HESP300 exam 2

what are attributes of words of interest in psycholinguistics?

 anything that has been shown to affect retrieval speed/reaction times (RTs) and accuracy

things shown to affect retrieval speed/reaction times (RTs) and accuracy

* frequency (how fast you can identify a word)
* associative meanings
* prototypicality
* phonetic structure
* morphemic structure
* imageability, concreteness/abstractness

high frequency

used often in language and easier to access in the brain (i.e. house)

low frequency

word not often heard in language and harder to access in brain

most frequent word in written language

“the”

most frequent word in spoken language

“I”

Words frequent for kids are not frequent for adults because…

frequency by personal age/field

what is semantic priming?

* Hearing one word activates its semantic and phonological “neighbors”


* best evidence that words are related to one another in the brain
* reduces RT

spreading activation models

* Collins and Loftus
* Lexical items are organized in terms of **core and peripheral associations**; much like an unending and overlapping series of zen diagrams 
* Everyday examples:
* Word association tasks and 
* Games such as “password”, 20 questions, etc
* Word is related both immediately to some things and distally to other things 

spreading activation and priming

* If words are interconnected, they should PRIME one another to facilitate access

lexical decision task

* “Is butter a word?”
* RT is longer if the preceding word was nurse; shorter if it was bread
* Looking for the time it takes a person to tell if the word is a real word 
* Base reaction time to lexical decision, then give list of words that should prime them → faster reaction time 
* Fast reaction time comes from grouping things together 

priming ___ recognition, which ____ RT

facilitates, reduces

what is the most powerful/effective form of priming?

semantics (meaning)

why can phonologically similar targets sometimes inhibit recognition?

Words from phonologically dense neighborhoods (lots of members) may be more difficult to retrieve

Factors that affect **speed of word recognition:** frequency

* Determining your personal “frequency of use” can be problematic (ex. Word frequency books)


* More frequent words will be recognized *faster* (e.g. in phoneme monitoring)
* More frequent words will be identified accurately even when input is degraded 
* When people “mis-hear”, they associate in the direction of more frequent items 

phoneme monitoring paradigm (purpose and procedure)

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* A way to measure lexical access time
* Pre-test (vocab test) to make sure your subjects know all the words you will use 


* Stimuli: paired sentences differing only in assumed **frequency** of a pair of synonymous words 
* Measure reaction time 
* ex.
* “The traveling **b**assoon playing went to Omaha” 
* “The itinerant **b**asoon player went to Omaha”
* Put words they want to test next to sound, people hear b later in second sentence 
* Faster with more frequent word

effects of word lengths

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* In general, longer words take longer than shorter words to process BUT


* Many long words lie in **sparse neighborhoods** (compared to dense neighborhood), which helps retrieval 

effects of age of aquisition

* In general, words you learn early in life are easier to recognize and retrieve than those learned later


* BUT, may be shaped by frequency of word use on a daily basis when you’re an adult 

two ways context can help word recognition

* top-down (try to fill in rest of word)
* hear “ca” → brain tries to guess “cat”
* bottom-up (use phonemes to figure out what word could work)
* hear “cata” → think catastrophe which is bottom-up info that aquires over time 

what is lexical ambiguity and what impact does it have on processing?

* when a word means more than one thing
* Most research suggests that ambiguous words always take longer to process, presumably because all meanings are accessed initially 
* Context is used to narrow down to appropriate choices 

what happens every time the brain hears a word that has more than one meaning?

brain stops for a second to make sure it selects the right meaning (using phoneme monitoring test)

what happens when an entire utterance is ambiguous?

brain uses context so it does not have to consider the less likely word meanings

what is crossmodal priming and how does it relate to ambiguity?

*  seeing while listening
* Notion that things can be ambiguous does not rest on only looking or sounding the same 


* Things can cross in two modes and create ambiguity in brain 

what are sunken meanings?

* Activation of multiple meanings of a word
* Some try to get you into a desirable phonological neighborhood
* Words have associated meanings and feelings that may not be clearly shown in a product, try to put qualities into words to take activation into spreading good thoughts and associations

Cohort model

* accessing words as you hear more of the target
* concerned with spoken word recognition
* sounds are depicted as being input sequentially over time
* initial sound triggers set of possible words that narrow as more sounds are input
* When listening, brain decides where words stop even though continuous in speech when two sounds cannot be next to each other (statistical learning)

how does protypicality affect reaction time?

if something does not fit a basic prototype, takes longer for brain to understand and sort through the less common factors associated with category (outliers require more detail)

tip of the tongue phenomenon

* the “bathtub” effect
* Know what starts with and ends with and syllables, but not being able to pin point word is tip of tongue moment
* malapropisms
* using words incorrectly

in the tip of the tongue phenomenon, words seem to be stored along with information about…

* phonology (onset/offset)
* stress
* syllable structure

category size effect

* Probably some features are **redundant** and are nested in other features (Collins & Quillian)
* reduces storage space needed
* semantic verification: is an X a Y? Does an X do Y? True or False?
* RT to answer or verify indicates distance between “storage nodes”  

category size effect shows a ____ of word organization

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* Hierarchical network
* The model presumes that there is **cognitive economy** in the system, and that redundant class features are stored at the top of the hierarchy and are not repeated further down

example of associative meanings of words: contrast

day/night

example of associative meanings of words: similarity

sad/unhappy

example of associative meanings of words: subordination

family/sister ; vehicle/car

example of associative meanings of words: coordination

sister-brother

example of associative meanings of words: part-whole

year/month

example of associative meanings of words: completion

big-mac ; gin-tonic

example of associative meanings of words: egocentrism

* personal biases
* republican/rich

example of associative meanings of words: predication

* baby/cry
* trying to build a sentence (syntagmatic association)

example of associative meanings of words: assonance

* rhyming

example of associative meanings of words: word derivatives

deep/depth

which two associations are considered immature responses and why?

* predication: trying to build a sentence → children do often 
* Reflects that children’s mental dictionaries are stripped down, smaller vocabularies so have less fast word associations 
* assonance: part of brain is broken so they can only rhyme
* first thought associated shows smaller lexicon

how are morphemes stored?

* antidisestablishmentarianism
* RT studies provide some evidence for prefix/morpheme “stripping”
* RT for untie longer than for uncle
* cognitive economy makes it easier to add un- to words to signify reversing
* Suffixes which induce phonological changes in the root seem to take longer than those which do not
* medicine → medical takes longer than teach → teacher


* The degree to which you can see the relationships among morphemes (transparency) matters
* hot dog less transparent than birdhouse because is not direct meaning
* People have to remember how they relate and what it  means, cannot use morpheme stripping 

in English, ____ bridges spoken and written/read language

phonological awareness

what is speech awareness?

* words have sounds within them
* notion that words have sound properties 


* changing sounds changes meaning or creates a nonword
* notion that sounds are moveable/have indiv. meanings
* syllable structure
* have sense that things have syllables/rhyme and have onset/conclusion syllable
* cat, bat, rat → c, b, r are onset and -at is conclusion syllable
* phonotactics
* Have the sense of words stringing together bc of statistical learning 

what is Phoneme-grapheme correspondence 

* linking sounds to specific letters
* Once kids have sense of this notion (around 4/kindergarten), have to show them what sounds/letters go together 

basic symbols in language and how they associate to meanings in different languages

* base symbols are called radicals
* in Chinese, have base symbols that readers need to recognize how they can be combined and elaborated
* each comvo symbol (word) is associated to a meaning
* like sight words in English
* no need to spend time decoding
* without phonics, cannot sound out the word you see to recall it from memory/understanding of being heard (so need to decode to an extent)

Dual routes in reading

* **Whole word** (word ball is associated to picture of a ball, do not actually know meaning just the association) VS **phonics** (know the principle and can piece together to get meaning)


* In Chinese, can go directly from logograph to meaning 
* Can do so in English and often need to:
* would be inefficient to sound out function words or words that you come to realize are irregular

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Getting to words involves…

* Using both top-down and bottom-up information


* To either locate an entry that may be stored differently if it is frequent/infrequent 
* Or to use strategies that access the word more easily

short term memory (STM) in understanding language

Deriving meaning from utterances and sentences usually requires some degree of short-term memory (words said)

long term memory (LTM) in understanding language

Maintaining gist of utterances requires long-term memory (meaning has to stay, not the exact words)

STM and LTM skills in language are part of _____

executive function (EF)

size of STM

limited (7 +/- 2)

size of LTM

unlimited

what gets in and stays in STM

* what grabs our attention, emotions, motivation, novelty get in
* things that are rehearsed, organized, elaborated stay in

what gets in and stays in LTM

* things that are rehearsed, organized, elaborated, networked get in
* virtually everything stays in

what helps retrieval of STM

3-8 seconds

what helps retrieval of LTM

priming, cuing, practice, examples

what are declarative memories in LTM

facts

what are procedural memories in LTM

skills

primacy and recency effect

in STM, likely to remember the first and last number/words

* like bathtub effect bc middle things lost

what is digit span and what can help improve it?

* remembering numbers
* Human STM is defined by the “magic number 7, plus or minus 2” (George Miller)
* “Chunking” into bits help remember

common mistakes in remembering lists of words

* phonologically
* similar word pairs can be mixed up
* similar sounding words w/ diff meanings
* semantically
* say words in similar category
* stored auditorily, even when written
* retrieve items based on categories in list

concepts that get remembered

* primacy
* recency
* incorrect but phonologically similar items

distinguishing between things that got remembered

* recognition
* recall memory

verbal memory is greatly increased by the ______

availability of syntax

what is verbatim memory?

* remembering things exactly how they were presented
* hard to recall
* you process meaning, then discard the form/exact info

attention in executive function

what you pay attention to

inhibition in executive function

being able to suppress undesired responses (Stroop test)

shifting/flexibility in executive function

* the n-back test

what is the stroop test?

* basics for implicit association test
* color words are written in different color text that may not match the word

congruent condition in Stroop test

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* Congruent condition = things match
* Color of word matches word you’re supposed to read
* Takes twice as long when colors and words do not match bc reading is so automatic, so inhibiting that response is very difficult 
* Suppressing is not hard for someone who cannot read

what is the Simon task?

* requires active inhibition of an automatic response
* EF advantage in bilingual children bc they always have to suppress one meaning of something in other language not being used

what must be derived in interpreting a sentence?

* constituent/phrase structure 
* Underlying semantic relations (who is doing what to whom)
* Resolve possible structural ambiguities (local and standing)
* reasonable paraphrases (what might mean same thing but said differently)
* speech acts, pragmatic function (occur after syntactic analysis)

local structural ambiguities

*  “when Fred passes the ball always gets to its target”
* When talking, not ambiguous
* Solved by things that tell you when and how things attach to each other
* Why we use commas

standing structural ambiguities

* “visiting relatives can be a nuisance”
* context (top-down) helps build sentence meaning

what happens if you process an ambiguous sentence wrong for the context?

* have to recompute from beginning
* very difficult to do when incorrect at first

____ aids in processing of linguistic items (Marks and Miller)

grammar

memory for anomalous sentences is relatively _____

good

* anomalous = abnormal

at what rate does syntactic form fade? (Sachs)

quickly

what are click studies?

* evidence that sentences are “parsed” (broken apart) into constituents and clauses
* Listen to sentences with random clicks, write down where you heard them 
* Listeners will displace them to cause boundaries, regardless of where they really were (writing down what they hear)
* And Ladefoged (1967) found that objects would locate imaginary clicks in the same way

clauses as a basic processing unit

* Identification of words from stimulus sentences is best within clauses
* Memory for clauses is better if you are interrupted in the middle, rather than at the end


* Bottom line, you seem to process the clause, take the concept, and start dumping the syntax

Faster identifying something seen in sentence if at _____ of clause

* end
* Memory better at middle or immediately after processing clause compared to things processed longer before asked

Processing of material divided into _______ is easier than material which is erratically segmented

constituents (Graf&Torrey, 1966)

evidence of clausal/constituent processing through reading time and eye gaze patterns

* readers dwell/stay at constituent boundaries, suggesting wrap up of clause’s information


* Visual spacing impacts memory 
* If clauses separated on own lines, easier to remember than random separation
* Lots of spacing seems like visual boundaries

Why are some sentences more difficult than others to process? 

* Listener reliance on SVO, SAAD (simple-active-affirmative-declarative) strategies 
* Congruity between logical (deep structure) relations and surface structure aids processing because they do not violate SVO rule in English
* Greater verb complexity (defines by number of arguments a verb can take, takes longer to process)
* phoneme monitoring (RT may be longer and paraphrase less accurately with more complex verb bc have to decide between two phoneme “trees”)

garden path sentences

* sentences that mislead the listener/reader because they violate typical parsing strategies 
* Typically, missing clause headers, AKA reduces relative clause

things that help syntactic ambiguity

* context
* overt clauses markers
* words like “that” in “he knew that she…”

difficult English sentences to process

* passives
* mary was loved by john
* datives
* the man showed the girl the baby
* CERCS (center-embedded relative clauses)
* the man who lives next to my sister is a doctor
* worse if semantically reversible
* when subject and object can be reversed to produce a meaningful sentence

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what are two major theories of how we process ambiguous sentences 

* garden path model
* constraint satisfaction model

what is the garden path model

* Readers pick the least marked interpretation of sentence. If they discover they are wrong, must backtrack and re-compute
* Two strategies predispose readers to treat ambiguous material in predictable ways 
* late closure principle and minimal attachment
* Try to attach each new word to the constituent that came just before

late closure principle

try to build as larger a constituent as you can; wait to impose a boundary until you have to 

minimal attachment

assume the simplest syntactic structure

constraint satisfaction model

* Readers (listeners) always compute both possible interpretations. If the first turns out to be wrong, second is reactivated
* Context seems to act as a heuristic for sentence processing, unlike lexical processing

some other English-specific strategies for sentence processing (9 of them included)

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* Assume that first NVN sequences is main clause unless marked by subordinating conjunction or clause marker
* NVN should be interpreted as Actor-action-object 


* Determiners mark the beginnings of NP’s and their end is marked by 
* A plural morpheme
* Auxiliary very or modal
* A verb or word not normally used as a noun
* When you find a function word, begin a new constituent longer than one word in length 
* Use affixes to help decide whether a content word is a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb


* After encountering a verb, look for the number and kind of arguments appropriate to the verb
* Using content words alone, build propositions that make sense 
* Ex. semantically contrained or non-reversibles are processed easily regardless of syntactic structure


* Look for the first of two clauses to describe the first of two events, and the second later, unless marked otherwise (**order of mention strategy**)
* Look for given info to precede new info 

why do children struggle more than adults for sentence processing?

* use order of mention
* young children presume that ordering things in long sentence are in order that they happen

why are strategies less helpful when learning different languages?

* modifiers differ by language
* word order differs so have to go against what words you anticipate to happen next

how does speed reading work?

readers anticipate words that should come next after reading 1 or 2 words, skimming to make sure

* less skilled readers have to decode everything

what are shadowing studies in top-down sentence processing?

* how fast can you repeat a model
* Marlsen-Wilson: shows people can recognize words within 200 msec of their onsets if they are in context, as opposed to single words
* as people are listening, they are making predictions of what speaker will say

what are gating studies in top-down sentence processing?

* how much information do you need to identify an upcoming word
* In context, words can be identified within 175-200 msec of onset; out of context, it takes 350 msec


* In general, semantic cues are strongest, with syntactic cues next in order of importance
*  See how much info it takes to guess the right information that follows

varieties of linguistic humor

* phonological
* puns, learned first
* lexical
* multiple meanings of words, learned as understand multiple meanings
* syntactic
* multiple readings of a phrase/whole utterance