ch.11 psych

Describe this effect: Words in a sentence can affect processing of an ambiguous sentence. What can we can conclude from this effect?

"The spy saw the man with the binoculars" vs. "The bird saw the man with the binoculars." Semantics can affect sentence processing

bedroom has

"bedroom" has two syllables and two morphemes, because each syllable, "bed" and "room," has a meaning.

table consists of

"table" has two syllables, "tabe" and "ul," it also consists of only a single morpheme, because the syllables alone have no meaning.

truck consists of

"truck" consists of a number of phonemes, but only one morpheme, because none of the components that create the word truck mean anything

trucks consists of

"trucks," which means "more than one truck," has two morphemes.

We can describe languages as being

"unique but the same" because use different words, sounds, and rules and same because all languages have words that serve the functions of nouns and verbs, include system to make things negative, ask questions, and refer to the past/present.

the word bit contains what phonemes

/b/, /i/, and /t/ because we can change bit into pit, bat, or to bid (phonemes refer ton sounds not letters)

what are the 4 major concerns of psycholinguistics

1) Comprehension- how do people understand spoken and written language 2) Speech Production- how do people produce language 3) Representation- how is language represented in the mind and in the brain 4) Acquisition- how do people learn language

Language makes it possible to create new and unique sentences because it has what two properties:

1) hierarchical 2) governed by rules

Broca's aphasia

A condition associated with damage to Broca's area, in the frontal lobe, characterized by labored ungrammatical speech and difficulty in understanding some types of sentences not only have difficulty forming complete sentences, they also have difficulty understanding some types of sentences

what is Wernicke's aphasia

A condition, caused by damage to Wernicke's area, that is characterized by difficulty in understanding language, and fluent, grammatically correct, but incoherent speech (semantics- understanding meaning)

situation model

A mental representation of what a text is about This approach proposes that the mental representation people form as they read a story does not consist of information about phrases, sentences, or paragraphs; instead, it is a representation of the situation in terms of the people, objects, locations, and events being described in the story

what is lexicon

A person's knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words.

phonemic restoration- description and conclusion

A phoneme in a spoken word in a sentence can be perceived even if it is obscured by noise Knowledge of meaning helps "fill in the blanks"

garden path sentences

A sentence in which the meaning that seems to be implied at the beginning of the sentence turns out to be incorrect, based on information that is presented later in the sentence

temporary ambiguity

A situation in which the meaning of a sentence, based on its initial words, is ambiguous because a number of meanings are possible, depending on how the sentence unfolds. "Cast iron sinks quickly rust" is an example of a sentence that creates temporary ambiguity

how would language mechanisms work for understanding the sentence: After the musician played the piano was wheeled off the stage.

After the musician played ... So far all the words are in the same phrase After the musician played the piano ... According to late closure, the parsing mechanism assumes that the piano is part of the current phrase After the musician played the piano was ... But when we reach was, late closure adds this to the phrase to create [After the musician played] [the piano was wheeled off the stage]. when wheeled is added to create an even longer phrase, it becomes obvious that something is wrong. Late closure has led us astray (down the garden path!). We need to reconsider, taking the meaning of the sentence into account, and reparse the sentence so "the piano" is not added to the first phrase. Instead, it becomes part of the second phrase to create the grouping

what is special about endings such as "s" and "ed"

Although endings such as "s" and "ed," have no meanings in themselves, they are considered morphemes because they change the meaning of a word

instrument inferences

An inference about tools or methods that occurs while reading text or listening to speech "William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet while he was sitting at his desk," we infer from what we know about the time Shakespeare lived that he was probably using a quill pen

anaphoric inferences

An inference that connects an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence Anaphoric inference occurs when we infer that She at the beginning of the second sentence and the other she near the end both refer to Riffifi.

causal inferences

An inference that results in the conclusion that the events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous clause or sentence. Sharon took an aspirin. Her headache went away. we make an anaphoric inference that "Her" refers to Sharon, and we make a causal inference that taking the aspirin caused the headache to go away

situation model approach to text comprehension.

Another approach to understanding how people understand stories is to consider the nature of the mental representation that people form as they read a story

What occurs when the ambiguous word cast has balanced dominance? The cast worked into the night. (control word: cook)

As a person reads the word cast, both meanings of cast are activated, because cast (member of a play) and cast (plaster cast) are equally likely Because two meanings are activated, the person looks longer at cast than at the control word cook, which has only one meaning as a noun.

Describe this effect: Semantics and syntax are affected by damage to different brain areas. What can we can conclude from this effect?

Broca: Frontal lobe damage affects syntax. Wernicke: Temporal lobe damage affects semantics. Semantics and syntax are processed by different brain areas

How was Chomsky's ideas for languages different from Skinner's behaviorism?

Chomsky saw studying language as a way to study the properties of the mind Therefore, disagreed with the behaviorist idea that the mind is not valid topic of study for psychology

What is lexical decision task do and what does it demonstrate?

Demonstrates the word frequency effect subjects are asked to decide as quickly as possible whether a particular stimulus is a word or a nonword is called a lexical decision task because you had to decide whether each group of letters was a word in your lexicon able to carry out the lexical decision task more rapidly for a list which contains high-frequency words such as history and busy, than for a list which contains low-frequency words such as decoy and voluble

Describe lexical ambiguity and the conclusions drawn from it?

Description- Many words have more than one meaning (examples: cast, tin). For words with biased dominance, one meaning is more likely. For words with balanced dominance, meanings are equally likely Conclusion- A word's meaning dominance and the context in which it appears determine which meanings of the word are activated and how rapidly

Describe word frequency and the conclusions drawn from it?

Description- Words vary in the frequency with which they are used in a particular language (examples: pretty, demure), and this affects ease of understanding Conclusion- High-frequency words are read faster than low-frequency words

Describe this effect: Information in a visual scene can affect processing of an ambiguous sentence. What can we can conclude from this effect?

Different scenes cause different processing of the same sentence. Content of a scene can affect sentence processing

evidence that a culture's language can influence the way people perceive and think.

Experiments comparing color discrimination in Russian-speaking and English-speaking participants have revealed differences in color perception related to language. Other experiments show that these differences may occur mainly when colors are presented to the right hemisphere, so the left (language) hemisphere is activated.

what are saccadic eye movements

Eye movements from one fixation point to another and the places where the eye briefly stops to look at a particular place in a scene, called fixations, are measured by eye-tracking devices

What influences the process of accessing the meaning of a word?

First, the frequency of a word determines how long it takes to process its meaning Second, the context of the sentence determines which meaning we access, if a word has more than one meaning Finally, our ability to access the correct meaning of a word depends on both the word's frequency and, for words with more than one meaning, a combination of meaning dominance and context

relate garden path sentences and temporary ambiguity

Garden path sentences illustrate temporary ambiguity, because the initial words of the sentence are ambiguous—they can lead to more than one meaning—but the meaning is made clear by the end of the sentence

what happen when Broca tested patients who had suffered strokes that damaged their frontal lobe?

He found that their speech was slow and labored and often had jumbled sentence structure (syntax)

syntactic priming

Hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a statement that follows will be produced with the same construction. important because it can lead people to coordinate the grammatical form of their statements during a conversation.

Ross Metusalem and coworkers (2012) recorded subjects' ERPs as they read scenarios and the results were?

If you were reading this scenario, which word would you predict to follow "he saw the group walk out onto the ..."? Stage is the obvious choice, so it was called the "expected" condition. Guitar doesn't fit the passage, but since it is related to concerts and bands, it is called the "event-related" word. Barn doesn't fit the passage and is also not related to the topic, so it is called the "event-unrelated" word. average ERPs recorded as subjects read the target words. The idea behind this experiment was to note the amplitude of the N400 response. Because stage was the expected word, there is only a small N400 response to this word. The interesting result is the response to the other two words. Barn causes a large N400, because it isn't related to the passage. Guitar, which doesn't fit the passage either but is related to "concerts," generates a smaller N400 than barn. key result is that the N400 response to an event-related word like guitar (red curve) is smaller than the response to an event-unrelated word like barn (blue curve). This suggests that even though guitar doesn't fit in the sentence, the person's knowledge that guitars are associated with concerts is activated. tage to be activated, and to generate little or no N400 response, because it fits the meaning of the sentence. However, the fact that guitar generates a smaller N400 than barn means that this word is at least slightly activated by the concert scenario. our knowledge about different situations is continually being accessed as we read a story, and if guitar is activated, it is also likely that other words related to concerts, such as drums, vocalist, crowds, and beer (depending on your experience with concerts), would also be activated. The idea that many things associated with a particular scenario are activated is connected with the idea that we create a situation model while we are reading. What the ERP results show is that as we read, models of the situation are activated that include lots of details based on what we know about particular situations results like these also indicate that we access this knowledge rapidly, within fractions of a second after reading a particular word. This online monitoring of meaning is consistent with the interactionist approach to sentence processing, because it shows that our knowledge of events influences our understanding of a sentence with little delay.

what is behaviorism

In 1957, B.F Skinner, the main proponent of behaviorism, published a book called Verbal Behavior language is learn through reinforcement children learn language by being rewarded for using correct language and punished (or not rewarded) for using incorrect language

What did Tanenhaus do in his visual word paradigm experiments?

In Tanenhaus's experiment, subjects' eye movements were measured as they saw objects on a table, as in Figure 11.8a (the two-apple condition) or 11.9a (the one-apple condition). As subjects looked at this display, they were told to carry out the following instructions: Place the apple on the towel in the box. Interpretation 1: The relevant apple is the one on the towel. Interpretation 2: Move the apple onto the towel. The interactionist approach to parsing predicts that when there are two apples in the scene (Figure 11.8a) and listeners hear "Put the apple," they'll expect the speaker to immediately include information to let them know which apple he or she is talking about and so will pick Interpretation 1. To determine if this occurred, Tanenhaus measured subjects' eye movements as they were listening to the instructions. Many subjects looked first at the apple on the napkin in response to "Put the apple" (eye movement 1), and then moved to the apple that is on the towel in response to "on the towel" (eye movement 2). This means the subject is interpreting the beginning of the sentence as identifying which apple is to be moved, as predicted by the interactionist approach. Then, upon hearing "in the box" the eyes moved to the box (eye movement 3). The interactionist approach predicts a different result if there is only one apple (Figure 11.9a). In this case, subjects will know which apple to move immediately upon hearing "Put the apple," so they'll be more likely to adopt Interpretation 2, above. The eye movement records for this condition, in Figure 11.9b, show that upon hearing "Put the apple on the towel," the person immediately looks at the apple (eye movement 1) and then at the other towel (eye movement 2), indicating that this person did adopt the second interpretation, that the apple should be moved to the other towel. However, upon hearing "in the box," the person quickly makes a correction and looks back at the apple (eye movement 3) and then at the box (eye movement 4), indicating the new interpretation that the apple should be placed in the box. The important result of this experiment is that the way subjects interpret the sentence, as indicated by their eye movements, is determined by the scene they are observing. This result is different from the prediction of the syntax-first approach: If parsing is always based on the structure of the sentence, then changing the scene should have no effect on the eye movements.

given-new contract

In a conversation, a speaker should construct sentences so that they contain both given information (information that the listener already knows) and new information (information that the listener is hearing for the first time). steps to guide their listeners through the conversation Sentence 1. Ed was given an alligator for his birthday. Given information (from previous conversation): Ed had a birthday. New information: He got an alligator. Sentence 2. The alligator was his favorite present. Given information (from sentence [1]): Ed got an alligator. New information: It was his favorite present

visual world paradigm

In experiments on language processing, determining how subjects are processing information in a scene as they respond to specific instructions related to the scene used to investigate how observing particular objects in a scene can influence how we interpret a sentence

inferences

In language, the process by which readers create information that is not explicitly stated in the text.

what is late closure

In parsing, when a person encounters a new word, the parsering mechanism assumes that this word is part of the current phrase so each new word is added to the current phrase for as long as possible

Speech segmentation -description and conclusion

Individual words are perceived in spoken sentences even though there are usually no breaks between words in the speech stimulus. Knowledge of the meanings of words in a language and knowledge of other characteristics of speech, such as sounds that usually go together in a word, help create speech segmentation

Words isolated from conversational speech -description and conclusion

It is difficult to perceive the isolated words. The context provided by the surrounding words aids in the perception of a word.

What does the rule-based nature of language mean?

It means that these components can be arranged in certain ways ("what is my cat saying?" permissible in English but not in other ways "Cat my saying is what?")

common ground

Knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions shared between two speakers.

Describe this effect: Temporary ambiguity can be caused by expectations and can be changed by experience. What can we can conclude from this effect?

Less likely sentence construction creates more ambiguity, but effect decreases with experience. Past experience with statistics of a language plus ongoing experience affects sentence processing

Word superiority -description and conclusion

Letters presented visually are easier to recognize when in a word. Letters are affected by their surroundings

What are two tests that demonstrate slow response for less frequent words?

Lexical decision task eye movements in reading

important for achieving speech segmentation.

Meaning, as well as a person's experience with other aspects of language

what is the description and conclusion of Link between action words and brain activity

Motor areas of cortex are activated by action words. Readers' responses to words include simulation of actions

describe and draw a conclusion from common ground

Mutually recognized common knowledge. Speakers tailor information to the listener's level of knowledge. People work together to achieve common ground in a conversation (see Figure 11.15).

How does event-related potential relate to language and what is important about these results?

N400 wave of ERP becomes larger when the meaning of the word does not fit the rest of the sentence Associated with temporal lobe This component of the response is sensitive to the meaning of words in a sentence- semantics P600 wave of the ERP is affected by grammar. It becomes larger when a grammatically incorrect form is used This response is sensitive to the form of a sentence- syntax associated with frontal lobe Damage to areas in the frontal lobe reduces the larger P600 response that occurs when the form of a sentence is incorrect results illustrate different physiological responses to syntax and semantics

how does semantics help with conversation

On the semantic side, people take other people's knowledge into account and help establish common ground if necessary.

how does syntax help with conversations

On the syntactic side, people coordinate or align the syntactic form of their statements. This makes speaking easier and frees up resources to deal with the task of alternating between understanding and producing messages

What exactly is "a mental representation of what a text is about"?

One way this question has been answered is to suggest that a person simulates the perceptual and motor (movement) characteristics of the objects and actions in a story.

What would happen if someone with Broca's aphasia 1. The apple was eaten by the girl. 2. The boy was pushed by the girl.

Patients with Broca's aphasia have no trouble understanding sentence [1] but have difficulty with sentence [2]. The problem they have with sentence [2] is deciding whether the girl pushed the boy or the boy pushed the girl patients with Broca's aphasia have difficulty processing connecting words such as "was" and "by," and this makes it difficult to determine who was pushed. (Notice what happens to the sentence when these two words are omitted) that the first sentence cannot be interpreted in two ways. It is clear that the girl ate the apple, because it is not possible

syntactic coordination

Process by which people use similar grammatical constructions when having a conversation.

In 1957, Noam Chomsky published a book titled Synaptic Structures, in which he proposed what?

Proposed that human language is coded in the genes just as humans are programmed to walk, they are programmed to acquire and use language Chomsky concluded that despite the wide variations that exist across languages, the underlying basis of all language is similar

what is the description and conclusion of Prediction based on knowledge of a situation

Readers access most likely word to fit story, and also related words. Readers' experiences with situations lead to predictions (see Figure 11.14).

what is the description and conclusion of Creating situation models

Readers create perceptions that match the situations described in sentences Listeners simulate perceptual and motor characteristics of objects and actions in a story.

Describe this effect: Errors of semantics and syntax generate ERP responses. What can we can conclude from this effect?

Semantic and syntactic errors cause increases in N400 (semantics) and P600 (syntax) components of the ERP. Semantics and syntax are processed differently in the brain

describe and draw a conclusion from synaptic coordination

Similar grammatical constructions in sentences during conversation. A person's speech patterns are influenced by the grammatical constructions used by the other person in a conversation (see Figure 11.16).

what is meaning dominance

Some meanings of words occur more frequently than others.

describe and draw a conclusion from the given-new contract

Speaker should provide both given and new information in a sentence. Providing given information facilitates comprehension.

What happens when comparing words with dominance and words with biased dominance with no prior context?

Speed determined by dominance

What happens when comparing words with dominance and words with biased dominance with prior context?

Speed determined by dominance and context

what is the syntax-first approach to parsing

The approach to parsing that emphasizes the role of syntax states that as people read a sentence, their grouping of words into phrases is governed by a number of rules that are based on syntax If, along the way, readers realize there is something wrong with their parsing, as occurs with sentence, then they take other information into account in order to reinterpret the sentence

what is word frequency

The frequency with which a word appears in a language

what is a corpus

The frequency with which specific words are used and the frequency of different meanings and grammatical constructions in a particular language Corpus reflects how people typically use their language

interactionist approach to parsing

The idea that information provided by both syntax and semantics is taken into account simultaneously as we read or listen to a sentence. Contrasts with the syntax-first approach.

what is the word superiority effect

The idea that letters are easier to identify when they are part of a word than when they are seen in isolation or in a string of letters that do not form a word

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

The idea that the nature of language in a particular culture can affect the way people in that culture think. idea that language can influence cognition

what is parsing

The mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases The way a sentence is parsed determines its meaning

what is the word frequency effect

The phenomenon of faster reading time for high-frequency words than for low-frequency words.

what is speech segmentation.

The process of perceiving individual words within the continuous flow of the speech signal Our ability to perceive individual words even though there are often no pauses between words in the sound signal

phoneme

The shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word.

Morphemes

The smallest unit of language that has a definable meaning or a grammatical function.

Holly Branigan and coworkers (2000) illustrated syntactic priming by using

The subject (right) picks, from the cards laid out on the table, a card with a picture that matches the statement read by the confederate (left). (b) The subject then takes a card from the pile of response cards and describes the picture on the response card to the confederate. This is the key part of the experiment because the question is whether the subject on the right will match the syntactic construction used by the subject on the left. a) confederate reads priming gstatement: the girl gave the boy a book b) subject picks up response card and describes picture to confederate: The father gave his daughter a present. syntax does match, as in the example in Figure 11.17b, we can conclude that syntactic priming has occurred. Branigan found that on 78 percent of the trials, the form of the subject's description matched the form of the confederate's priming statement. This supports the idea that speakers are sensitive to the linguistic behavior of other speakers and adjust their behaviors to match. This coordination of syntactic form between speakers reduces the computational load involved in creating a conversation because it is easier to copy the form of someone else's sentence than it is to create your own form from scratch.

"Getting himself and his car to work on the neighboring island was time consuming. Every morning he drove for a few minutes, and then boarded the...." Although there are a number of ways to complete this sentence, most people respond "ferry" Why?

They do this by going beyond syntax and semantics, or even the meanings of individual words in the sentence. The expectation that the person would be boarding a ferry is created by people's knowledge that getting from one island to another in a car is likely to involve boarding a ferry (not a bridge)

Parsing is the process by which words in a sentence are grouped into phrases has been studied by

This process has been studied by using garden path sentences that illustrate the effect of temporary ambiguity.

The experienced soldiers warned about the dangers before the midnight raid. The experienced soldiers warned about the dangers conducted the midnight raid. what does this experiment show

Warned used as a main verb. This is the most likely construction. (b) When warned is in the relative clause, it becomes part of the entire clause, so it is parsed differently than when it is the main verb. This is the less likely construction according to the idea that our experience with language leads us to predict the most likely construction, we become "garden pathed" when our experience leads us to predict the MV construction when reading sentence

Contrast Wernicke's aphasia and Broca's aphasia

Wernicke's aphasia patients produce meaningless speech are are unable to understand speech and writing Wernicke's patients have more widespread difficulties in understanding patients with Broca's aphasia have trouble understanding sentences in which meaning depends on word order

what is the phonemic restoration effect

When a phoneme in a word is heard even though it is obscured by a noise, such as a cough. This typically occurs when the word is part of a sentence.

what is lexical ambiguity

When a word can have more than one meaning. For example, bug can mean an insect, a listening device, to annoy, or a problem in a computer program.

what is balanced dominance

When a word has more than one meaning and all meanings are equally likely

biased dominance

When a word has more than one meaning and one meaning is more likely.

What did Irwin Pollack and JM Pickett (1964) demonstrate by recording the conversations of subjects who sat in a room waiting for the experiment to begin?

When taken out of context and presented alone, words become much more difficult to understand, because of people's often sloppy pronunciation in conversational speech subjects were then presented with recordings of single words taken out of their own conversations, they could identify only half the words, even though they were listening to their own voices eople in this experiment were able to identify words as they were talking to each other, but couldn't identify the same words when the words were isolated, illustrates that their ability to perceive words in conversations is aided by the context provided by the words and sentences that make up the conversation.

What were Chomsky's arguments against behaviorism?

against the behaviorists idea that language can be explained in terms of reinforcements and without reference to the mind One of Chomsky's most persuasive arguments was that as children learn language, they produce sentences that they never heard and that have never been reinforcements and without reference to the mind Ex: i hate you mommy

Aubrey Gilbert and coworkers (2006) looked for a difference between how colors are processed in the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

basic idea behind this approach is that language is processed in the left hemisphere. Thus, if language does affect color perception, it would be more likely to do so when colors are viewed in the right visual field (which projects to the left hemisphere) than in the left visual field (Figure 11.20). Gilbert and coworkers presented subjects with a display like the one in Figure 11.21a, in which all the squares in the wheel were the same (green in this example) except for a target square (blue). On some trials the target was from a different category than the other squares, as in Figure 11.21a. On other trials, the target was from the same category as the other squares (the target was a different shade of green than the other green squares). The subjects' task was to push a button indicating whether the target was on the left or right side of the wheel. The subjects' task was to indicate, as quickly as possible, which side contained the "odd" color. (b) Result of the experiment. The left pair of bars shows that when the color wheel was in the left (nonlanguage) visual field, reaction times were the same whether the odd color was in the same or different category as the other colors. The right pair of bars shows that when the wheel was presented in the right (language) visual field, reaction times were faster when the odd color was from a different category (for example, blue vs. green). ndicate that when the display was viewed in the right (language) visual field, the reaction times to identify the target were faster when the target was from a different category (left pair of bars). If the category labels blue and green are determined by language, this is what we would expect. In contrast, when the display was viewed in the left (nonlanguage) visual field, reaction times were the same whether the target was from the same category or from a different category (right pair of bars). Thus, when the language hemisphere is activated, a category effect does occur, but when the nonlanguage hemisphere is activated, no category effect occurs. So, does language affect perception? From the results of this experiment, the answer would seem to be that it depends on which part of the brain is involved.

Describing language as "a form of joint action," Clark proposes that understanding this joint action involves considering

both the content of a conversation, in terms of given and new information, and the process by which people share information

how did Olaf Hauk and coworkers determined the link between movement, action words, and brain activation?

by measuring brain activity using fMRI under two conditions: 1. as subjects moved their right or left foot, left or right index finger, or tongue 2. as subjects read "action words" such as kick (foot action), pick (finger or hand action), or lick (tongue action). Hauk's results show areas of the cortex activated by the actual movements (Figure 9.24a) and by reading the action words (Figure 9.24b). The activation is more extensive for actual movements, but the activation caused by reading the words occurs in approximately the same areas of the brain. For example, leg words and leg movements elicit activity near the brain's center line, whereas arm words and finger movements elicit activity further from the center line. This link between action words and activation of action areas in the brain suggests a physiological mechanism that may be related to creating situation models as a person reads a story.

How did Susan Haviland and Herbert Clark (1974) demonstrated the consequences of not following the given-new contract?

by presenting pairs of sentences and asking subjects to press a button when they thought they understood the second sentence in each pair. They found that it took longer for subjects to comprehend the second sentence in pairs like this one: We checked the picnic supplies. The beer was warm. than it took to comprehend the second sentence in pairs like this one: We got some beer out of the trunk. The beer was warm. The reason comprehending the second sentence in the first pair takes longer is the reader or listener needs to make an inference that beer was among the picnic supplies

Measurements of brain activity have demonstrated how similar areas of the cortex are activated

by reading action words and by actual movements.

Semantics (the meanings of words) and syntax (rules for using words in sentences) have been distinguished by

by the neuropsychology studies of Broca and Wernicke and by how errors of semantics and syntax influence the amplitudes of components of the ERP.

what is the description and conclusion of Making inferences

c- Subjects infer meaning that extends beyond the wording of a sentence. d- Creative process based on past experience adds meaning. c- There are a number of ways to create coherence in a text (anaphoric, instrument, causal). d- Creative processes help create coherence.

Herbert Clark sees what as being central to the understanding of languages

collaboration

when do children produce their first words and by adulthood how many can they understand

during second year understand more than 50,000 different words

What are the 4 methods involved in understanding how conversations are produced

given-new contract common ground synaptic coordination

how was mental representation of text been tested in Stanfield and Zwaan's orientation experiment

has been tested by having subjects read a sentence that describes a situation involving an object and then indicate as quickly as possible whether a picture shows the object mentioned in the sentence. 1. He hammered the nail into the wall. 2. He hammered the nail into the floor. Robert Stanfield and Rolf Zwaan (2001) presented these sentences, followed by either a matching picture or a nonmatching picture. Because the pictures both show nails and the task was to indicate whether the picture shows the object mentioned in the sentence, the correct answer was "yes" no matter which nail was presented. However, subjects responded "yes" more rapidly when the picture's orientation matched the situation described in the picture Subjects responded "yes" more rapidly for the orientation (in a) and the shape (in b) that was more consistent with the sentence. The sentences for these pictures are The ranger saw the eagle in the sky. The ranger saw the eagle in its nest. In this experiment, by Zwaan and coworkers (2002), the picture of an eagle with wings outstretched elicited a faster response when it followed sentence [1] than when it followed sentence [2]. Again, reaction times were faster when the picture matched the situation described in the sentence. This result, shown in Figure 11.13b, matches the result for the orientation experiment, and both experiments support the idea that the subjects created perceptions that matched the situation as they were reading the sentences.

What does our ability to perceive written words depend on?

how frequently the words appear in our lexicon.

coherence

important property of any narrative The representation of a text or story in a reader's mind so that information in one part of the text or story is related to information in another part.

Coherence enables us to understand stories. Coherence is largely determined by

inference. Three major types of inference are anaphoric, instrumental, and causal.

What is Language?

is a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.

what is semantics

is the meanings of words and sentences

what is responsible for organizing sounds into words and word segmentation

knowing the meanings of the words being aware of the context in which these words occur rules about what sounds go together in words and what sounds are more likely to be separated into two different words

Where are syntax and semantics located in the brain at?

link Broca's area (area in frontal lobe) to syntax (the structure of sentences) link Wernicke's area (area in temporal lobe) to semantics (understanding meaning).

What are the factors associated with understanding text stories?

making inferences creating situation models link between action words and brain activity prediction based on knowledge of a situation

How did Rayner and coworkers (2003) experiment with subjects' eye movements?

measured subjects' eye movements as they read sentences that contained either a high- or a low-frequency target word indicate that readers looked at low-frequency words (such as demure) about 40 ms longer than high-frequency words (such as pretty) One reason could be that the readers needed more time to access the meaning of the low-frequency words. The word frequency effect, therefore, demonstrates how our past experience with words influences our ability to access their meaning

The role of accessing information in understanding stories has been studied by

measuring the event-related potential (ERP) as people are reading short passages. Remember that the N400 response of the ERP is generated in response to errors in word meaning.

reading a story about a bicycle elicits

not only the perception of what a bicycle looks like, but also properties associated with movement, such as how a bicycle is propelled (by peddling) and the physical exertion involved in riding the bicycle under different conditions (climbing hills, racing, coasting). situation model approach

The situation model approach to text comprehension states that people represent the situation in a story in terms

of the people, objects, locations, and events that are being described in the story.

describe the experiment where Isaacs and Clark (1987) studied this idea in an experiment in which they paired up subjects and gave each subject the same set of 16 postcards of New York City scenes.

one way to establish common ground is through the back-and-forth exchanges during the conversation. Isaacs and Clark (1987) studied this idea Subject 1's postcards were arranged in a 4-by-4 grid. This subject's task was to describe the pictures so that Subject 2 could arrange his or her pictures in the same order. When Subject 1 was a New Yorker and Subject 2 was not, it was sometimes easy to establish the location for pictures of well-known buildings, "Yeah" indicates common ground, and that it is OK to move on. But for a building that wasn't as familiar, a longer exchange was necessary Once all 16 cards were correctly arranged, they were scrambled into a new order, and the process started again. One result of this experiment, shown in Figure 11.15a, is that on each successive trial subjects needed fewer words to sort the pictures. Thus, 37 words per picture were needed on Trial 1, but only 8 by Trial 5. This illustrates the establishment of common ground by showing that communication becomes more efficient as the conversation progresses. From Trials 1 to 6, the percentage of name references to buildings increases when both subjects are New York City residents (left pair of bars) and when subject 2 is a nonresident (right pair of bars). indicates the percentage of name references such as "Empire State Building." The left pair of bars indicates that a high percentage of name references were used when Subject 1 and Subject 2 were both New York City residents, and that the percentage increased on later trials. The right pair of bars shows that fewer names were used when Subject 2 wasn't a resident, but the percentage also increased on later trials. Thus, common ground is determined both by people's expertise and by the exchange of information during the conversation.

What happens when you consider the following sentence in which the context indicates the more frequent meaning of tin: 4.The miners went under the mountain to look for tin. (control word: gold)

only the dominant meaning of tin is activated, so tin is read rapidly

Alex Fine and coworkers experiment where they presented both ambiguous and unambiguous relative clause (RC) sentences

our experience with certain sentence constructions can influence how we predict a sentence will be organized, caused Alex Fine and coworkers (2013) to ask whether readers can learn to change their predictions based on experience with new constructions. ubjects read sentences in a moving window display in which the subject saw one word at a time on a computer screen and pushed a space bar to view the next word in the sentence. conducted the midnight these words in the ambiguous sentences took longer to read than the same words in the unambiguous sentences longer time for the RC ambiguous sentences, compared to the unambiguous RC sentences, is the ambiguity effect. However, by the second set of 10 trials, the ambiguity effect vanished, as indicated by the right pair of bars in Figure 11.11, in which the difference between the ambiguous and unambiguous reaction times is not statistically significant. as subjects gained experience in reading verbs in the RC construction, they adapted to the new sentence statistics, in which RC constructions are common. These results illustrate the role of experience in language processing by showing that the subjects adjusted their expectations about the RC sentences so that these structures eventually became easier to process. This experience-based explanation of sentence understanding supports the interactionist approach to parsing because it shows that a person's predictions about the structure of language can influence processing as the person is reading a sentence.

What happens when the ambiguous word tin is biased? 2.The tin was bright and shiny. (control word: gold)

people read the biased ambiguous word tin just as quickly as the control word, because only the dominant meaning of tin is activated, and the meaning of tin as a metal is accessed quickly

what are the 2 smallest units of language

phonemes (sound) and morphemes (meanings)

what is the word superiority effect experiment Reicher did

present FORK then KM present K them KM present RFOK then KM subject's task is to pick the flashed letter that was presented in the original stimulus they did so more quickly and accurately when the letter had been part of a word This more rapid processing of letters within a word is the word superiority effect The word superiority effect shows that letters in words are not processed one by one but that each letter is affected by the context within which it appears.

Jonathan Winawer and coworkers (2007), compared the way Russian-speaking and English-speaking subjects discriminated between different shades of blue.

provided evidence that favors the idea that language can influence cognition Subjects saw three blue squares and were instructed to pick, as quickly and accurately as possible, which of the squares on the bottom matched the color of the square on the top. some trials, the two squares on the bottom were from the same Russian category in which both bottom squares would both be called siniy. On other trials, the two squares on the bottom were from different Russian categories. This is shown in Figure 11.18b, in which the left square is siniy and the right one is goluboy. Russian-speaking subjects responded more quickly when the two bottom squares were from different categories (goluboy/siniy) than when the squares were from the same category. The English-speaking subjects did not respond more quickly when the colors were in different Russian categories. Russian-speaking subjects responded faster when the bottom stimuli were from different categories than when they were from the same category (left pair of bars). This difference did not occur for English-speaking subjects (right pair of bars) the Russians' faster response when stimuli were from different categories occurred because their language distinguishes between goluboy and siniy. One way of looking at this is that learning the different labels makes it more likely that the colors will be perceived as different, and this makes it easier to quickly determine which square matches the one on the top. This effect does not occur for English-speakers because all of the colors are simply called blue. These results, therefore, support the Sapir-Whorf idea that language can affect cognition.

What was the finding in experiments by John Bransford and Marcia Johnson (1973) in which they had subjects read passages and then tested them to determine what they remembered?

reported seeing this passage, even though they had never read that John was using a hammer, because they inferred that John was using a hammer from the information that he was pounding the nail. People use a similar creative process to make a number of different types of inferences as they are reading a text.

Changing the sentence "The cats won't eat" into "The cats won't bake" is an error of?

semantics because the meaning doesn't make sense

How did Warren (1970) demonstrate the phonemic restoration effect

subjects listened to a recording of the sentence "The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city." Warren replaced the first /s/ in "legislatures" with the sound of a cough asked subjects to indicate where in the sentence the cough occurred No subject identified the correct position of the cough none of them noticed that the /s/ in "legislatures" was missing. effect was experienced even by students and staff in the psychology department who knew that the /s/ was missing. This "filling in" of the missing phoneme based on the context produced by the sentence and the word containing the phoneme is an example of top-down processing. Warren also showed that the phonemic restoration effect can be influenced by the meaning of the words that follow the missing phoneme the last word of the phrase "There was time to *ave ..." (where the * indicates the presence of a cough or some other sound) could be shave, save, wave, or rave, but subjects heard the word wave when the remainder of the sentence had to do with saying good-bye to a departing friend. This example of how our knowledge of the meanings of words and the likely meanings of sentences affects speech perception is another example of top-down processing

changing the sentence to "The cats won't eating" is an error of

syntax because the grammar is not correct

What does hierarchical nature of language mean?

that it consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units (words into phrases; phrases into sentences)

The overall conclusion from research on how people comprehend stories is

that understanding a text or story is a creative and dynamic process. involves understanding sentences by determining how words are organized into phrases; then determining the relationships between sentences, often using inference to link sentences in one part of a story to sentences in another part; and finally, creating mental representations or simulations that involve both perceptual and motor properties of objects and events in the story.

what kind of ERP response occurs in response to the sentence "the cats won't bake"

the N400 response the meaning of "bake" doesn't fit with what we know about cats.

What happens when the ambiguous word tin is biased? 3.The miners went to the store and saw that they had beans in a tin. (control word: cup)

the context indicates the less frequent meaning of tin (food container), which strengthens the activation for this meaning. When the person reaches the word tin, the less frequent meaning is activated at increased strength because of the prior context, and the more frequent meaning of tin is activated as well. Thus, two meanings are activated, so the person looks longer at tin

what is psycholinguistics and what is its goal

the field concerned with the psychological study of language goal to discover the psychological processes by which humans acquire and process language

onversations, which involve give-and-take between two or more people, are made easier by procedures that involve cooperation between participants in a conversation. These procedures include

the given-new contract, establishing common ground, and syntactic coordination.

The ability to understand words in a sentence is influenced by word frequency. This has been demonstrated using

the lexical decision task and by measuring eye movements.

The effect of meaning on the perception of phonemes is illustrated by

the phonemic restoration effect.

What is the event related potential (ERP) and what can it be used for?

the rapid electrical response recorded with small disc electrodes placed on a person's scalp can be used to distinguish between syntax and semantics

syntax

the rules for combining words into sentences creating meaning based on word order

What does comparing the following sentences indicate: The spy saw the man with the binoculars. vs. The bird saw the man with the binoculars.

the structure of the bird sentence is the same as that of the spy sentence, but our knowledge of the properties of spies and of birds influences the way we interpret the relationships between the words in the sentence.

Two mechanisms proposed to explain parsing are

the syntax-first approach and the interactionist approach. The syntax-first approach emphasizes how syntactic principles such as late closure determine how a sentence is parsed. The interactionist approach states that semantics, syntax, and other factors operate simultaneously to determine parsing

The interactionist approach is supported by

the way words with different meanings affect the interpretation of a sentence, eye movement studies in the visual world paradigm, predictions based on a person's knowledge of the environment, and predictions based on a person's knowledge of language constructions.

A lot of language comprehension can be traced

to prediction we often predict what words, sentences, or passages mean based on what we know about the properties of our language