10. Language

Question 1

What is Parsing?

Answer 1

Process by which words in a message are transformed into a mental representation of the combined meaning of the words

Question 2

What are constituents in Parsing?

Answer 2

Constituents in Parsing are subpatterns that correspond to basic phrases, or units, in a sentence’s structure

Identification of constituent structure is important to the parsing of a sentence

Question 3

What do participants do during comprehension (parsing)

Answer 3

– Process the meaning of a sentence one phrase at a time

– Maintain access to a phrase only while processing its meaning

Question 4

what did Jarvella (1971)’s study include?

Answer 4

Jarvella (1971) had people listen to long passages of speech. Interruptions during the passages were cues to the participants to recall, as precisely as possible, whatever they could from the sentence just heard. Jarvella created passages that contained identical phrases, except that the phrases “belonged” to different clausal constituents.

Question 5

What is the immediacy of interpretation in parsing?

Answer 5

– People try to extract meaning out of each word as it arrives
– They do not wait until the end of a phrase to decide on how to interpret a word

Question 6

what did Just and Carpenter’s (1980) study find?

Answer 6

Participants fixated longer on unfamiliar or surprising words while reading a sentence

Question 7

what did Berkum et al. (1999) study find?

Answer 7

The cat entered the room suddenly, startling a mouse which had found a bit of cheese in the corner.
The mouse quickly/slowly returned to its hole

quickly = predictable
slowly = unpredictable

Question 8

how do people process sentences according to parsing?

Answer 8

• People process a sentence as each word comes in
• However, the meaning of a sentence is defined in terms of the phrase structure
• Thus, some of the information cannot be processed until the phrase is complete

Question 9

What is permanent ambiguity in parsing?

Answer 9

• Ambiguity remains to the end of a sentence

* e.g., Flying planes can be dangerous.

Question 10

What is transient ambiguity in parsing?

Answer 10

• Ambiguity is resolved by the end of a sentence
• e.g., The old train…
… left the station.
… the young.

Question 11

what is the principle of minimal attachment in parsing?

Answer 11

The parser builds the simplest syntactic structure possible (that is, the one with the fewest phrasal nodes).

– One interprets a sentence in a way that causes minimal complication of its phrase structure

The horse raced past the barn fell.
The woman painted by the artist fell.

– If ambiguity is resolved within a phrase, we are often unaware of dealing with the ambiguity

Question 12

how do we deal with lexical ambiguity according to Swinney?

Answer 12

The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of the room.
– Lexical decision task
• spy, ant, or sew
– When they were presented within 400 ms of the prime word (bugs), recognition of both spy and ant was facilitated
– If the delay was more than 700 ms, only the elated word (ant) was facilitated

Question 13

According to parsin, what do people do when presented with ambiguous words?

Answer 13

When an ambiguous word is presented, participants select a particular meaning
within 700 ms

Question 14

what are the two syntactic cues that are used to interpret a sentence?

Answer 14

– Word order
– Inflectional structure

Him kicked the girl.
The girl kicked he.
The girl kicked him.
He kicked the girl.

Question 15

what else is used to interpret a sentence and what was an experiment that supported this?

Answer 15

Semantic cues are also used
Jane fruit eat [Jane eat(s) fruit]
• Fillenbaum (1971, 1974)
1. John was buried and died.
2. John died and was buried.
– When asked to paraphrase the sentence #1 above, about 60% of the participants generated a sentence that had the same meaning as #2

Question 16

how are syntactic and semantic cues integated?

Answer 16

Syntactic and semantic cues are integrated to arrive at an interpretation of a sentence

Question 17

What was Typer and MArslen-Wilson (1977)’s study?

Answer 17

– If you walk too near the runway, landing planes are

– If you’ve been trained as a pilot, landing planes are

Question 18

How do we combine syntactic and semantic cues?

Answer 18

through interactive processing

Question 19

what is interactive processing?

Answer 19

– Syntactic and semantic cues are simultaneously processed
– People appear to be able to use semantic information immediately to guide syntactic
decisions

Question 20

What as Trueswell et al (1994)’s study in parsing?

Answer 20

The evidence examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable.
The evidence that was examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable

Question 21

What is utilisation in language?

Answer 21

Utilization
– A stage of language comprehension in which people use the meaning of a sentence to arrive at deeper understanding of the sentence

Question 22

what does utilisation usually include?

Answer 22

Usually includes something beyond what is stated in the sentence itself

Question 23

what are backward inferences in utilisation?

Answer 23

Inferences in sentence comprehension that connect the sentence to prior context

Question 24

what are forward inferences in utilisation?

Answer 24

Inferences in sentence comprehension that anticipate things not yet asserted

Question 25

what was Singer (1994)’s experiment in utilisation?

Answer 25

– The dentist pulled the tooth painlessly. The patient liked the method. (direct statement)
– The tooth was pulled painlessly. The dentist used a new method. (backward inference)
– The tooth was pulled painlessly. The patient liked the new method. (forward inference)
– Participants judged whether it was true that A dentist pulled the tooth.

Question 26

What is inference of reference in utilisation?

Answer 26

Various linguistic cues indicate that an expression is referring to something that we already know
– e.g., a and the

Question 27

What was Loftus and Zanni’s (1975) experiment on utilisation?

Answer 27

– Participants watched a film of a car accident
– Then they were asked a series of questions such as:
A. Did you see a broken headlight?
B. Did you see the broken headlight?

– Participants were more likely to answer “Yes” when asked the question in form B

Question 28

what is prenominal reference in utilisation?

Answer 28

Deciding who is being referenced by a pronoun is critical for sentence comprehension

Question 29

what are the cues used to interpret pronouns?

Answer 29

Number or gender cues
Syntactic cues
Semantic cues

Question 30

what are examples of number or gender cues?

Answer 30

Melvin, Susan, and their children left when [he, she, they] became sleepy.

Question 31

what are examples of syntactic cues?

Answer 31

Floyd punched Bert and then he kicked him.

• Dorothea ate the pie; Ethel ate cake; later she had coffee.

Question 32

What are examples of semantic cues?

Answer 32

• Tom shouted at Bill because he spilled the coffee.

* Tom shouted at Bill because he had a headache.

Question 33

what are negative sentences in utilisation?

Answer 33

Appear to suppose a positive sentence and then ask us to infer what must be true if the positive sentence is false

e.g. Ken is not a crook
– The above sentence supposes that it is reasonable to assume that Ken is indeed a crook
– Then it asserts that this assumption is false

Question 34

what was in Clark and Chase’s studies (e.g. 1972)

Answer 34

1. The star is above the plus.
• True affirmative
2. The plus is above the star.
• False affirmative
3. The plus is not above the star.
• True negative
4. The star is not above the plus.
• False negative

Question 35

what did Clark and Chase hypothesise?

Answer 35

Clark and Chase hypothesized that three processes are involved in the processing of these sentences
– T: processing of base supposition
– M: processing of mismatch between
supposition and picture
– N: processing of negation

Question 36

what were Clark and Chases results?

Answer 36

The star is above the plus. (true affirmative)
The plus is above the star. (false affirmative)
The plus is not above the star. (true negative)
The star is not above the plus. (false negative)

Question 37

what is text processing?

Answer 37

A number of recurring relations serve to organize sentences into larger parts of a text

Question 38

what is response relation?

Answer 38

A question is presented and an answer follows or a problem is presented and a solution follows

Question 39

what is a specific relation?

Answer 39

Specific information is given subsequent to a more gentle point

Question 40

What is an explanation relation?

Answer 40

An explanation is given for a point

Question 41

what is evidence relation?

Answer 41

Evidence is given to support a point

Question 42

what is sequence relation?

Answer 42

Points are presented in their temporal sequence as a set

Question 43

What is cause relation?

Answer 43

An event is presented as the cause of another event

Question 44

What is goal relation?

Answer 44

An event is presented as the goal of another event

Question 45

What is a collection relation?

Answer 45

A loose structure of points is presented (this is perhaps a case in which there is no real organisation relation)

Question 46

how are propositions in texts organised?

Answer 46

Propositions in a text are often organized hierarchically according to various semantic relations

Question 47

What are the characteristics of memory from textual material?

Answer 47

– is sensitive to the hierarchical and causal
structure of that text
– tends to be better when people attend to
that structure

Question 48

What was Keenan et al (1984)’s experiment on text processing?

Answer 48

1. Joey’s big brother punched him again and again.
2. Racing down the hill, Joey fell off his bike.
3. Joey’s crazy mother became furiously angry with him.
4. Joey went to a neighbor’s house to play.

The next day, his body was covered with bruises.

Question 49

what are bridging inferences?

Answer 49

Sometimes two propositions that are further apart in the text need to be related