Week 11B – Language 1: Comprehension

Vocabulary-style flashcards covering the foundations of language comprehension, experimental methods, parsing, and discourse processing.

Language

A tool for communication comprising a system of symbols and rules regarding their usage.

Symbols

The written or spoken words that serve as the foundational elements of a language system.

Rules

Guidelines that specify how words are ordered to produce meaningful sentences.

Fixations

Eye-movements during reading where the eye remains still on characters for approximately $250\,ms$.

Saccades

Eye-movements characterized by the eye jumping from one location to another.

Regressions

Backward eye-movements that allow a reader to look at previously read text, accounting for about $10-15\%$ of all eye-movements.

Perceptual Span

The range of vision during reading, typically including $4$ characters to the left and $12-15$ to the right of fixation.

Immediacy hypothesis

The theory that a reader attempts to comprehend a word as soon as it is encountered without any delay.

Eye-mind hypothesis

The assumption that there is no time delay between looking at a word and the brain processing its meaning.

Electroencephalography (EEG)

A technique used to measure voltage changes on the scalp that are associated with the presentation of stimuli.

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs)

Components of the EEG labeled according to their polarity (positive [P] or negative [N]) and latency in milliseconds following stimulus onset.

N400

A negative potential peaking approximately $400\,ms$ after stimulus onset that reveals sensitivity to semantic anomalies/incongruity.

P600

An ERP component that typically indexes syntactic violations or structural processing difficulties.

Syntax

The practice of ordering words according to grammatical rules to construct meaningful sentences.

Parsing

The process of computing the syntactic structure of sentences and assigning elements to categories like noun or verb.

Local Ambiguity

A scenario where various interpretations are possible only temporarily while processing a sentence.

Global Ambiguity

A situation where an entire sentence has multiple possible interpretations.

Garden-Path Model

A parsing model proposing that the simplest syntactic representation is constructed first using only syntactic information.

Constraint based models

Parsing models proposing that the parser utilizes all potentially relevant information to guide early processing stages.

Discourse

Spoken or written language that spans multiple sentences.

Discourse processing

The act of linking units of text (sentences) together to build a mental representation.

Surface form

A level of representation in discourse processing that represents the text itself and is rapidly forgotten.

Text base/Propositional representation

A representation level formed of the propositions extracted from the text.

Situation model

A mental representation that describes the situation referred to in the text, often representing the "gist" of the narrative.

Inferences

Information not explicitly stated in a text but represented within a Situation Model.

Logical Inferences

Inferences based on formal rules and word meanings that are considered $100\%$ certain.

Bridging Inferences

Inferences that link new information to previously obtained information to maintain coherence.

Elaborative Inferences

Inferences that extend the text using world knowledge and semantic associations.

Event-Indexing Model

A model suggesting readers track events along dimensions of time, space, protagonist, causality, and intentionality.

Shallow processing

When extra-grammatical processes influence parsing more than grammatical processes, potentially leading to errors like the Moses Illusion.