Linguistics Final

parsing

assigning syntactic structure to the incoming words of a sentence during language comprehension

incrementality

synthesizing and building meaning on the fly based on partial information as speech unfolds, rather than delaying processing until some amount of linguistic material has accumulated

shadowing task

an experimental task in which subjects are asked to repeat the words of a speakers sentence almost as quickly as the speaker produces them

the horse raced past the barn fell

most famous example of a garden path sentence from tom bever (1970)

reduced relative clause

grammatical structure in english involving a relative clause in which certain function words have been omitted; often leads to ambiguity; ex. raced past the barn

garden path sentences

sentences that are difficult to understand because they contain a temporary ambiguity

self paced reading task

behavioural task intended to measure processing difficulty at various points in a sentence; subjects read sentences on a computer screen one word at a time; record the amount of time each subject spends reading each segment

moving window paradigm

version of the self paced reading task where dashes initially replace each alphabetic character in a sentence and participants press a button to uncover each portion of the sentence; this is a more natural reading rhythm

garden path theory

theory of parsing that claims an initial first pass structure is built during comprehension using a restricted amount of grammatical information and guided by certain parsing principles or tendencies, such as the tendency to build the simplest structure possible; frazier and fodor (1978)

heuristics

shallow but very fast information processing shortcuts that often lead to incorrect conclusions based on superficial cues; tversky and kahneman (1974)

availability heuristic

peoples estimates of frequency are often based on how easily examples come to mind

representativeness heuristic

peoples estimates of the likelihood of a category is based on judgments of surface plausibility, disregarding the statistical probability of that category

constraint based approach

main competitor to garden path theory, claiming that multiple interpretations of an ambiguous structure are simultaneously evaluated against a broad range of information sources that can affect the parsers early decisions

thematic relations

knowledge about verbs that captures information about the events they describe, including how many and what kinds of participants are involved in the events, and the roles the various participants play

intransitive verbs

occur with a subject but no direct object

transitive verbs

take both a subject and a direct object

ditransitive verbs

occur with a direct object and an indirect object

sentential complement verbs

introduce a clause rather than a direct object noun phrase

frequency based information

frequent words and structures are recognized more quickly than less common ones

mitchell and cuetos (1991)

different languages will make different assumptions about sentences based on how they are more commonly structured in that sentence

importance of context

attaching a modifier phrase (relative clause/prepositional phrase) usually only makes sense when it is needed to differentiate between two separate entities, so context can greatly reduce garden path effects; altmann and steedman (1988)

tanenhaus and his colleagues (1995)

apple on the towel into the box; can tell how they are interpreting the sentence by eye tracking; no need to look at empty towel

chambers (2004)

pour the egg in the bowl over the flour; garden path effect only emerges in visual displays with a single pourable egg

intonation

just one useful cue among many that we can use to understand meaning, not reliable on its own

Loglan

ambiguity free artificial language created by james cooke brown (1960)

Kamide (2003)

visual displays of characters and objects; looked at object most likely to be involved in an event with the previously heard noun and verb

advantages of eye tracking method

more precise view of what is happening

limitations of eye tracking

have to be able to visually depict content of the sentence; uninformative about predictions outside of visual display

surprisal

measure thats inversely related to the statistical predictability of an event such as a particular continuation of a sentence; hale (2001)

number of distinct phonemes in a language

11 to 164

language extinction

especially prevalent in places that speak english; about half of all languages are endangered

whorf hypothesis

words and structures of a language can affect how the speakers of that language conceptualize or think about the world

kay and kempton (1984)

green and blue colour distinction between speakers of english vs tarahumara; 3 colors shown with identical distance from each other; english speakers judged the distance between blue and green larger

winawer (2007)

light and dark blue colour distinction between speakers of english vs russian; matching colours using a keyboard; russian speakers showed advantage for colours that were on opposite sides of the light/dark distinction because they have two separate words

right side supremacy

words recognized more efficiently when presented to sensory organs on the right side of the body, directly connected to the left hemisphere

code switching

practice of intentionally mixing two or more languages in a single utterance or stretch of speech by fluent bilinguals; adaptive behaviour that weighs the costs/benefits of switching between languages

cognates

words that originate from the same source and are similar in both form and meaning

akkermans (2010)

english speaking dutch participants played prisoners dilemma; those playing in english chose a more competitive strategy, especially when they had been living in an english speaking country

Chen (2013)

Languages that require different conjugation for the future have people that are more healthy and fiscally responsible