Comprehension Language and Psychology Overview The comprehension of

Comprehension Language and Psychology

Overview • The comprehension of sounds • The comprehension of words • The comprehension of sentences

THE NATURE OF COMPREHENSION

The phoneme restoration effect • • It was found that the _eel was on the axle. It was found that the _eel was on the shoe. It was found that the _eel was on the orange. It was found that the _eel was on the table.

The phoneme restoration effect • • It was found that the wheel was on the axle. It was found that the heel was on the shoe. It was found that the peel was on the orange. It was found that the meel was on the table.

The phoneme restoration effect • Listeners do not accurately record what they hear. • They report what they expected to hear from the context.

What is comprehension? • Comprehension is not the passive recording of what is heard or seen. We do not necessarily hear all words spoken to us. • Comprehension is strongly susceptible to the slightest of change in discourse which the listener is attending to. • Comprehension is not processed in a linear sequence. We process chunks of information, not individual words and not meaning in isolation.

THE COMPREHENSION OF SOUNDS

Who are you referring to? Penny Benny

What phonemic information is used to distinguish Penny from Benny? • Voice onset timing (VOT) – The brief burst of air which precedes the articulation of all stop consonants. – Provides phonetic information listeners use to distinguish between sounds like [p] and [b] • [p] is 50 millisecond (1/20 second) later than [b].

[g] vs. [k] http: //psycnet. apa. org/index. cfm? fa=buy. op tion. To. Buy&id=1999 -05027 -010

Q 1: How do we perceive the subtle difference so rapidly and so accurately? • We are born with the ability to perceive subtle phonetic differences. • Categorical perception – We perceive the phonetic differences in binary either-or fashion.

Categorical perception [b]? If you hear sounds with a VOT of about 25 milliseconds (about halfway between [b] and [b]), which would it be? [p]?

Q 2: Is the ability to categorically perceive phonetic differences influenced by the linguistic environment? Thai English Voiced • [bai] ‘leaf’ • [dai] ‘die’ • [laid] ‘lied’ Voiceless • [pai] ‘go’ • [tai] ‘tie’ • [lait] ‘light’ aspirated voiceless Aspirated voiceless • [phai] ‘paddle’ • [thai] ‘tie’

THE COMPREHENSION OF WORDS

The psychological mechanisms that affect lexical processing: Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) • the representation of information is distributed (not local) • memory and knowledge are stored in the connections between units. • learning can occur with gradual changes in connection strength by experience. http: //web. lemoyne. edu/~hevern/psy 101_11 F/psy 101 lectures/ 12 memory 2_outline. html

How to access words in the mental lexicon: The logogen model A logogen • represents a word in the mental lexicon. • specifies the word’s linguistic features (semantic, phonological, etc) Activation • The logogen is activated by sensory (auditory and visual) input and by contextual information. Process of lexical access • Each logogen has a threshold. When the lexical information reaches the threshold, the logogen ‘fires’. That is, the word represented by the logogen is accessed. • Each time a word is encountered, the threshold for the word is lowered. In other words, less information is required to access the word.

• The logogen model (Morton, 1969, 1970) http: //en. wikiversity. org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Lexical_Access

The frequency effect • The high frequency words have low threshold of activation. • The low frequency words have high threshold of activation. http: //en. wikiversity. org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Lexical_Access

What can the PDP model account for? • The Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon • The bathtub effect • Spreading activation network

Tip-of-the-Tongue (TOT) phenomenon • We try to retrieve a word we think we know, but we just cannot recall the word at that moment. http: //www. reference. com/browse/tip_of_the_tongue

the bathtub effect • We tend to remember the beginning and the end of a word better than the middle part.

Spreading activation networks • concepts are connected via nodes and the strength of the connection is represented by the distance between the nodes http: //en. wikiversity. org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Semantics_in_the_Brain

The process of spreading activation • Activation begins at a single node and then spread in parallel form throughout the network. • The force of activation is reduced over distance, thus ensuring that closely related concepts are more likely to be activated than distant concept.

THE COMPREHENSION OF SENTENCES

Comprehension Difficulties • Transformational complexity – Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC) • Ambiguity

Transformational/Generative Grammar Deep structure Transformation • A sentence produced by PS rules alone. • (competence) • The necessary changes applied to the deep structure in order to produce a surface structure Surface structure • A sentence that has run through one or more transformations • (performance)

Derivational Theory of Complexity Difficulty in comprehension was derived from the number of transformations that were added on to the original phrase structure of the sentence. • Affirmative You are in love with coffee. You are NOT in love with coffee. • negation • interrogation Are you in love with coffee? Aren’t you in love with coffee? • Interrogation • Negation

Problems • Unexplainable exceptions • Passive sentence takes less time to recall than negative sentences. – John was hit > Tom did not hit John.

The semantic factor • It takes less time for semantically plausible sentences. – The struggling swimmer was rescued by the lifeguard. – The struggling swimmer rescued the lifeguard.

The semantic factor • Negation is grammatically simple, but semantically difficult to comprehend. – The struggling swimmer was rescued by the lifeguard. – The struggling swimmer was not rescued by the lifeguard.

Ambiguity • The phoneme monitoring task – Subjects listen to paired sentences and are asked to react as soon as they hear a target phoneme. – Sentences containing more complex information in the clause before the target phoneme will create a greater lag in reaction time.

Semantic Ambiguity Sentences containing more complex information in the clause before the target phoneme will create a greater lag in reaction time. • The men started to drill before they were ordered to do so. • The men stared to march before they were ordered to do so.

Garden-pathing • The linear left-to-right unfolding of sentence structure helps the listener/reader anticipate the next word or words which will follow. – Without her contributions failed to appear. – Since she always jogs a mile seems a short distance.

Failure syntactic parsing principles Without her contributions failed to appear http: //www. ling. sinica. edu. tw/eip/FILES/journal/2007. 6. 21. 11349123. 6028631. pdf

Lexical ambiguity: Locative particle vs. verb of main clause 我們在別墅下面向海洋

Questions?