PSYC-4099 Exam #2

In studies on categorical perception, listeners hear synthesized sounds with varying voice onset times (VOT) (e.g., between /ga and /ka/) and have to identify each as belonging to either phonemic category (e.g., as a /ga or a /ka/). Results show that:

there is a boundary along the continuum of VOT associated with an abrupt change how the sounds are classified

Warren and colleagues found that when they replaced a speech sound with the sound of coughing or noise, listeners perceived it according to the sentence context (e.g., hearing "heel" in "It was found that the *eel was on the shoe"). These findings suggest:

Top-down effects of context on speech perception

Which of the following affects speech perception?

The acoustic properties of speech. The speaker's speech rate. The predictability of the sentence context

McGurk and MacDonald (1976) found that when a speaker's lips produce the syllable /ga while an audio tape of the sound /ba is played, listeners hear the fused sound as:

da

Studies on mispronunciation detection have found that participants who are shadowing the mispronunciations are more likely to restore them:

a and c

Studies by Warren and colleagues indicate that if a speech sound in a sentence is replaced by a cough, listeners still perceive the sound. This is called:

phonemic restoration

The consonants /b/, /d/, and /g differ in their ____________

place of articulation

Vowels are distinguished by:

the position and height of the tongue

The phenomenon capturing the fact that our vocal apparatus moves into position for making the next sound is called:

coarticulation

In Swinney's (1979) experiment, people heard a sentence like "The waiter poured the port into the glass." (Note: "port" is both a kind of wine and a place to dock ships.) They made a lexical decision at one of two test points: either immediately after hearing "port," or a bit later. For the lexical decision, they had to indicate whether a word shown (e.g., "wine", "ship", "pog") was a real word or not. Overall, the results showed:

priming for both "wine" and "ship" at the early point but only for "wine" at the later point

Determiners, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections are:

Closed-class (function) words

When a word presented earlier (e.g., "doctor") activates a word with a related meaning (e.g., "nurse") this is called _______

semantic priming

Which model of lexical access emphasizes the importance of word onsets (e.g., the first syllable of a word)?

Marslen-Wilson's (1987) Cohort Model

Which model of lexical access suggests that language users can use top-down information (e.g., from the sentence context) from the earliest moments of processing?

McCleland and Elman's (1986) interactive activation model: TRACE

"The horse raced past the barn fell." The reason we have trouble understanding garden path sentences like this one is that

language is interpreted word by word, as we hear it.

The "late closure" strategy of parsing proposes that:

we prefer to attach incoming words to the current clause (phrase)

Autonomous models of parsing claim that

syntax is processed before semantics and pragmatics

In the study by Tanenhaus and colleagues (1995), participants heard the sentence "Put the apple on the towel in the box", either in a visual context with one apple on a towel and an empty towel, or in a visual context with two apples: one on a towel and one on a napkin. The researchers found that:

When the visual context had only one apple, participants were more likely to alternate their gaze fixations between the apple and the empty towel (indicating confusion about the interpretation of "on the towel").

The findings suggest that listeners can eliminate syntactic ambiguity in the right visual context.

The view that we use all available information (syntactic, lexical, discourse, visual) in our initial parsing of a sentence describes the ___________ model of parsing:

interactive / contrainted based

Parsing, the mental grouping of words into sentences, is most relevant to:

sentence comprehension

The "minimal attachment" strategy of parsing proposes that:

we prefer to the syntactic construction the fewest syntactic nodes possible

Consider the sentence: "The painter gave the actor a rose."

What is the thematic role of "the painter".

"the painter" is the agent of the sentence

The fact that it's easier to process the sentence "The children taught by the Berlitz method passed the test" than the sentence "The teachers taught by the Berlitz method passed the test." suggests that:

context can eliminate syntactic ambiguity (here, helps readers parse "taught" as a past participle vs. the simple past tens

Consider the sentence: "The spy saw the cop with the binoculars". This sentence:

involves permanent syntactic ambiguity that can be resolved by other sources of information (e.g., context, prosody)

According to Levelt (1989), there are four major processes in language production. Which of the following is not one of them?

rephrasing

Saying "clarefully" instead of "carefully" is an example of a(n) __________ error

addition

When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said "As I was telling my husband—As I was telling President Bush..." her speech error involved units at what level of processing?

the word level

According to Fromkin's serial model, what is the correct order of stages of speech production?

syntactic structure, intonation contour, content words, function words and affixes, phonetic segments

The strongest evidence for independence of planning units is that:

speakers tend to make mistakes at a single level of processing (e.g., at the phoneme level), leaving the rest of the utterance intact

Dell's (1986) parallel model of language production differs from Fromkin's serial model in that it:

assumes that multiple levels of processing are active at the same time

In Levelt's model, the mental lexicon includes lemma and lexeme information associated with each word. Lemma information refers to:

Syntactic aspects of word knowledge (e.g., part of speech, grammatical gender)

Speech errors include:

unintended, non-habitual deviations from a speech plan (e.g., accidentally saying "porelation" instead of "correlation")

Saying "pulled a pantrum" instead of "pulled a tantrum" is an example of a ___________ error.

phoneme perseveration

Freud's explanation that "slips of the tongue" originate from intrapsychic conflict makes it easy to explain common speech errors like anticipation and perseveration errors.

False

The invariance problem refers to the fact that there is no one-to-one correspondence between:

acoustic cues and perceptual events

During a "tip-of-the-tongue" (TOT) state:

Speakers have partial access to words: they have access to the meaning, but not enough phonological information

The smallest unit of meaning in a given language is called:

morpheme

The class of models that assumes that words are represented in the mental lexicon within a network of interconnecting nodes is called:

spreading activation (parallel) models

Derivational morphemes (e.g., -er, -ness, -ion, -ly) are used to create new words and typically cause a predictable shift in meaning.

True

People are slower to retrieve high frequency vs. low frequency open class words (e.g., nouns and verbs).

False

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