Chapter 11

What Makes Language Processing difficult?

Phonemes
Coarticulation: making one movement in a way that anticipated future movements or is influenced by a past movement.
Letters:
Orthographic processing: The visual aspect of letter processing, in which the linguistic meaning of a visual symbol is recognized
Words:

Speech stream: A term used to refer to spoken speech that emphasizes its continuous nature. ALthough we perceive speech to be composed of individual words (and therefore to have short breaks between the words), speech sounds are produced fairly continuously.
Mondegreens: segmentation of phonemes into words is subject to occasional error. A rich source of such errors is misheard song lyrics
Homonyms: when two words are spelled and pronounced the same way, but have different meanings

How Are Ambiguities Resolved?

Categorical perception: refers to the fact that people do not perceive slight variations in how phonemes are pronounced. Phonemes can vary along certain dimensions with no cost in their perceivability.
Phoneme restoration effect: phonemes that are poorly produced are “restored” by higher-level processes so the perceiver believes that the missing phoneme actually was present. The system can infer what the missing phoneme should have been based on the context.
McGurk effect: aN effect showing that both visual and auditory information are used in phoneme perception

Lexicon: people recognize words through a matching process in which a spoken word is compared with a mental dictionary that contains representations of all the words they know - not the meaning, but the pronunciation, spelling, and part of speech for each word.
Lexical decision task: a letter string appears on the computer screen, and the participant must say whether it is a word- they are open to semantic priming
Semantic priming: effect in which performance of a task is biased by having seen semantically related words or pictures viewed earlier

Dual route models of reading: models that posit two mechanisms for reading. One route uses a direct matchup of the spelling and entries in the lexicon, and the other translates the letters into sounds and then matches the sound to the auditory entry in the lexicon
Acquired dyslexia: is caused by brain damage (as from a stroke or removal of a brain tumor) in people who are able to read before the injury (2 types of acquired dyslexia)

Surface dyslexia: the reading of nonwords (and regular words) is preserved, but the patient has difficulty reading irregular words.
Phonological dyslexia: patients can correctly read irregular words such as yacht and regular difficulty words such as cup, but they cannot read nonwords.

Sentence parser:the psychological mechanism that derives phrase structures from sentences
Garden path sentence: one in which your cognitive system builds a phrase structure, but later in the sentence it becomes clear that something must have been wrong with it (While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib.” You may have though initially that anna is dressing the baby, but then you realized that interpretation couldn’t be right.
The parser decides what fits where with syntactic cues:

Key word: a word that reliably provides a cue to a bit of phrase structure organization (example: the word a indicates that a noun phrase follows;who,which, and that indicate a relative clause)
Principle of minimal attachment: idea is that the parser is biased to add new words and phrases to a node that already exists on the hierarchy rather than creating a new node

Surface code: (first level) is a representation of the exact words in the order that they appear
Textbase: semantically deeper than the surface representation in that it captures the explicitly stated logical and casual relationships between the objects and events in the text.
Textbase uses a format called proposition: are the most basic unit of meaning that has truth value, and they usually represent causes, events, and objects.
Final level of representation- situation model: describes not just the objects and events in that set of sentences, but the entire situation in which they take place. Refers to the deep knowledge of a text that represents an integration of information from the text and knowledge the reader had before reading the text.