Psych 240-Lecture 16

Front 1

2 ways language is not as straightforward as it seems

Back 1

Complicated sentences can be comprehensible:

“Daddy, what did you bring that book that
I don’t want to be read to out of up for?”

Simple sentences can be difficult to comprehend:

“The horse raced past the barn fell.”

“After the musician had played the piano was quickly taken off stage.”

Front 2

Production

Back 2

speaking and writing

Front 3

Comprehension

Back 3

listening and reading

Front 4

3 steps involved in speaking

Back 4

Have thought--form sentence--produce sound

Front 5

3 steps involved in listening

Back 5

Hear sound--identify words, sentences--comprehend meaning

Front 6

Phonemes

Back 6

Smallest unit of speech sound
Around 40 in each language
Different phonemes in different languages
L vs. R in Japanese
Tonal differences (Chinese)
Aspirated vs. unaspirated “p” (Thai)
clucking sound (Xhosa - South Africa)
Rules of order
Fpibs not okay
Pritos okay
Tlitos not okay (but Tl is okay in the Tlingit language)

Front 7

Morphemes

Back 7

Smallest unit that with a definable meaning or grammatical function
Prefixes, suffixes, roots
Can be entire words
Language has rules for combining them

Front 8

Words

Back 8

Combinations of one or more morphemes
specific rules: “lifted” vs. “goed”

Adults know several hundred thousand

Front 9

Phrase

Back 9

organized grouping of words. the building blocks of sentences.

Front 10

Syntax

Back 10

rules that determine word order

Front 11

Sentence

Back 11

group of phrases conveying meaning

Front 12

Semantics (meaning)

Back 12

Related to concepts/categories in LTM

Words symbolize concepts

Meanings of sentences
– Words must be grouped into phrases
– Appropriate meaning assigned not just by words in isolation, but by relationships between words.

Front 13

Noam Chomsky

Back 13

• Set stage for contemporary study of language.
• Studied how words and phrases translate into meaning.

Front 14

Phrase structure

Back 14

Way to map the structure of a sentence.
Each word is assigned a role.
Rules specify in what order and combinations these roles can occur.

Front 15

First problem with relying on phrase structure alone

Back 15

Same phrase structure, two meanings:


The shooting of the hunters was terrible.

Front 16

Second problem with relying on phrase structure alone

Back 16

(2) Two different phrase structures, one meaning


The boy hit the ball (active voice)
The ball was hit by the boy. (passive voice)

Front 17

Surface structure

Back 17

the phrase structure that applies to the order in which the words were actually spoken.

Front 18

Deep structure

Back 18

the fundamental, underlying phrase structure that conveys the meaning

Front 19

Transformational grammar

Back 19

rules that transform among surface structures having the same deep structure

Front 20

Paraphrase

Back 20

Different surface structures with deep structure that conveys the same meaning.

The boy hit the ball
The ball was hit by the boy

different focus

Front 21

Ambiguity

Back 21

same wording has more than one meaning.

Front 22

Lexical ambiguity

Back 22

word has multiple meanings.

Front 23

Syntactic ambiguity

Back 23

same words can be grouped together into more than one phrase structure.

They are cooking apples

Front 24

Referential ambiguity

Back 24

Same word/phrase can refer to two different things within a sentence.

Front 25

Result of semantic priming by Meyer

Back 25

Probes with related primes are verified more rapidly than those with unrelated primes

Front 26

Why semantic priming test happened the way it did

Back 26

Concepts are connected to each other in semantic memory
Activation of one concept spreads to closely-related concepts (=“spreading activation”)
Presentation of primes activate strongly-linked concepts
If a concept is already active when you read the word, you can respond to it more quickly

Front 27

Lexical access (dumb retrieval or smart retrieval)

Back 27

Dumb retrieval!

All possible meanings of a word are retrieved from the lexicon (mental dictionary); context then guides selection of correct meaning.

Front 28

Swinney Experiment

Back 28

Listen to a passage of text.
When presented with text on a screen, decide if word or non-word. (lexical decision task)
Measure reaction time.

Immediately after and delayed lexical decision

Front 29

Parsing a sentence

Back 29

Understanding a sentence requires parsing
We need to establish the syntactic structure of the sentence, which tells us who did what to whom.

Front 30

Principle of Minimal Attachment

Back 30

Assume that ambiguous prepositional phrase describes the action (verb) rather than the object of the sentence.

“with binoculars” describes “saw” rather than “the cop”


The spy saw the cop, and the spy was using binoculars

instead of

The spy saw the cop, and the cop had binoculars.

Front 31

Interactionist approaching (with parsing)

Back 31

All information, both syntactic and semantic, is taken into account simultaneously

Sometimes syntax is ambiguous:
The spy saw the man with the binoculars.
In some cases, meaning can resolve this ambiguity:
The bird saw the man with the binoculars.

The knowledge that birds don’t use binoculars prevents the parser from ever considering this grouping