Introducing

Psycholinguistics

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Chapter 1 (Introduction)
1.1 Introduction
 Mental lexicon = dictionary in our heads

1.2 What is psycholinguistics?

 Psycholinguistics can be defined as the study of the mental representations and processes
involved in language use, including the production, comprehension and storage of spoken
and written language.
 Comprehension is a bottom-up flow, processing based on information flow from lower level
of processing to higher level in this case from the input to an interpretation
 There is evidence for top-down information flow too, processing guided by information flow
from higher levels to lower levels in this case when a listener starts to gain an understanding
of the sentence they are hearing this can influence the efficiency with which they recognize
subsequent words in the sentence
 Interactive processing = information flowing in both directions

1.3 Who does psycholinguistics?

 Contribute to knowledge of the workings of the mind
 Neuropsychologists be interested in locating the language faculties within the physical
structures
 Inform theories of language structure, it can provide the performance data to support
theories of competence, it can provide psychological validity for linguistics construct

1.4 How do psycholinguists do psycholinguistics?

 Observation and introspection of daily behavior
 Experiment
 High-tech observation, measuring brain activity

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Chapter 2 (Planning utterances)

2.1 Introduction
 Some sentences are complete, some stop and start again as the speaker changes his mind or
repairs something that he realizes he has got wrong or revises something that is incomplete,
others appear to be full of repetition and there are errors.
 The speaker appears to provide a spoken form of punctuation by placing pauses at various
points in a passage.
 Hesitation = failing to produce well-formed sentences
o Filled pauses = hesitation noises
o Drawing out of a sound
o Filler phrases / verbal fillers = ‘empty’ use i.e. like you know

2.2 A sketch of the production process

CONCEPTUALISATION Discourse model, situational and general knowledge, etc
Generating a message

Pre-verbal message

FORMULATION
(GRAMMATICAL and PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING) Grammar and lexicon
Producing structured language

Phonetic plan (internal speech)

Speech motor commands, etc

ARTICULATION
Producing speech sounds

External speech

 Conceptualisation = notion or abstract idea of what we want to say

 Formulation = put elements of language together that will express a idea, drawing on our
knowledge of our language, including vocabulary
 Articulation = speak this utterance

2.3 Conceptualisation and planning

 Not involve forms of language, but is all done ‘in the head’ in abstract terms
 Pre-verbal message = result of the process of conceptualization
 Mentalese = language of thought
 Articulatory pause = very brief silence

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 Function of pauses
o Planning
o Breaking utterances into constituent part, at places where a written text might have
punctuation = delimitative pauses
o Regulate their breathing = physiological pauses
o Gain time to search for a word
 Read speech an unprepared speech difference in planning
o With a prepared text we need to plan when to pause in order to mark the structure
of the text. We also need to organize how we are going to articulate the speech
sounds that correspond to the word
o In spontaneous speech, we need to decide what we want to say and what sentences
and words we want to use

2.4 Cycles of planning

 Macroplanning = deciding how to achieve an intended communicative goals using relevant
speech act (= the performance of some action through saying something)
 Linearisation = choosing the order in which information should be expressed
 Instrumentality = speaker select information that helps them to achieve their communicative
goals
 Microplanning = determining the perspective and information structure that is most
appropriate for a given speech act and deciding what should be highlighted as new or topical
information
 Two levels of planning
o A speaker has made initial decision about the sequence of speech acts required to
achieve some communicative goals
o Individual acts can be planned in more detail, even before the overall plan has been
finalized

GRAMMATICAL ENCODING
Functional processing
(lexical selection, function assignment)
The Mental Lexicon
Positional processing
(constituent assembly’s: sentence frame, inflections) lemmas
lexemes

PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING

2.5 Formulation
 Grammatical encoding = where the speaker uses their knowledge of grammar to create
sentence structures that will convey a message

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o Functional processing = give the appropriate jobs to words that will express the
speaker’s intended meaning
 Lexical selection = choosing the words
 Function assignment = giving words their jobs in the sentence
o Positional processing = selected set of lemmas organizes into an ordered string
 Constituent assembly = creates a sentence frame for the message
 Content words = nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs
 Function words = prepositions, conjunctions, particles, etc.
o Phonetic plan = drive the articulators (the speech organs)
 Phonological encoding = allows us to construct the appropriate sequences of sound to
express the message
 Lemmas = semantic aspects of words, linked to lexemes (= forms of words, can be the spoken
shape or their written form)
 Exchange = two words that have the same grammatical category but which appear in
different syntactic phrases
 Stranding = element has not moved with the rest of the word
 Syntactic priming = if participant read the prime sentence and have to describe a picture of a
man reading a story to a boy, then they are more likely to use a sentence like the man is
reading a story to the boy than the man is reading the boy a story. But if the prime has a
double-object construction (= sentence with two objects, one is the direct object en the
other indirect object) then participants are more likely to describe the same picture also with
a double-object

2.6 Sentence complexity

 Derivational Theory of Complexity = it is more complicated to produce a passive sentence
than a active one
 Main clause = someone is object of the first verb
 Subordinate clause = someone is subject of the second verb
 Subordination index = ratio of subordinate clauses to total clauses

2.7 Syntax and speech

 Global/standing ambiguity = nothing in the sentence itself resolves the ambiguity
 Local/temporary ambiguity = something in the sentences resolves the ambiguity
 Pre-pausal lengthening = lengthening found before a pause
 Connected speech processes = changes to the speech sounds of words that occur late in the
production process, as a consequence of the phonetic environment that the sounds find
themselves in
 Wanna-contraction = realisation of want to as wanna

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Chapter 3 (Finding words)

3.1 Introduction
 Process of lexicalisation
1. Retrieval of the abstract form of a word from the mental lexicon, based on the
concepts that the speaker wants to convey
 Finding words
2. Specification of the form of the word
 Building words

3.2 Pausing and predictability

 Frequency of use = some words are used more frequently than others
 Predictability = some words fit in a particular topic or context better than others
 Pauses are more likely and longer before content words than before function words, because
the function words sits in a separate part of the mental lexicon with faster access or function
words become available at a different stage of the production process
 Predictability and lexical selection is based not just on what is the most likely next word in a
linear string of word, it depends also on a more hierarchical structure with aspects of what
we want to go on to say influence our current word choices

3.3. Speech errors and lexical selection

 Slots-and-fillers = choice of the wrong fillers (words) for the waiting of slots (positions in the
sentence frame)
 Distinguish between causes and mechanism of speech errors

Types of word errors

Mis-selection Substitution (one word replaces another)
Blend (two words are merged)
Mis-ordering Anticipation (a word appears earlier than intended)
Perseveration (a word appears again later in the sentence)
Exchange (two words swap places)
Other Omission (a word is left out)
Addition (an extra word appears)

 Antonyms = words that are opposite in meaning

 Synonyms = sameness of meaning
 During speech production there is sometimes ambivalence as to which of two closely related
ideas best represents the speaker’s intention and this has been referred to as a situation of
alternative plans. If the speaker is unable to resolve the competition between the alternative
plans, then these activated lemmas may to be inserted into the same slot and the lexemes
linked to these lemmas become blended at the level of phonological processing
 Associative = lemma-level relationships arise through the associations that words have with
one another
 Collocations = words that typically occur together

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 In substitutions the intended concept activates its lemma and activation flows through the
associative links between lemmas so that an associate of the initially accessed lemma is also
activated and the wrong lexeme is inserted into the utterance
 Blends and substitutions differ in the type of semantic relationships: synonyms are blendes,
substitutions involve antonyms or other types of associative relationship
 Malapropisms = errors where the word produced is similar to the intended word in its sound
shape, but not necessarily in its meaning
 There are links from the sounds in the target word to other words contain the same sounds
and as the form of the target is retrieved, this activates its compent sounds.
 Serial search models = speaker has access to one word at a time following a rather discrete
and unidirectional flow of information between levels
 Interactive activation models = information spreads by way of activation from units at one
level down to multiple units at the next level, but then also back up to the higher-level unit
 Semantically = words share some aspect of their meanings
 Phonologically = words share some aspect of their pronunciation

3.4 Getting the order wrong

 Mis-ordering = errors where the correct words have been selected for production but placed
in the wrong position in the utterance
 A speaker develops an utterance, they access the required lexical items from their mental
dictionary, but something goes wrong in assigning an item to the correct position
 Anticipations = a word is inserted too early into the sentence frame that has been developed
 Perseverations = a word that has already been uses remains active and available for re-
insertion and may result from a failure to cross it off the list of words cued for use, because it
is a frequent word with a high level of activation
 Exchanges = case that two word or word/slots are involved in an error, not always of the
same category

3.5 Association norms

 Association norms = lists of the words that are evoked in the minds of native speakers when a
target word is presented to them

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Chapter 4 (Building words)

4.1 Introduction
 Morphology of the word is its structure defined in terms of the meaningful parts that
constitute it
 Words are made up of one or more morphemes = smallest unit of meaning
 Allomorph = same morpheme, but more than one form
 Spoken forms of words are made up of phonemes = speech segments
 A phoneme can have more than one allophone
 Morphological and phonological production processes occur at the same local level

4.2 Tip-of-the-tongue
 Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon = a gap that is intensely active,
 Grammatical gender = nouns are either masculine or feminine
 Participants in a TOT state could often successfully report the gender of the target
 Anomia = experience similar to TOT of brain-damaged patients

4.3 Speech errors and morphological structure

 Inflections = endings of a word
 Irregular plurals = not a simple affixation of ending
 Fulllisting hypothesis = idea that all examples of a particular morphologically complex form of
words
 Morpheme shift = error where morphemes shift by words
 Multiword unit = lexical items that are made up of more than one word
 Accommodation = the writer version of a speech error has been moved in the intended
utterance what causes in another pronunciation
 Derivational morphology = construction of new words from base form
 Suffixes = morphemes on the endings of a word
 Prefixes = morphemes at the beginning of a word
 Productivity = affixes that are most likely to be used on novel word
 The more productive an affix is, the more predictable it tends to be
 Lexical stress errors are errors where the correct word has been produced, but with the
wrong stress pattern

4.4 Speech errors and phonological encoding

 Phonological encoding = process where sounds make up the word
 Phonetic plan = drive the articulators
 Nonword = form that does not exist as a word in the language in question
 Metrical structure = stress pattern of word and utterance
 Syllable structure = how the segments making up a word or utterance are hierarchically
organized into syllables
 The syllable has an onset and a rythme
 The must minimally have a peak, which is usually a vowel and it part of the rythme
 The coda is also a part of the rymthe and is a final consonant or sequence of consonants
 Spoonerism = onsets swap with other onsets
 Phonetic similarity = two sounds share some properties

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4.5 Tongue twisters

 Tongue twisters = achieved by asking participants to spend a short time silently reading a
sequence of word and then say them out repeatedly and as quickly as possible

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Chapter 5 (Monitoring and repair)

5.1 Introduction

5.2 Self-monitoring
 Repairs in response to external feedback, but also when not
 Speakers carry out monitoring of their own speech
 Aspect of speech that speaker monitor
o Check whether the message is the one that they want to utter
o Check that the words they have chose are the best ones for what they want to say
o Check that the correct grammatical structures are being use
o Monitor for errors in pronunciation
o Monitoring for contextual appropriateness

5.3 Induced errors

 SLIP = Spoonerisme of Laboratory-Induced Predisposition
o Rapid and brief representation pairs of word with the same repeating pattern of
initial consonant sounds. Participants have to say aloud the last pair
 Speakers monitor their output and filter out nonsense words, even in a unnatural task
 The setting in which participants found themselves had an effect on their ability to filter out
the errors

5.4 Repair
 Typically involve the interruption of an erroneous utterance
 3 phrases
o Interruption
 Moment when speaker break off from their original utterance
o Editing
 Editing expression = e.g. uh, that is, (or) rather, I mean
o Repair
 Speak makes good the damage of error from the point of restart onward
 Main interruption rule = speaker interrupt themselves immediately that they detect an error
 Covert repairs = self-interruption before the speaker actually utters the incorrect part of their
utterance
 Over repairs = error and repair are available for scrutiny
 Functions of editing expression
o The speaker initiates a restart
o Continuation
o Form a grammatically complete coordinated structure
 Prosodic marking = speakers emphasis of the repair word
 An error in a word’s stress pattern is more likely to be repaired if the misplacement of stress
also result in a difference in the vowel oin the word

5.5. Editor theories

 The speed with which errors are detected an corrected support the existence of internal as
well as external monitoring

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 The repair is a response to the realization that the output is not the word the speaker
intended
 In cases where an error correcting is made, then it is equally fast regardless of whether the
error would have produced real words or nonwords
 Speaker manage to filter out taboo words

5.6 Speakers helping listeners

 Connected speech processes = natural consequence of economy of effort during speaking

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Chapter 6 (The use of gesture)

6.1 Introduction
 Research into the use of gestures
o Psychoanalytic approach, looking for gestures that reveal something about the
speaker’s emotional state
o Linguistic and psycholinguistic approach, gestures provide an additional channel of
information, completing the spoken channel

6.2 Gestures as content

 Distinguish between two main functions, which have been associated with tow parallel tracks
o One carries the subject matter or content of the discourse
o Used for discourse management
 Content-related gestures can include:
o Symbols = ‘stand for’ something, correspond to and be used instead of a complet
utterance, cultural difference
o Indices = direct the perceivers’ attention to particular objects, involve an instrument,
cultural difference
o Icons = depict what is being talked about, most are informative
 Gestures are an integral part of a composite signal

6.3 Gesturing for discourse management

 Gesture indicates that he subject matter is being communicated to the listener
 There are gestures which are associated with a change in topic or which are used when new
information is being delivered
 Gestures that are used in citing refer back to an earlier contribution to the conversation
 Seeking gesture usually requests a response
 Turn-taking gestures contribute more obviously to the management of conversation
 Listeners can contribute through their use of what are referred to as collateral gestures e.g.
head-nods

6.4 Gestures for emphasis

 Batonic gestures = tend to coincide in time with the stressed syllables of speech and probably
therefore reinforce the stresses, helping to bring home a point

6.5 Gestures, conceptualization and lexicalisation

 Gestures can reflect the conceptual mental model and the linguistic encoding of that model
 Cognitive difference in conceptualization
o There are largely western cultures where spatial orientation relative to the perceiver
is important
o There are cultures where what is important is in absolute spatial orientation

6.6 Who do we gesture for?

 Communicate something to listener in content or conversation management
 Helps speakers to find words and formulate utterances
 Helps with formulation processes by making the connection between lemmas and lexemes

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 Iconic gestures typically precede the spoken material to which they are linked by about one
second
 Iconic gestures are highly frequent during pauses in the fluent phases of speech cycles

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Chapter 7 (Perception for language)

7.1 Introduction
 Some issues are common to both visual and spoken language processing, but there are also
some issues that are unique to either modality

7.2 Basic issues in perception for language

 Language users must recognize the signals that reach the brain, they must recognize them as
being a language they understand and they must interpret them as meaningful
 Humans have perceptual specialization for languages
 Hemispherical specialization = various tasks are under the control of certain brain areas and
there is considerable evidence that one hemisphere of the brain is responsible for some tasks
and the other for other tasks
 Language faculties are predominantly in the left hemisphere
 Dichotic listening experiment = experiment where participant hear competing sequences of
word presented over headphones to each ear. Most accurate identification occurs for word
presented to the right ear, because left hemisphere is responsible for the right side of the
body = right ear advantage
 REA is not reflection of auditory processing per se, because musical stimuli fail to show the
REA
 Difference in left brain hemisphere action for speech and non-speech, but equal activation in
right hemisphere
 REA is not phonetic
 If someone pay greater attention to one ear, this can enhance or decrease the REA
 In priming tasks researchers are interested in how quickly and/or accurately participants
respond to a stimulus that has been preceded by anther stimulus that might be related to it
in some way
 The nature of pre-lexical processing need to be identified before words can be acces and is
common to both visual and auditory processing
 Phoneme = distinct speech sound
 Phonetic features = involve the presence or absence of a feature
 Diphone = sequence of two sounds
 Variability = input that we receive can be highly variable in its detail
o Different vocal tract shapes and sizes
o Different chest cavity sizes
o Physical factors
 Variability is potential problem for perception
 If language comprehension involves the recognition of basic units of writing o of speech, then
these units need to be separable form adjacent units. Segmentation of the input is not always
straightforward
 Spectogram = based on the analysis of the sound energy present in speech at different
frequencies

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7.3 Basic issues in speech perception

 Human auditory perception is especially well tuned to speech sound
 Human perceptual system streams language and non-language signals
 Phoneme restoration effect = when listeners hear words in which ha speech sound has been
replaced by a non-speech sound they are highly likely to report the word as intact
 When the word-level information is ambiguous, then the word that is restored is one which
matches in the sentence context
 When English speakers listen to a click language, they report the click as a sound separate
from the speech
 Cue integration = involving a range of cues that distinguish a sound from others in the sound
inventory of the language
 McGruk effect = visual and auditory cues have been experimentally manipulated so that they
are no longer compatible, then they can merge on a percept that is different from that
signaled by either set of cues on their own
 Coarticulation = the articulation of one sound is influenced by the articulation of a
neighbouring sound
 Signal continuity = listeners are better able to follow a stream of speech if it sounds like it
comes in a continuous fashion form one source
 Cocktail party effect = we are able to follow one speaker in a crowd room full over
conversation despite other talk around us

7.4 Basic issues in visual perception for language

 Word superiority effect = individual letters are recognized more rapidly and reliably when
they occur in words than when they are either in nonwords or in jumbled letter strings
 Readers’ eyes are not in fact moving, but with fixations and saccades (jumps)
 Not all use the same writing system as English, the alphabetic system = many irregularity in
the correspondence between letters and sound
 Deep orthography = direct letter-sound correspondence
 Shallow orthography = pronunciation of a particular letter string is reasonably predictable but
where there may be many letter strings with the same pronunciation
 Consonantal system = letters often represent the consonants only
 Syllabic system = respresent a syllable
 Ideographic system = symbol corresponds to a word

7.5 Influence of the linguistic system on perception

 Categorical perception = we hear speech sounds as belonging to categories
 Voice onset time (VOT) = lag between the release of the closure for the plosive consonant
and the beginning of voicing for a following vowel
 There is nothing special about speech can also be distinguished categorically with appropriate
training
 Human are not alone in making categorical perceptual distinction between speech sounds
 Categories themselves and the boundaries between the categories have to be learned
 Category boundaries are not fixed, but can be affected by the linguistic context
 Ganong effect = lexical status of word containing the manipulated segment is important

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Chapter 8 (Spoken word recognition)

8.1 Introduction
 Pre-lexical analysis = operations that are carried out on the speech input in order to organize
it into useful units
 Contact = establishing links between the input and the stored forms of words
 Activation = getting contacted word excited about the fact that they have been contacted
 Access = getting hold of the information about a word that is stored in the mental lexicon
 Recognition = knowing which word it is that we have hear

8.2 What are words?

8.3 Pre-lexical analysis

 Involves automatic peripheral perceptual processes which analyze the spoken input into
linguistically relevant units
 Phonemens = smallest unit that when changed can result in a change in meaning by signaling
a different word
 Slips of the ear = misperceptions of speech
 Word-by-word analysis of the input implies that a word will not be recognized until its entire
speech pattern has been identified
 Phonetic feature = distinctive properties o speech sounds
 Gating experiment = truncated propositions of a recorded word are played to participant for
identification. Longer and longer fragments are presented, with an identification response at
each gate
 Metrical segmentation strategy = searches are started each time a strong of stressed syllable
is encountered
 Vowel harmony = type of agreement between vowels in the relevant syllables
 Possible word constraint = speech input is exhaustively segmented into words without leaving
any residual sounds

8.4 Contact and activation

 Mapping from the output of pre-lexical analysis onto forms stored in the mental lexicon is a
bottom-up processing
 Others also claim a role or top-down
 More than one stored word is a characteristic of parallel models of lexical processing
 Word-initial cohort = sound of words carry primary responsibility for making contact with
words in the mental lexicon since we hear these parts of the word first
 Cohort model = testable predictions about key aspects of the word recognition process, once
the initial sounds of a word have been heard, all words in the mental lexicon that have the
same initial sequence of sounds will be contacted

8.5 Selection
 Deviation point = point in the nonsense word where it diverges from known words

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8.6 Lexical access

 Point at where lexically stored information becomes available

8.7 Recognition and context effect

 Words are activated on the basis of bottom-up information

8.8 Frequency, competition and neighbourhoods

 Frequency effects = words that we encounter more often have an advantage over words that
we do not see or hear so often, reflected in faster response times and greater accuracy or
common words in tasks
 Contingency of choice = knowing you have heard a word that depends not just the sound of
it, but also on knowing than you have not heard a word like it
 Neighbourhood = a word share similar properties
 Word-initial cohort is a type of neighbourhood
 Neighbourhood density = have an influence on both word recognition and word production

8.9 Recognizing morphologically complex forms

 Inflectional morphology = adding affixes to mark grammatical information
 Derivational morphology = adding affixes to make a different kind of word

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Chapter 9 (Visual word recognition)

9.1 Introduction

9.2 Factors affecting visual word recognition

 Lexical frequenty and context effect influence both spoken and visual word recognition
 Word superiority effect = it is easier to identify words than nonwords and the recognition of
letters within a string of letters is easier and more accurately if the string constitutes an
existing word
 Legal nonwords = sequences of letters that would be possible words in the language
 Illegal nonwords = sequence(s) letters that do not occur in equivalent positions in real words
 Longer words take longer to recognize
 High-frequency words are recognized more easily and more reliably than low-frequency word
 Zipf’s law = relationship between word length and frequency
 Regularity effect = relationships between spelling and pronunciation
 Progressive demasking = more and more of a word is exposed on repeated presentations
until the participant is able to uniquely identify the target

9.3 Models of visual word recognition

 Morton’s logogen model
o Logogens = recognition units that are activated on the basis of different types of
input information
o Parallel model
 Forster search model
o Serial model
 Interactive activation model
o Linear process

9.4 Routes to read by

 Grapheme-phoneme conversion
o There is a pathway that takes readers through a rule-based system that converts
written strings into form for pronouncation
o Whether this conversion happens prior to lexical acces
o The extent to which the use of such conversion is under strategic control
 Subvocalisation = inward rehearsal of the spoken forms of words
 Pseudohomophone = nonwords that would sound like real word if they were pronounced
o Take longer to rejection in a lexical decision task than other nonwords
 Dual-route model
 Category monitoring task = task where participants see individual word and have to indicate
whether or to each word belongs to a particular semantic category
o Shows misclassification of homophones (= word that have the same spoken form, but
not necessarily the same written form)
 Homograph = word that has the same written form but not necessarily the same spoken form

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9.5 Dyslexia
 Developmental dyslexica = no obvious single event that has resulted in the problems
faced by the dyslexic
 Acquired dyslexia = usually the result of brain damage of from a stroke
 Surface dyslexia = good reading aloud of nonsense words, poor recognition and reading
aloud of real words
 Phonological dyslexia = good ability in reading real word but poor at reading
pronounceable nonwords
 Nonsemantic reading = good reading aloud skill but don’t have any understanding of
what they read
 Deep dyslexia = cannot read aloud nonsense form, often substitute visually similar real
words for nonsense forms, good reading comprehension for concrete and imaginable
word, but less with abstract and grammatical word, large number of substitution,
paralexia
o Paralexia = word that is semantically related to the target begin read out as
another semantic related word
 Derivational paralexias = one affixed form is substituted for another
 Visual paralexias = visual similarity between target and error

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Chapter 10 (Syntactic sentence processing)

10.1 Introduction
 Parsing = traditional teaching of grammar where texts in the language would be given to
students to analyse in terms of grammatical structure

10.2 Complexity and sentence processing

 Argue that a passive was derived from an underlying or logical form that expressed the basic
idea of the sentence and which was closer in structure to the active version of the sentence
 Sentence-picture matching tasks = participants are given a sentence and have to select form a
set of pictures which picture best illustrates the meaning of the sentence

10.3 The clausal hypothesis

 Related to the derivational theory of complexity
 The clause is the basic unit of analysis in language comprehension
 The click location experiment found that participants were more likely to erroneously report
clicks at the boundary between the subject and predicate of the main clauses
 Clausal structuring = claim that language is segmented into clauses at some stage during
comprehension, but that processing can carry on during a clause
 Clausal processing = claim about clause structure, i.e. that processing is concentrated at
clause boundaries
 Normal prose = syntactically and semantically well-formed
 Anomalous prose = meaningless but syntactically well-formed
 Scrambled prose = neighter syntactically nor semantically wellformed, but consists of real
words
 When the sentence has structure, a word within a sentence can be responded to more
rapidly

10.4 Explicit syntactic markers

 Phoneme monitoring is similar to word monitoring, but requires participants to listen for a
particular speech sound rather than for a word

10.5 Strategies for syntactic processing

 We package up the constituents that we read or hear no longer belongs together as a single
constituent
 Native speakers seem to have clear preferences in the structures they assign to sentence

10.6 Garden paths and the sausage machine

 Garden path sentence = sentence which lead the listener up the garden path by initially
inducing an interpretation which turns out to be incorrect, involve a misleading syntactic
analysis
 Sausage machine = parser, driven by some key principle. First the goal of its operations is to
build a syntactic tree, also known as a phrase marker. Second, the parser is deterministic.
Third, the sausage machine parser tries to keep the syntax as simple as possible

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10.7 Syntactic category ambiguity

 When the same word-form may represent more than one syntactic category

10.8 Cross-linguistic evidence for processing strategies

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Chapter 11 (Interpreting sentences)

1.1 Introduction

1.2 Meaning and sentence processing

 Reversible sentences = sentences in which the subject and object can be swapped over and
the sentence still make sense
 Some aspects of grammar are not highly constraining of the analysis

11.3 Syntax first

 First-pass analysis, such as slowing down of reading when a garden path is encountered,
should instead be attributable to syntactic factor, influence on reading times
 Second-pass analysis, re-reading that is required for the reader to come up with a revised
syntactic analysis, non-syntactic factors

11.4 Presuppositions, plausibility and parsing

 Restrictive relative clause = set op possible object, people, etc. is being referred to by the
noun phrase that the relative clause modifies
 Subordinate clause
o Can be the subject of a verb
o The object of a verb
o Modifier of a noun
o Often introduced by a complementiser
 Syntactic analysis is not directly affected by semantic factors such as plausibility

11.5 Lexical preferences

 Minimal Attachment strategy
 Self-paced word-by-word reading = sentences are presented in chunks on a computer screen
with the participant controlling the presentation of the next chunk by pressing a response
button. The time taken to read each chunk gives a measure of comprehension
 Transivity ambiguous = verbs with structural ambiguity which related to whether or not they
have an object
 Thematic role

11.6 Prosody and parsing

 Prosodic cues = informational structure and focus
 Stress shift = prevents two stressed syllables from being too close together
 Listeners are sensitive to the use of prosody and intonation to mark focus and that focus can
influence structural attachments

11.7 Constraint-based accounts

 One source of information is processed before other
 One sentence structure is considered at a time, meaning that a new revised analysis of the
input is required if the first analysis fails

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 Unrestricted accounts of processing claim that many or all types of information can be used
during processing
 Weak interactive accounts = interaction between syntactic and other sources occurs only
when the syntactic analyses requires it
 Strong interactive accounts = non-syntactic sources play a more determining role in sentence
analysis and are not subservient to a central syntactic processor
 Constraint-based accounts = each of the various types of information available to a reader or
listener is used to determine the analysis of a sentence

11.8 Hybrid accounts

 Unrestricted race model = when an ambiguous sentence is encountered, the various possible
analyses are involved in a race, with the winner being the analysis that is built fastest
 The garden path model predicts a preferred syntactic analysis of attaching the modifying
phrase tot the second NP
 Constraint-based models predict that since both resolutions of the ambiguity remain these
will be in competition with one another, making this sentence more difficult to process,
which are semantically disambiguated
 The unrestricted race model predicts that the globally ambiguous sentence will be easier
than other sentences

11.9 Good-enough processing

 Good-enough processing = compositional approaches of both the Garden Path model and
constraint satisfaction model are too powerful and that readers will often interpret a
sentence on the basis of partial of superficial information
 Shallow processing = learners rely on particularly at the early stages of acquisition

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Chapter 12 (Making connections)

12.1 Introduction

12.2 Mental model building

 Conceptual notions that speaker or writers want to convey or to the abstract representation
of what a reader of listener understands
 Listeners integrate informative that they have heard, rather than remembering it as separate
pieces of information
 Mental representation formed during listening or reading involve more than just the
integration of information in the input
 Discourse comprehension involves the construction of an abstract representation, using
world knowledge and inferencing skills
 Discourse processing involves additional brain areas and many of these are also involved in
more general cognitive processing

12.3 Inferences
 Understanding more than the surface meaning of sentences
 Listeners use very rapidly their understanding of the preceding discourse and inferences
based on this understanding to sort out which protagonists are likely to be the subject and
object of incomplete phrases

12.4 Anaphora
 Important aspect of language comprehension is the making of connections between the
different parts of a discourse
 Coherence = consistency between the events or states in series of sentence
 Cohesion = making the appropriate links between the words and phrases in a text
 Anaphora = second or subsequent mention of the object
 Antecedent = refer to entities that are being introduced into the discourse for the first time
 Bridging inferences = anaphor resolution requires some additional inferences to be made
 The degree of specificity of the noun phrases involved can affect the processing of anaphoric
relations

12.5 Given and new

 New information = information which has just been introduced into the discourse for the first
time
 Given information = information which has already been established as background
information
 Accented words = words that are spoken strongly
 Listeners are sensitive to the appropriate level of accentendness for the information status

12.6 Fillers and gaps

 Linkage that needs to be made within sentences is between elements moved to the front of a
sentence and the location in the sentence structure form which they have been moved
 Fillers = fronted elements

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 Gaps = location they have been moved

 Empty categories = gaps have no phonological content
 Most obvious fillers are wh-words
 Active filler hypothesis = if a filler that is still active, then locating the gap is a priority
 Pseudogaps
 Processing strategies for matching fillers to gaps
o Gap as first resort = processing system will postulate a gap at the earliest possible
position
o Gap as last resort = delay postulating a gap until it is forced to
o Lexical expectation = processor may take a gamble
o Most recent filler hypothesis = where there are two gaps, the processor should assign
the most recent or two possible fillers tot the first gap and the more distant to the
second

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Chapter 13 (Architecture of the language processing system)

13.1 Introduction

13.2 Modularity within language processing

 Modularity
o Existence of separate modules for different types of language processing
o Relationship between the language processing system
 Key characteristics to a strongly modular approach
o Modules that are informationally encapsulated
o Automaticity of the operations of each module
 Broca’s aphasics
o Aggramatic
 Wernicke’s aphasics
o Well-formed sentences, but empty of meaning, because of difficulty in finding words

13.3 The relationship of production and comprehension

 During fluent speech production speakers tend to line up their pauses with the boundaries
between phrases and clauses
 Speaker frequently accompany their speech with iconic gestures that represent some salient
aspect of what is talking about
 Anomia = difficult to give names from objects
 Word deafness = patient can read, write and speak quite normally, but unable to understand
words spoken to them

13.4 The relationship of visual and spoken language

 Dual route model of reading aloud
 Interaction of visual and phonological representations for words is crucial

13.5 Language and other processing systems

 Specific language impairment = case of dissociation of linguistic and other abilities
 Chatterbox syndrome = Williams syndrome, suffers speak fluently and grammatical, but poor
performance of logical reasoning
 SLI and chatterbox syndrome double dissociation

13.6 Language and the brain

 Primarily the left hemisphere is involved and the processes are very fast

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