language processing is a joint product of linguistic principles and psychological mechanism.
The information-processing system
- The study of memory has a long history in psychology. The first systematic studies of memory were performed in the late 19th century(Ebbinghaus, 1885/1913).
William James anticipated the contemporary distinction between working and long-term memory, which he called primary and secondary memory, in his landmark book, Principles of Psychology(James,1890/1950).
Contemporary study of memory and information processing began in the late 1950s(Miller, 1956), and the fields of memory study and language study have exerted a synergistic effect on one another ever since.
✨ Working memory: the temporary storage of information that is being processed in any range of cognitive tasks(Baddeley, 1986, P. 34).
e.g. think of trying to remember a phone number that is spoken to you as you dial it. We need to hold the digits somewhere for a short period of time, and that somewhere has been termed working memory.
Working memory is measured in several ways. The most simple is a memory span test(or simple span test) in which participants are given a series of items(words, letters, numbers and so forth) and asked to recall the items in the order presented. Sometimes they are asked to recall them in backward order. A person's memory span is the number of items that can be reliably recalled in the correct order.
The Baddeley-Hitch Model: Baddeley and Hitch(1974) proposed a model of working memory, which has subsequently been revised a number of times. The model has three components, which are now called the central executive, the visuospatial sketchpad, and the phonological loop. The latter two systems are sometimes referred to as "slave system" to the central executive.
The phonological loop: consists of the phonological store and the articulatory rehearsal system.
The visuospatial sketchpad: maintains and manipulates visuospatial information.
The central executive was initially conceived as a limited capacity pool of general processing resources.( the assumption is that we are limited in terms of the number of things we can do at once) It is assumed that the central executive exerts executive control--- that is, determines what activities the slave systems should be doing at any given time.
✨ Long-term memory: a memory structure that holds permanent knowledge. - Tulving(1972) suggests that we should distinguish between two aspects of long-term memory: episodic memory(deal with personally experienced facts) and semantic memory(general facts).
e.g. Semantic memory holds the information that horses have four legs and a tail, but the last time we went horseback riding is held in episodic memory.
Semantic memory: our organized knowledge of words, concepts, symbols, and objects. It includes such broad classes of information as motor skills(typing, swimming, bicycling), and general knowledge(grammar, arithmetic), spatial knowledge(the typical layout of a house), and social skills.
Episodic memory: retrieve information from a person's own perspective; retrieve personal facts from long-term memory.
✨ Relevance for language processing
The processing function of working memory is used to organize the words into the constituents.
Long-term memory plays several roles. Semantic memory contains information on the speech sounds and words that we retrieve during pattern recognition. And while this process is going on, we are also building up and episodic memory representation of the ongoing discourse. That is, once we complete the processing of a given sentence, we might extract the gist of it and store that in episodic memory.
Summary: - The general strategies by which the human mind encodes, stores and retrieves information can be described independently of language. Working memory provides a temporary repository of information that is relevant for ongoing cognitive tasks. It is divided into three components: the central executive, the phonological loop, and the visuospatial sketchpad. Long-term memory is divided into semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory holds for general knowledge, whereas episodic memory stores our experience from our personal perspective.
✨ Serial and Parallel processing
- If a group of processes takes place one at a time(without overlapping), it is called serial processing. If two or more of the processes take place simultaneously, it is called parallel processing.
✨ Top-down (information at the higher levels may influence processing at the lower levels)and Bottom-up process(which proceeds from the lowest level to the highest level, all of the lower levels of processing operate without influence from the higher levels)
- The distinction between top-down and bottom-up processing is similar in some respects to the distinction between serial and parallel processes. In fact, a top-down process is often a parallel process, and a bottom-up process is usually serial.(not always)
When discussing working memory, there is the notion that we may have a fixed processing capacity for handling information. This has been a central assumption of a variety of accounts of human cognitive functioning. It is an important concept when considering human performance on complex tasks, such as language processing. When the task is complex, one part of the task may draw substantial resources from this limited pool of resources,thereby leaving insufficient resources for other parts and resulting in overall impaired performance.
Tasks that draw substantially from this limited pool of resources are called controlled tasks, and the processes involved in these tasks are referred to as controlled process.(e.g. develop a phrase structure for a sentence)
Tasks that do not require substantial resources are called automatic tasks; process that do not require extensive capacity are referred to as automatic process.(e.g. recognize common words)
Bresnan(1978) reasons that the process of working our way through a syntactic structure places heavy burdens on working memory, which has a fixed capacity. By comparison, the process of lexical retrieval is far easier. Thus, if grammatical information was stored in the lexicon, it would simplify overall language processing.
✨ Modularity
Within cognitive psychology, the issue of modularity has two meanings.
First, it pertains to the degree of independence of the language-processing system;
Second, linguistic subsystems, such as semantics and syntax, operate independently rather than interactively.
The Development of The Processing System
All in all, children of 18 months or perhaps younger can recall information about specific events in their lives. Children acquire a great deal of language within the first few years of life, a time when each of these aspects of memory is developing.
Working memory appears to be closely related to the acquisition of new words.
Semantic memory develops within the first 2 years of life. Moreover, some rudimentary forms of object permanence develop much earlier, as young as 3 or 4 months.
Episodic memory is related to children's ability to understand language in a personal way. It is likely that the emergence of episodic memory is related to the child's acquisition of personal pronouns such as I, me, and mine. A strong episodic memory must be in place for children to develop the ability to tell personal stories.
Summary
It appears children make significant advances in working memory, semantic memory, and episodic memory during the preschool period. Semantic memory appears within the first 2 years. Episodic memory appears to take form between ages two to four. Working memory appears to be functional by age four.
All of these developments assist the acquisition of language, but these relationships are most clearly articulated for working memory. Children with better scores on working memory tasks have larger vocabularies.
The Development of The Processing System
All in all, children of 18 months or perhaps younger can recall information about specific events in their lives. Children acquire a great deal of language within the first few years of life, a time when each of these aspects of memory is developing.
Working memory appears to be closely related to the acquisition of new words.
Semantic memory develops within the first 2 years of life. Moreover, some rudimentary forms of object permanence develop much earlier, as young as 3 or 4 months.
Episodic memory is related to children's ability to understand language in a personal way. It is likely that the emergence of episodic memory is related to the child's acquisition of personal pronouns such as I, me, and mine. A strong episodic memory must be in place for children to develop the ability to tell personal stories.
Summary
It appears children make significant advances in working memory, semantic memory, and episodic memory during the preschool period. Semantic memory appears within the first 2 years. Episodic memory appears to take form between ages two to four. Working memory appears to be functional by age four.
All of these developments assist the acquisition of language, but these relationships are most clearly articulated for working memory. Children with better scores on working memory tasks have larger vocabularies.
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