Language III - Lexical Access and Syntactic Priming

Flashcards covering lexical ambiguity, false hearing studies, and the effects of experience on lexical access and syntactic production.

Lexical Ambiguity

A situation where a single word has multiple meanings, such as "bank" meaning a financial institution or the side of a waterway.

False Hearing

Context-based, high-confidence misperceptions where individuals interpret ambiguous stimuli based on contextual predictions rather than the actual input.

Activation-Based Account of False Hearing

The theory that false hearing results from an age-related decline in the ability to inhibit the activation of a contextually predicted but incorrect response.

Failes & Sommers (2022)

A study that used eye-tracking to investigate how patterns of fixations on different response options changed in real-time over the course of sentences to understand false hearing.

Rodd et al. (2016)

Research involving large-scale internet experiments and BBC Radio 4's "The Human Zoo" to determine if recent experience affects responses to ambiguous words.

Syntactic Priming

A phenomenon where prior experience of a specific grammatical construction increases the likelihood that a speaker will use that construction again, independent of sentence meaning.

Double Object Sentence

A grammatical structure where a verb is followed by two objects, such as "The girl gave the boy a book."

Prepositional Object Sentence

A grammatical structure where an object is followed by a prepositional phrase, such as "The girl gave a book to the boy."

Branigan et al. (2000)

A study on syntactic co-ordination in dialogue which found that syntactic priming is more likely to occur when the verb used is the same across utterances.

Heyselaar & Segaert (2022)

A study demonstrating that structural priming persists for at least one month in young adults and at least one week in older adults.

Implicit Memory Processes

The memory functions whose age-related decline is cited as the likely reason older adults show shorter-lived structural priming effects compared to younger adults.

Parsing

In the context of language understanding, the recovery of grammatical structure from an input.

Subordinate Meaning

The less common or non-dominant meaning of an ambiguous word, which was the focus of the primes in Rodd et al. (2016) Experiment 2.