9. Language Production Flashcards
What are the 2 main forms of language production?
Speaking and writing
What are characteristics of speaking and writing?
Both are goal-directed activities - communication
What are the 4 main differences between speaking and writing?
1) Speaking is more spontaneous than writing
2) Nature of audience – speakers know precisely who is receiving the message, but writers often don’t
3) Feedback – speakers receive immediate feedback but writers don’t
4) Access to what has been produced –Writers usually have direct access to what have been produced so far, but speakers do not.
How do we know that speaking is quite undemanding of our processing resources?
We can speak very fast! Around 3 words per second.
Our ability to process speech despite its rapid rate tells us that it is relatively easy
What are 3 strategies we use to reduce processing demands?
1) Preformulation – Reduce processing costs by producing phrases used before. Repeat many expressions
2) Underspecification – Using simplified expressions
3) Syntactic Priming – Occurs when a previously experienced syntactic structure influences current processing. Common in speech because processing on demands on speech production are reduced when a heard syntactic structure is copied
Which is harder to produce - monolog or dialog? Why?
Monolog is harder than dialog.
Dialog – can copy phrases or sentences of the other person. The other person’s words serve as a prime/prompt.
Monolog – speakers must generate their own ideas
The _____ principle is they key to successful communication.
Cooperative. Ensure smooth switches between speakers, around 500ms pause.
What are the 4 maxims of communication?
1) Maxim of quantity
2) Maxim of quality
3) Maxim of relation
4) Maxim of manner
What is the maxim of quantity?
Speaker should be as informative as necessary, but not more so. Necessary to know the object(s) from which the referent must be distinguished from.
What is the maxim of quality? What does flouting of this maxim entail?
Speaker should be truthful.
Flouting the maxim of quality results in sarcasm or irony.
What is the maxim of relation?
Speaker should say things relevant to the situation
What is the maxim of manner?
Speaker should make his/her contribution easy to understand. (brief and unambiguous)
What is an adjacency pair?
When both speakers have each taken a turn (eg. qn and answer) It is a common way a conversation moves from one speaker to another
In real life, how successful are people in adhering to the maxim of quantity?
Only moderately successful at adhering to this principle. ⅓ of the time, speakers produce an unnecessarily detailed sentence.
Cognitively demanding to work out that listeners don’t need the additional information and omit that information.
In nonlinguistic (“the larger bat”) vs linguistic ambiguity (“the baseball bat”) situations, which situations do participants do better in?
nonlinguistic ambiguity
In linguistic ambiguity situations, there is no similarity between the two bats in terms of visual shape and meaning. The only similarity is at the phonological (sound) level and that becomes apparent only later in processing when the speaker is about to name the object.
How do gestures enhance communication?
Increases listeners’ ability to make sense of the speaker’s message
When the speakers knew that the listeners could not see the visual stimulus, they used more gestures to describe it. What does this suggest?
Suggest that speakers can be quite responsive to listener’s needs.
Gestures were far more effective than words at communicating what sort of information?
visual spatial information
Speakers tend to _____ the value of gestures as a means of communication.
underestimate
Why do speakers use gestures when speaking on the phone?
gestures may help us to retrieve words we want to say, making it easier to communicate. When participants ability to make gestures were suppressed, they were less able to guess uncommon words from word meanings.
What are some examples of discourse markers?
“well”, “oh”, “uhhh”, “you know”
What is the purpose of:
- “oh”, “uhh”
- “you know”
- “like”
“oh”, “uhh” - indicate that speaker is experiencing problems in deciding what to say next
“you know” - check for understanding and to connect with the listeners
“like” - indicate discrepancy between what someone says and what they mean
Which discourse markers are used to indicate moving to the next topic?
“oh” - new topic related to speaker
“so” - new topic related to listener
Which 2 discourse markers are more used in casual situations than formal ones?
“oh” and “well”
shouldn’t use “like” during interviews as it reduces chance of being hired
What are prosodic cues?
Include rhythm, stress, and intonation
They make it easier for listeners to understand what speakers are saying
Do speakers use prosodic cues appropriately?
nope. speakers often fail to provide prosodic cues even when they are needed. Speakers used prosodic cues limitedly as they tend to overestimate the listener’s understanding of the intended meaning.
When are prosodic cues more likely to be provided?
when the context fails to clarify the meaning of an ambiguous sentence.
Speakers provided prosodic cues regardless of whether the listener needed them. What does this suggest?
Speakers’ use of prosodic cues did not indicate any particular responsiveness to the listener.
Speakers and listeners work together to maximize common ground. What is common ground?
mutual beliefs, expectations, and knowledge. (ie. speakers and listeners try to get on the “same wavelength”)
What are 2 types of assumptions that speakers make about listeners to establish common ground?
1) Global assumptions
2) Local assumptions
What is the difference between global and local assumptions?
Global assumptions: Listener’s preferred language; Listener’s general knowledge; Shared personal experiences
Local assumptions: Relates to what the listener knows or is attending to at any given moment
Comparing global and local assumptions, which ones are speakers more likely to make mistakes for?
Speakers are more likely to make incorrect local assumptions than global ones because the local assumptions keep changing
What are 2 problems with the use of common ground?
1) Cognitively demanding to keep focusing on precisely what the listener knows. Limits the influence of common ground speaker’s utterances. So speakers just focus on their own knowledge until listeners tell them something is amiss.
2) Speakers often produce utterances that are easy for them to say rather than easy for their listeners to understand, neglecting common ground, especially when in urgent situations.
In the Horton and Keysar experiment, dot moving from speakers side to listeners side for shared vs unshared conditions, and speeded vs unspeeded conditions, what were the findings?
Explain in terms of unspeeded vs speeded conditions.
Unspeeded condition: participants used common ground and utilised contextual information in their descriptions only in the shared-context condition.
Speeded condition: participants included contextual information in their descriptions regardless of its appropriateness. (ie. they assumed contextual knowledge from listeners even if they knew the listener did not have access to that knowledge). There was insufficient time for cognitively demanding monitoring processes to operate.
Comparing interaction vs no interaction condition in the lego construction (director & builder) experiment, which condition had more common ground?
interactive condition
Directors often very rapidly altered what they said to maximize the common ground between themselves and the builders in the interactive condition. Hence fewer errors were made.
What are 2 strategies speakers take with respect to the common ground?
1) shared responsibility - Speaker expect the listener to volunteer information if he/she notices a problem with the common ground
2) cognitive overload - Speaker may try to keep track of the listener’s knowledge as well as his/her own, but generally finds that this requires excessive cognitive processing.
In what circumstances do speakers make more use of common ground? (3)
1) Time is not limited
2) Interaction is possible
3) Listeners state that they have a problem
Give 2 limitations of current research on common ground.
1) lab setting, participants’ common ground is harder to keep track as they don’t know each other beforehand. Not the case in real life.
2) In the lab, common ground generally involves information presented in visual displays. In real life, common ground typically refers to past events or knowledge of mutual acquaintances, or current information available.
Can liars be distinguished more easily via their verbal or nonverbal behavior?
Verbal behavior!
How to use content of a speech to tell if someone is lying?
Deceptive communicators used fewer first-person singular pronouns (eg. “I”) and fewer exclusive words (eg. “but”, “except”, “without”). Thus, liars distanced themselves from their lies and presented a simple account.
Truthful accounts were more logical and coherent and also contained more details. Liars speak more slowly, with more pauses.
How do we detect lying since we know that lying is cognitively demanding?
1) add a cognitive load while the suspect tells his story
2) ask the suspect to say his story in reverse order
What are the 4 levels involved in speech production?
1) semantic level (representation of ideas)
2) syntactic level (grammar and sentence structure)
3) morphological level (vocabulary)
4) phonological level (pronunciation)
What is the tip-of-the-tongue state?
Refers to a frustrating situation where we have a concept or idea in mind but cannot find the right word to describe it.
When does tip-of-the-tongue state occur?
Happens when semantic processing is successful but phonological processing is unsuccessful. Have problems accessing phonological information
Occurs with relatively rare words. Especially words that don’t sound like any other word (eg. apron, vineyard). The unusual phonological forms of words make them hard to retrieve.
What can be done to assist people to produce the correct word when they are in the tip-of-the-tongue state?
Present them with words sharing the first syllable with the correct word
Why do bilinguals experience the tip-of-the-tingue state more than monolinguals? (2 possible explanations)
1) Bilinguals’ attempts to find a word in one language could be disrupted by interference from the phonological representations of words in their other language.
2) bilinguals use many words somewhat less frequently than monolinguals. Hence the connections between meanings and phonological form are less well established.
