Psycholinguistics exam 3 PDF

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Psych 413 – Exam 3 Study Notes Word Comprehension

Not a book, a triangle What you know about a word is reflected by how you traverse the 3 points of the triangle Going from sound to word: Speech perception: phonology: word meaning Process is incremental: people make guesses about what they're hearing as they're hearing it. Don't wait for end of the word  Sometimes have enough info already before the hearing or word is done 2 models on how we make these guesses 1. Cohort Model more modular (little top-down info) kinds of guesses people make are mostly based on speech signal itself and context info is skimpy and not so important 2. TRACE model more interactive (lots of top-down info) Whats top down info ? the broader context, what they are talking about, what you think the words are going to be, the sentence, what word is likely to be there, anything that is further analyzed comin back down, what morpphemes or phonemes you are hearing TRACE model says we are using top down info all the time. Cohort model  from the speech signal, you unconsciously develop a cohort of possible words  When hear speech signal, narrow down set of possibilities  Gradually narrow down cohort until you figure out what word it is I took the car for a spin Acoustic signal : /s/ cohort Snap Spinach Psychologist Spin

Sun Spark Silly Ceiling Now hear /sp/ cohort Spinach Spin Spark Now get to /spi/ cohort Spinach reading/writing  Without speech, there is no writing 2. Writing systems represent spoken language in a more permanent form o Big changes form images that represent meaning, not sounds of words o Many writing systems, all solutions to the same problem: representing spoken language  Textbook discusses: orthographic depth o Shallow orthographies: visual symbols represent sounds in simple/predictable manner  Italian, russian, turkish, etc  Do not have words like: mint/pint, gave/gave, colonel/aisle, etc o Deep orthographies: correspondences are less consistent  Chinese, danish, english  Does this property affect how people read? o Not so much: basic processes are the same, only some differences in detail o Surprising degree of similarity 3. Reading requires using phonology o Writing represents spoken language but leaves out a lot o Readers have to put some of this back  Ex permit (parking) or permit (allow) o Just writing something doesn't always convey a person's meaning (you can't tell if they were bragging or amazed, mad or making a joke)  We have to fill in the missing phonology  We do this all the time --> basic processes in perception: 4. Skilled readers can't help using phonology o How do people get from print to meaning? o 2 logical possibilities: orth-->sem, phon -->sem, orth-->phon-->sem  Experiment by Gu van Orden o A question: "is it an animal" then a word "bear"  If correct, say yes, if not, say no  Error occurs because reading still uses phonology when they should use orthography  Major findings

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Skilled readers activate phonology even though it causes errors Also happens for nonwords like GREAN Also happens in reading sentences Children: more advanced readers make more of these errors Happens in different writing systems  Deep/shallow o Orthography (spelling) and phonology (sound) become deeply intertwined!  Worse readers actually make fewer errors 5. Brain evidence o How does the brain respond to writing/respond to speech  Evidence from 4 contrasting language: integration greater for good readers compared to poor readers  The more skill you have --> the more your phonology and orthography become integrated

ALL NOTES Constraint Based Model ***on learn@UW  Example: modular theory says you always use minimal attachment first, then revise it if necessary  Cosntraint based theory says you are constantly using lots of ___  Visual world paradigm: comprehending ambiguous language in the world o Ex. Ambiguous instruction: put the apple on the towel in the box o Unambiguous control: put the apple that's on the towel in the box  Eye movements: resolve the ambiguity o Decline of modularity in sentence comprehension?  Early data showed no effect of contect in reading time --> supported modularity  Later data DID show effect of context on reading times --> supported interaction  Why the Change?  Stronger contexts  Better understanding of frequency biases  Prediction o The world is full of things that happen over time o With enough experience, you can predict what comes next  Funny videos are FUNNY because we have predicted something and we were wrong about it  Unconsciously predict where your limbs will be, compare with actual position, learn to reach/walk/etc o Prediction can work in language comprehension o Sentances occur over time and vary in predictability  How to know that our intuitions are right that we do some prediction during comprehension? o Prediction comes from experience  Ex spanish has gender: la/el  Spanish speakers can use this to predict sentences

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Can spanish speaking kids do this: compare 2 pictures with the same/different genders --> yes they can  Study how long it takes a child to look at the right picture (when there's 2 pictures with 2 genders) when they hear it, vs. 2 pictures with the same gender  They look at the gender faster when they're different: use gender to predict Memory demands and comprehension o Recursion: sentence inside sentence inside…  The book {the girl read} was really long.  These complex sentences are hard because they require lots of short term memory to understand them o 2 implications with memory claim:  People with smaller memory capacity have more trouble with complex sentences like this --> true  If you had more recursion, would need even more memory capacity: your memory limits how much you can understand o Do people ever say sentences like this?  Incomprehensible because of memory demands or experience?  Experience view: sentences are hard because no one says them, so you have no experience with them --> garden path sentences  Memory capacity itself is dependent on experience - the memory tests are really just reading tests  If we could find a reason to say such a sentence, it wouldn't be incomprehensible

Semantic priming - The phenomenon by which hearing or reading a word partially activates other words that are related in meaning to that word, making the related words easier to recognize in subsequent encounters. Lexical decision - An experimental task in which participants read strings of letters on a screen that might either be actual words (doctor) or nonsense words (domter). Subjects press one button if they think they've seen a real word, or a different button to signal that the letters formed a nonsense word. Response times for real words are taken as a general measure of the ease of recognizing those words under specific experimental conditions.

Cross-modal priming - An experimental task involving both spoken and written modalities; participants typically hear prime words, which are often embedded within full sentences, and they must respond to test words displayed orthographically on a computer screen.

Facilitation - Processes that make it easier for word recognition to be completed. Inhibition - Processes that result in word recognition becoming more difficult. Neighborhood density - Experimental results demonstrating that it is more difficult and time-consuming to retrieve a word from memory if the word bears a strong phonological resemblance to many other words in the vocabulary than if resembles only a few other words. Cohort model - A model of word recognition in which multiple cohort competitors become active immediately after the beginning of word is detected, and are gradually winnowed down to a single candidate as additional acoustic information is taken in. from the speech signal, you unconsciously develop a cohort (group) of possible words which you gradually narrow down until you figure out which one it is.

Incremental language processing - the process of language in such a way that hearers begin to generate hypotheses about the meaning of the incoming speech on the basis of partial acoustic information, refining and revising these hypotheses on the fly rather than waiting until there is enough information in the speech stream for the hearer to be certain about what the speaker means.

Phonemic awareness - The conscious recognition of phonemes as distinct units, usually only solidly acquired by individuals who are literate in an alphabetic writing system. -phonemes distinguish words from other words (p, d, b - pad, dad, bad) Homophones - Two or more words that have separate, non-overlapping meanings but sound exactly the same (even though they may be spelled differently). Alphabetic vs. logographic writing system - A collection of orthographic symbols that map onto individual sounds or phonemes. Parsing - The process of assigning syntactic structure to the incoming words of a sentence during language comprehension. The structure-building mechanisms and procedures collectively are often referred to as "the parser." Incrementality (or incremental interpretation) - The property of synthesizing and building meaning "on the fly" as individual units of speech come in, rather than delaying processing until some amount of linguistic material has accumulated. Garden path sentences - Sentences that are difficult to understand because they contain a temporary ambiguity. The tendency is for hearers or readers to initially interpret the ambiguous structure incorrectly, and then experience confusion when

that initial interpretation turns out to be grammatically incompatible with later material in the sentence.

ambiguous sentences that you think you understand and then suddenly you don' Garden Path Theory - A theory of parsing that claims that 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. Evaluations of plausible meanings or consideration of the context only come into play at a later stage of parsing

Minimal Attachment (MA): choose the simplest sentence structure when sentences have more than one possible structure - trying many alternative interpretations takes too much memory - gives you best chance of being right most of the time 

Late Closure (LC): If two structures are equally simple, keep adding words to the phrase you've been working on Constraint-Based Approach - The main competitor to the garden path theory, this approach claims that multiple interpretations of an ambiguous structure are simultaneously evaluated against a broad range of information sources (or constraints) that can affect the parser's early decisions....