Psych 20: Language

Word frequency effect

Tasks used to assess word frequency

Lexical decision

Participants read stimuli 1 at a time and are asked to respond as quickly as possible whether the item is a word or not.

Eye-fixation time during reading

how long is a word fixated

Effects of Word frequency

High frequency words processed more quickly than low-frequency words

Semantic priming

Prime consisting of a semantically related vs. unrelated word

Results of Semantic Priming

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Faster processing with semantic vs. neutral prime

Elision

Omission of sounds, syllables, or words in speech

Coarticulation

speaking such that one speech sound influences another

Speech segmentation

Determining syllable/word boundaries

What does context’s (including visual information of the scene and the speaker) role in understanding words

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Facilitates comprehension

Lexical ambiguity

1. Words with the same spelling often have multiple meanings


2. Words with the same spelling can also have different \n pronunciations

Lexical priming

Priming that involves the meaning of words

Tenenhaus Lexical Priming

People briefly access all meanings of a word before relying on \n context to determine relevant meaning

Meaning dominance

Some words are used more frequently than others

Biased dominance

When words have two or more meanings with different dominance

Balanced dominance

\n When words have two or more meanings with similar dominance

Explain the results of: Accessing meaning of ambiguous words while reading a sentence determined by word’s dominance and sentential context

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If there is no prior context: (a) competition between equally likely meanings of a word with balanced dominance results in slow access; (b) activation of only the most frequent meaning of a word with biased dominance results in fast access.

If there is context before a word with biased dominance: (c) activation of both the less frequent and most frequent meanings results in slow access; (d) activation of only the most frequent meaning results in fast access.

Semantics

meanings of words and sentences

Syntax

Rules for combining words into sentences

Parsing

Mentally groups the words into phrases

What does parsing help listeners do?

Create meaning

Garden path sentences

Sentences that begin by appearing to mean one thing, but then end up meaning something else

Temporary ambiguity

\n When the initial words are ambiguous, but the meaning is made clear by the end of the sentence

What does this image show?

Parsing. Two sentences differing in just the final word but with very different structures

The garden path model of parsing

* Listeners use heuristics to group words into

phrases
* Rules are based on syntax a sentence
* Late closure

Heuristics

Rules that can be applied quickly to make a decision

What are benefits and costs of heuristics?

* Benefit – fast (necessary when processing 200 words/min)
* Cost – can make wrong decision

Syntax

The grammatical structure of a sentence

Late closure

Parser assumes new word is part of the \n current phrase

Parsing and Sentence Comprehension

* The proposition to be conveyed that is intended by the speaker (writer) is represented by the syntactic tree
* The speaker (writer) generates a sequence of words from the syntactic
* The listener (reader) must generate a syntactic tree from the sequence of words to understand the proposition
* Comprehension challenges arise because the listener (or reader) must generate the intended syntactic tree
* Visual world paradigm, the context of a scene

Visual world paradigm

The context of a scene

Constraint-based approach to parsing combines: ?

* Syntax
* Word meaning


* Story context
* Scene context

What did Tenenhaus & Trueswell Scene Context expirement show?

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* Visual world paradigm, the context of a scene
* Eye movements change when information suggests revision of interpretation of sentence is necessary
* Linguistic and nonlinguistic information used simultaneously

What was the Tenenhaus & Trueswell Scene Context expirement?

a) One-apple scene similar to the one viewed by Tanenhaus et al.’s (1995) participants. (b) Eye movements made while comprehending the task. (c) Proportion of trials in which eye movements were made to the towel on the right for the ambiguous sentence. (Place the apple on the towel in the box) and the unambiguous sentence (Place the apple that’s on the towel in the box

Coherence

Representation of the text in one’s mind that creates clear relations (between parts of the text and between parts of the text and the stories main topic)

Archived by making inferences

Inferences

Readers create information during reading not explicitly stated \n in the text

Anaphoric Inferences

Connecting objects/people (e.g., pronouns)

Instrument Inference

Specific tools or methods used for the task

Casual Inferences

Events in one clause caused by events in previous sentence

Situation model

Mental representation of what a text is about (Represent events as if experiencing the situation/Point of view of protagonist)

(what were the results?) Subjects heard sentences and were then asked to indicate whether the picture was the object mentioned in the sentence

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Results of Stanfield and Zwaan’s (2001) and Zwaan et al.’s (2002) experiments. Subjects responded “yes” more rapidly \n for the orientation, in (a), and the shape, in (b), that was \n more consistent with the sentence.

Physiology of simulations

* Approximately the same areas of the cortex are activated by actual movements and by reading related action words
* The activation is more extensive for actual movements

Situation Model and Brain Activation Hauk et al. (2004) results.

Colored areas indicate the areas \n of the brain activated by (a) foot, finger, and \n tongue movements; (b) leg, arm, and face words

Other skills are necessary for people to engage in effective \n conversations:

Theory of mind

Nonverbal communication

Theory of mind

Being able to understand what others feel, think, or believe

Nonverbal communication

being able to interpret and react to the person’s gestures, facial expressions, tones of voice, and other cues to meaning

Given–new contract

Speaker constructs sentences so they include \n – Given information \n – New information \n – “New” can then become “given” information

Syntactic coordination

Using similar grammatical constructions

Syntactic priming

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* Production of a specific grammatical construction by one person increases chances other person will use that construction
* Reduces computational load in conversation

Syntactic Priming: Different constructions to express the same thing: \n 1) The girl gave the boy a book. \n 2) The girl gave a book to the boy

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The Branigan et al. (2000) experiment. \n (a) The subject (right) picks, from the cards laid out on \n the table, a card with a picture that matches the \n statement read by the confederate (left). (b) The \n participant then takes a card from the pile of response \n cards and describes the picture on the response card \n to the confederate. This is the key part of the \n experiment, because the question is whether the \n participant on the right will match the syntactic \n construction used by the confederate on the left.

Prosody

The pattern of intonation and rhythm in spoken language

Music as the “language of emotion”

Music creates emotion through sounds that have no meaning

Whats the difference between language and music?

Language combines words and music combines tones to create structured sequences that unfold over time