PSY 260 chapter 11

In a study, participants listened to the following tape recording: Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of the room. As participants heard the word "bugs," they completed a lexical decision task to a test stimulus flashed on a screen. Results showed that the participants responded most slowly to the test stimulus

SKY

Boxing champion George Foreman recently described his family vacations with the statement, "At our ranch in Marshall, Texas, there are lots of ponds and I take the kids out and we fish. And then of course, we grill them." That a reader understands "them" appropriately (George grills fish, not his kids!) is the result of a(n) _____ inference.

anaphoric

The given-new contract is a method for creating

coherence in people's conversations.

Swinney's lexical priming studies using ambiguous words as stimuli show that context

exerts its influence after all meanings of the word have been briefly accessed.

In an eye movement study, Rayner and coworkers had participants read sentences that contained either a high- or low- frequency target word. For example, the sentence "Sam wore the horrid coat though his ____ girlfriend complained," contained either the target word "pretty" or "demure." Results showed the participants' _____ was shorter for the target word _____.

fixation; pretty

In New Guinea, tribes that had been isolated for centuries were found that

had a large number of sophisticated language systems

The principle of late closure can be described as a(n) _____ since it provides a best guess about the unfolding meaning of a sentence.

heuristic

Language consists of smaller components, like words, that can be combined to form larger ones, like phrases, to create sentences, which themselves can be components of a larger story. This property is known as

hierarchical structure.

Most of the coherence in text is created by

inference.

A psycholinguist conducts an experiment with a group of participants from a small village in Asia and another from a small village in South America. She asked the groups to describe the bands of color they saw in a rainbow and found they reported the same number of bands as their language possessed primary color words. These results

support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis