sphhrng 4430 exam 2

varieties of psycholinguistic experiments

- Rating sentences for grammaticality

- Repetition of words and nonwords

- Circling letters on page of a text

Institutional Review Board (IRB)

A board that reviews all planned experiments to make sure they meet ethical standards following national guidelines

(Five) Examples of observations that cause us to wonder about language processing / observed difficulties associated with:

1. Proofreading

2. Garden path sentences

3. Irregularities in children’s speech that is unlike adult’s speech

4. Disfluencies related to word finding

5. Phenomena associated with communication disorders

Proofreading

- Correcting grammar, spelling, and punctuation

- How does top-down processing influence the ability to count how many f's are in a sentence?

garden path sentences

a sentence that is temporarily ambiguous or confusing because it contains a group of words that are compatible with more than one structural analysis

Examples:

• I convinced her children are noisy.

• I told the girl the cat scratched Bill would help her.

• The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.

Irregularities in children’s speech that is unlike adult’s speech

• Unlike adult speech

  • the boy goed home

  • I rided my bike

  • she telled me

  • I eated my grapes

  • she taked my toy

Disfluencies related to word finding

• normal disfluencies when we are trying to retrieve a word

  • I wanted to paint the window….sill….using that great paint by….Valspar.

Phenomena associated with communication disorders

• nonfluent aphasia - telegraphic speech - omission of functor words

nuisance variable

variables that could provide alternative explanations

independent variable

the thing you “wiggle” or vary systematically so that you can see its effects

dependent variable

what you measure to test your hypothesis

hypothesis

the carefully expressed, explicit version of the idea that the experiment is designed to test

stimulus

what we provide to experimental participants

response

how the participants react to the stimulus

Bousfield & Sedgewick (1944)

• By having people list as many items in a category as they could in 10 minutes, they collected data to investigate the associative links between words and how activation may have spread.

2 Hypotheses from Bousfield & Sedgewick

1. category membership hypothesis

2. proximity hypothesis

category membership hypothesis

words have lemmas that are close to one another because of membership in the category DAIRY (in the example in class)

proximity hypothesis

referents close to one another in the grocery store

Sachs (1967)

Experimental Question:

• What do we remember from sentences we hear- the message, the form, or both?

  • Sentences are only very briefly remembered in terms of form; very quickly what is remembered involves meaning

  • we store what we hear at Level 1: Message level and Level 2: Functional level

Bransford, Barclay, and Franks (1972)

Experimental Question:

• Do we remember the actual meaning or mental pictures we construct when we hear something?

Results:

• sentences that generate a new mental picture are easiest to detect, memory is most reliable at the message level

5 Spech Production Studies:

1. Oldfield & Wingfield

2. Belke et al.

3. Kohn et al.

4. Goldman-Eisler

5. Griffin & Bock

Oldfield & Wingfield (1965)

Task:

• Picture naming of common and uncommon objects

Results:

• the rarer a word is, the slower people were at naming a picture of it

Belke et al. (2005)

• studied effects of category membership on latency of naming for words

Results:

• Naming items in category 1 (clustered by semantic category) took longer than category 2 (across semantic categories)

  • when a category was "activated", naming was slower as if more choices had become activated and had to be rejected/suppressed before production of the target could occur

Kohn et al. (1987)

• studied the tip of the tongue state

Methods:

• 18 participants were presented with definitions of words (varied in length and meaning categories) and were asked to give the word and to say what they were thinking as they tried to come up with it if the TOT state occurred

Results:

• people who can't yet come up with the target can come up with some morphemes that could be in it or make up a word that could be a real one

Goldman-Eisler (1968)

Experimental Question:

• What processes do people use to generate a sentence about a picture?

Results:

• people hesitate more when they are asked to explain the cartoon than when they were asked to describe it

Griffin & Block (2000)

Task:

• used eye tracking to observe where people looked while describing events shown in pictures of people interacting with animals, objects, or other people

Results:

• people look at thing they're going to mention first, and they keep looking at it until its concept has activated the LEMMA. Then, they look to the next thing they’re going to activate

Warren (1970)

• Comprehension Study

Task:

• study design involved removal of a short part of an utterance (for example, the /s/ sound in the word legislatures

Results:

• discovered the phonemic restoration effect, which is the tendency for our perceptual system to fill in missing speech sounds

Lexical Decision Task

Task:

• decide as quickly as possible, whether a set of letters flashed on a screen (one-fifth of a second) makes a word or not

dialect

• a variety of any language spoken by a group of people that is characterized by systematic differences from other varieties of the same language in terms of structural or lexical features

  • every person speaks a dialect of their native language

accent

systematic phonological variation (difference in pronunciation)

• every person speaks in an accent

idiolect

form of a language spoken by one person

• variation from speaker to speaker

slang

• stylistic choices in vocabulary

jargon

• technical language → speech production that just sounds like words in child development. Jargon is just technical language

  • “aphasia” is Jargon for speech path and audiology

register

speech style that is appropriate for a certain situation (example: formal versus informal)

mutual intelligibility

if speakers of one language variety can understand speakers of another language variety and vice versa

dialect continuum

large number of contiguous dialects on a continuum

5 types of language variation

1. phonemic

2. phonological

3. morphological

4. syntactic

5. lexical

phonetic variation

• differences at the phonetic level that differ in its physical characteristics

phonological variation

• inventory of sounds and how they’re distributed

  • caught versus cot

morphological variation

• The distribution of morphemes

• The use of completely different morphemes for the same function

  • SAE versus Appalachian English - past tense for certain verbs

    • climb, eat, and heat

• morphological variation across registers

  • example: Spanish and other “pro-drop” languages you can drop pronouns from speech, which may depend on the context

    • yo hablo español vs. hablo español

syntactic variation

variation in the category in which certain words belong to

• “she has already told you” verus “ she done already told you”

lexical / semantic variation

• variation in the different words people use to mean the same thing

  • soda

  • pop

  • coke

• Variation in what the same word means

  • British english versus american english

    • “knock up” - rouse from sleep by knocking versus to make pregnant

    • “to be pissed” - to be drunk versus to be mad

2 types of factors that influence variation

• regional variation

  • regional and geographic factors that influence variation

• social variation

  • social class, age, gender, ethnicity

Regional variation

• languages are spoken in different geographical locations that are separate from each other

• regional dialect boundaries often coincide with natural barriers

4 social factors

1. socioeconomic variation

2. age variation

3. gender variation

4. ethnic variation

socioeconomic variation

• those in the higher SES typically define what becomes the “standard” dialect

• associating with a particular SES can be expressed with language

age variation

• younger speakers may not speak the same way as older speakers

  • rising intonation at the end of declarative sentences

  • use of “like” as an interjection

  • lexical variation - addition of new words (download) and loss of old words (dungarees)

gender variation

• women are more likely to use standard variants than men

  • may be tied to social roles that women and men play

ethnic variation

• nothing inherent about any ethnic group that causes members of the group to speak one way as opposed to another

  • people who belong to a particular ethnic group may not speak a dialect associated with that ethnicity

  • people who are not associated with a particular ethnicity may speak a dialect associated with it

When does language learning begin?

before birth in the 3rd trimester

Eimas et al. (1971)

• Studies of speech perception in infants

• rate of sucking on a pacifier to examine ability to distinguish differences between articulatory features (e.g., t/d)

most infants can determine what a person is looking at and look at it too by how many months?

5 months

children react different depending on whether an adult who isn't giving them a toy seems to be unable versus unwilling to give it at how many months?

6 months

children are learning to ignore phonetic differences not used in their languages by how many months?

10-12 months

McNeill (1966)

• psycholinguistics of imitation

• when anyone tries to imitate an utterance, what comes out is a varying mixture of what they’ve understood and what they have re-created from their own syntax, morphology, phonology, and phonetics

zone of proximal development

what your mind is ready to learn; it's neither too easy nor too difficult

5 types of early syntax

1. Whole phrase versus word combining

2. Plurals and past tense

3. Transitive verbs and sensory verbs

4. Prepositional phrases

5. Formulas versus constructions

Whole-phrase strategy

• toddler doesn't seem to know that the syllables in the phrases are actually words with their own meanings

Word-combining strategy

• Take two words they already know and combine them

  • shows that what's keeping children from combining words isn't conceptual but rather a limited word production skill

two-word stage

• toddlers try to express a substantial range of semantic relations between people, things, and actions with two words

  • object-location, action-location, possession, agent-action, action-object

plurals and past tense

• first reliably used bound morpheme is the progressive -ing

• first free grammatical morphemes are in and on

• next comes the regular noun plural ending (/-s/ and /-z/ forms)

• then a few irregular past tense verbs

• then other common morphemes

Berko (1958)

• Do children memorize all the inflected forms that they know, or do they subconsciously learn rules for making plurals and past tenses?

  • Wug test

Wug Test Conclusions

• children do learn the rules for putting the commonest endings on English words

When does early syntax development occur?

after 2 word stage

syntactic roles

the verb's subject and object

semantic roles

agent and undergoer

transitive verb

a verb that has an object, describes an action (ex: The ball hits the baby)

Sensory Verbs

class of verbs in which someone/something gets and experiences info about the world (ex; see, hear, feel, taste)

locative prepositional phrase

• usually the first type of prepositional phrase learned by children; a locative modifier—a phrase that gives location information (ex: on the pillow)

Formulas

• memorized utterance recipes that can be used to create an utterance, but not too much flexibility (ex: think of it like a recipe. Add one or two ingredients to customize it)

  • ex: Hi ______, ____ please, put ______ down

constructions

• meaningful patterns of words that are more flexible

  • transitive verb clauses (the cat chased the mouse)

  • sensory verb clauses (Jimmy hears the doorbell)

  • locative prepositional phrases (The cat is on the pillow)

Hirsch-Pasek & Golinkoff

• Research on how soon children begin to "de-construct" constructions in comprehension

• used 2 screens to see children's understanding of transitive verb constructions (preferential looking study)

  • demonstrates that learning is a gradual process

canonical babbling

• (6 to 10 months)

• production of at least one well formed consonant in a syllable; sometimes as part of a sequence of repetitive syllables; bababa, dadada

Jargon

• nonword, multisyllabic, intonation-rich productions

Protowords

• specific recurring word-like or slightly longer utterances, "almost" words that are recognized by family members (ex: pacigo for pacifier)

phonological processes

• patterns seen in child development that can be thought of simplifications that make talking easier

Fronting

• "back" consonants (k, g) replaced by "front" consonants (t, d)

  • ex: dog--> dod

final consonant devoicing

• final voiced consonants are produced as voiceless cognates

  • ex: dog--> dok, mud--> muk

Stopping

• fricative consonants replaced by stop cognates

  • ex: that--> dat, zoo--> doo

Aphasia

an acquired language disorder caused by focal brain damage

How to talk to people with aphasia

1. unhurried fashion

2. use facial cues

3. use gestures and writing along with speaking

4. keep reflecting what you've heard

5. simple and direct communication

6. use normal volume

7. respect their intelligence

Focal damage

localized, covering a relatively small area

diffuse damage

widespread damage (Alzheimer's)

Broca's aphasia

- expressive/nonfluent aphasia

- understand the meaning of words quite well, but have a hard time figuring out the relationships among words

Wernicke's aphasia

- receptive or fluent aphasia

- have difficulty understanding the meaning of what they hear, but they apparently have some intact spreading activation processes and are able to complete syntactic processes such as those involved in the formation of long distance dependencies

telegraphic communication

includes omission of functors (articles, conjunctions) and tendency to use/overuse high-frequency words

sound errors

often occur on sounds that are also problematic to children (ex: fricatives)

2 Aphasic Assessments

1. Boston Naming Test

2. Western Aphasia Battery

Boston Naming test

- Assesses word retrieval abilities

- 60 black and white line drawings to name

Western Aphasia battery

- Determines the degree and type of aphasia

- Assesses:

• content

• fluency

• auditory comprehension

• repetition

• naming

• reading

• writing

• calculation

3 Aphasic Treatments

1. Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT)

2. Semantic Feature Analysis

3. Constraint-Induced Aphasia Therapy (CIAT)

melodic intonation therapy

• non-dominant hemisphere for language facilitates communication

  • phrase transformed into a melodic pattern of 3 or 4 tones

semantic feature analysis

• semantic-level approach that aims to explicitly strengthen semantic representations

  • coached through specific semantic info that is relevant to a pictured object

  • encouraged to produce the lexical labels for characteristic semantic features associated with the target

Constraint-induced aphasia therapy (CIAT)

• the goal is to overcome "learned nonuse"

• 3 principles:

  • massed practice (30 hours within 10 working days)

  • constraint induction/focusing on training (a range of techniques that allow the therapist to guide the patient towards forms of communication he or she might otherwise avoid)

  • behavioral relevance (mimic everyday communication, relevant complementary actions)

3 Hypotheses about syntactic processing deficits in aphasia

1. Global Parsing Failure hypothesis

2. The resource restriction hypothesis

3. The slowed syntax hypothesis

global parsing failure

• hypothesizes that an individual with Broca's aphasia is incapable of discovering relationships between words in sentences when there are no semantic (meaning) cues to help them out

syntactic parsing

• refers to how comprehenders use cues to determine how words in a sentence relate to one another during the process of interpreting a sentence

gap-filling syntactic processes

- ex: The people liked the waiter from the small town who served the drinks.

- includes a filler noun phrase (the waiter) that serves as a subject of the relative clause (who served the drinks)

- The sentence has long-distance dependency. The waiter is the subject of the verb served, but waiter is a long way away from served in the sentence

Zurif et al. (1993)

• asked patients with Wernicke's aphasia and Broca's aphasia to process sentences with long-distance dependencies and react to probe words at critical points in the sentence

Results:

• individuals with Broca’s Aphasia understand the meaning of words quite well, but have a hard time figuring out the relationships among words

• individuals with wernicke’s aphasia have difficulty understanding the meaning of what they hear, but they apparently have some intact spreading activation processes and are able to complete syntactic processes, such as those involved in the formation of long-distance dependencies

resource restriction hypothesis

• both building syntactic structure and assigning meaning to structured representations requires "resources"

• brain damaged individuals suffer a reduction in resources

Possible support for this hypothesis:

• Caplan and Hildebrandt (1988)