Language Comprehension

Research on negatives (Clark and Chase, 1972)

4 types of sentences: True/False Positives, True/False negatives. Takes longest to respond to the sentence with the mismatch and the negated supposition. We comprehend negatives by first dealing with the embedded supposition and then the negation.

Negatives

A negative sentence assumes a positive sentence and then asks us to infer what must be true if it is false. Assigns a negative truth value.

Lexical ambiguity

A single word has more than one meaning. No structural differences between the two interpretations.

Transient ambiguity

Ambiguity is resolved by the end of the sentence. Principle of minimal attachment: choose the simplest phrase structure that will accomodate the words processed thus far. People adopt one phrase interpretation immediately, when it is contradicted, they change their interpretation.

Permanent ambiguity

Ambiguity remains to the end of the sentence.

Types of interferences

Backward (bridging) interference and forward (elaborative) interference

Constituent structure

Comprehension involves knowing who did what to whom. We do not remember all possible sentence forms. Our knowledge includes information on the sub-patterns (constituents) of sentences. Parsing means we process sentences in terms of their constituents.

Parts of parsing

Constituent structure, Immediacy of interpretation, processing syntactic structure and semantics, ambiguity.

Swinney (1979)

Decision times for ant and spy were facilitated when presented within 400 ms of bugs after 700 ms only ant was facilitated.

Jarvella (1971)

Do people have a poorer memory for exact wording of a constituent once it has been parsed and the parsing of another constituent has begun? Participants only have verbatim memory for the last constituent.

Perception

Encoding the message.

Evidence for Immediacy of Interpretation

Eye fixation patterns

Just and Carpenter (1980)

Fixation durations reflect the amount of information provided by the word. Fixation is immediate when the reader encounters the word.

Caplan et al (2000)

Found that there is more brain activity in Broca's area with center-embedded sentences.

N400

Indicates difficulty in semantic processing

Neural markers of transient ambiguity

Mason et. al (2003) fMRI study: unambiguous vs. ambiguous preferred vs. ambiguous unpreferred. Findings: broca's area most activated with the ambiguous unpreferred.

Two indicators of sentence processing in event-related potentials (ERP) recorded from the brain:

N400 and P600

Center-embedded sentences

One clause is embedded within the other clause. Use relative pronouns to indicate the role of upcoming words.

Allopena et. al (1998): Immediacy in spoken language

Participants looked at a display of objects and were told to manipulate them. Eye movements recorded as instructions were pronounced. Measured the probability of fixating on specific object as a function of time since the start of word articulation. Findings: we begin to interpret a sentence even before we encounter the main verb.

Aaronson & Scarborough (1977)

Participants read sentences displayed one word at a time. Pressed key each time they wanted to read another word. Finding: readers and listeners finish processing of a constituent at the phrase boundaries.

Immediacy of interpretation

People seek to interpret the meaning of each word as they encounter it.

Stages of language comprehension

Perception, parsing, utilization

P600

Response to syntactic violations

Two types of ambiguity

Syntactic and lexical

Utilization

The mental representation is used.

Two types of syntactic ambiguities

Transient and permanent

Processing syntactic structure

Two basic syntactic structures: Word order and inflection.

Bridging interferences

We commonly make bridging interferences to connect the current sentence with previous sentences.

Elaborative interferences

We make elaborative interferences that connect to possible future material.

Parsing

Words are transformed into a mental representation of the meaning. Combine the meanings of individual words to extract the meaning of a sentence.