Learning Objectives
- Get acquainted with the purpose, principles, and policies of the Psychology 1003B Learning Labs.
- Get students into their Learning Lab groups for the term.
- To understand principles underlying top-down mechanisms in language learning and production.
- To experience and explain well-known examples of language learning and speech processing.
Materials
- Whiteboard markers and erasers.
- Instructor computer and projector with the slide deck and audio.
- Noisy Bingo sheets and a way for students to mark them.
Overview
This lab serves as an overview of Learning Lab policies, alongside the first activities on the topic of language. Students are also placed into groups which remain together for the duration of the semester.
Time Allocation
| Activity | Time |
|---|---|
| TA introductions | 5 min |
| Review lab format and policies | 5 min |
| Assign students to groups | 5 min |
| Learning a New Language | 13 min |
| Noisy Bingo | 15 min |
| Wrap-up | 2 min |
| Question submission | 5 min |
Learning a New Language
Transition into the topic of language by asking how the brain makes sense of it. This activity uses statistical learning as one of the mechanisms involved in learning a new language.
Start with a small lie: tell students that they are doing an experiment on “visual–auditory integration.” Students count collisions between balls on a screen while listening silently to a stream of syllables. The visual task is a distractor which keeps them focused while they hear the sound stream.
Afterward, play different permutations of the syllables and ask whether each sounds like a “real” or “fake” word from the artificial language. Exposure alone allows people to learn regularities in a new language, supporting word learning and the establishment of word boundaries.
The Wug Test can then illustrate how implicit pattern learning also contributes to learning grammatical structure.
Noisy Bingo
This second activity demonstrates how short-term expectations derived from context can shape speech processing. Students mark words they believe they hear in noise-vocoded speech.
The catch is that none of the words on their sheets are actually played. Similar-sounding words and the expectations created by the Bingo cards will nevertheless produce some confident matches and, usually, a few bingos.
Take-home message
- Human communication is very complex.
- Psycholinguistics studies how we learn, process, and produce language.
- Lower-level mechanisms still play important roles in these higher-level dynamics.
- Expectations from both long-term experience and immediate context can shape what we hear.
Final submission
Think about a situation in your life where expectations or prior knowledge helped you communicate with your peers despite an unclear or unfamiliar context. How can you relate this to the concepts covered in the lab?