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Cognitive Process Associated with Language

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Submitted By ladygwen
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Cognitive Processes Associated With Language
Gwendolyn Spillman,
University of Phoenix
Cognitive Psychology
PSYCH/640
Gaston Weisz
March 21, 2014 Cognitive Processes Associated With Language
Language is a cognitive function that most humans take for granted. The basic means of communication among individuals is through language. Language allows people to communicate with each other, share his or her thoughts and feelings, share ideas and concepts, fears, and affirmations. Different cultures have different languages as well as vocabulary and grammatically components that each one understands. The goal of this paper is to explain what language is and the many methods behind it, the cognitive process of perception and how it affects language, and the cognitive process of language comprehension.
Cognitive Processes Associated with Comprehension
There are three processes concerning the cognitive processes associated with language comprehension. These processes begin with the perceptual processes that encode spoken or written words (Anderson, 2010). Parsing is the second stage, in which people try to extract as much information from every word in order to put meaning to a sentence. Individuals will use syntactic cues, such as word order to arrive at an interpretation of a sentence (Anderson, 2010). When sentences contain ambiguity, people will use the principle of minimal attachment to help them interpret a sentence. This is a process where a person will choose an interpretation of a sentence with minimal complications within its phrase structure (Anderson, 2010). When interpreting sentences without ambiguity people will tend to commit to an interpretation right away, this is known as immediacy of processing. When a person is unsure of the correct interpretation, and when they are hesitating because of ambiguity it may take a few seconds to determine the

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