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Language and Cognition

Language and Cognition

Language serves as a bridge between ideas and communication, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world. Psychologists have long debated whether language shapes thought or vice versa. This discussion gained grip with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, who proposed that language determines thought, a concept known as linguistic determinism. They suggested that the vocabulary and structure of a language influence how its speakers think and perceive reality.

Language Development

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Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
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Language is a system of communication that allows the expression of thoughts, ideas, and feelings. The brain processes language in both hemispheres.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 22, 2026

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks

Published on: September 5, 2019

Faster Speech Slows Predictive Processing: Evidence from Mandarin.

Huanhuan Yin¹, Patrick Sturt¹, Martin Pickering¹

¹Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, UK.

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)

|April 21, 2026

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Faster speech rates slow down language prediction, especially in predictable contexts. This indicates that language prediction requires cognitive resources and is sensitive to processing difficulty.

Keywords:

cognitive resources contextual predictability language comprehension prediction prediction mechanism speech rate

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Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Psychology

Background:

Listeners frequently predict upcoming words during language comprehension.
Prediction speed is influenced by processing difficulty and contextual predictability.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how speech rate affects listeners' prediction speed.
To examine the interplay between speech rate, contextual predictability, and cognitive resources in language comprehension.

Main Methods:

Three experiments measured reaction times for word recognition tasks (lexical decision, picture naming, word naming).
Participants processed sentence contexts with varying levels of predictability and different speech rates.
Speech rate and contextual predictability were systematically manipulated.

Main Results:

Faster speech rates led to slower participant responses across all experiments.
The slowing effect of faster speech rates was more pronounced in highly predictable contexts.
This suggests that increased processing difficulty from faster speech interacts with prediction demands.

Conclusions:

Faster speech rates impede prediction speed during language comprehension.
Language prediction is resource-dependent and sensitive to the cognitive load imposed by speech rate.
These findings support models where prediction mechanisms consume cognitive resources.