Ch. 11. Language comprehension

Question 1

How many words is it estimated that and adult knows?

Answer 1

50 000 - 100 000

Question 2

What is a lemma?

Answer 2

the version of a word which you find in the dictionary

Question 3

What is the process by which a stream of speech is converted into individual words and sentences?

Answer 3

Speech perception

Question 4

Which term refers to the rhythm, intonation and stress patterns in speech?

Answer 4

prosody

Question 5

What term reflects how the production of the same words can be different in different contexts, yet understood as the same (e.g., with or without background noise, different speakers, and so on)?

Answer 5

invariance

Question 6

What is the term given to the perception of speech stimuli as distinct sounds rather than as continuous noise?

Answer 6

cathegorical perception

Question 7

A meta-analysis of studies on reading by Brysbaert (2019) found that the average silent reading rate for adults is 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 words per minute for fiction. The difference accounts for:

Answer 7

Longer words in non-fiction

Question 8

What is the process by which we access stored knowledge about words?

Answer 8

lexical axess

Question 9

What is the tendency for a speech sound to be influenced by sounds preceding or following it?

Answer 9

co-articulation

Question 10

What is characterized by a deficit in the reading of irregular words, while the reading of regular words is spared?

Answer 10

surface dyslexia

Question 11

What is the perceptual illusion that illustrates the interplay of visual and auditory processing in speech perception?

Answer 11

mc-gurk effect

Question 12

In which research paradigm are the participants presented with a letter string and they must decide whether or not it is a word?

Answer 12

lexical decission task

Question 13

In which research paradigm are participants presented with a sentence frame and a target word, and they must decide if the word fits the frame?

Answer 13

sentence verification task

Question 14

What is the process by which we assign a syntactic structure to a sentence?

Answer 14

parsing

Question 15

What is the branch of study concerned with the mental process underlying language comprehension and production?

Answer 15

psycholinguistics

Question 16

What is a graphic representation of the syntactic structure of a sentence?

Answer 16

phase structure three

Question 17

What attaches incoming material to the phrase that is currently being processed?

Answer 17

late closure

Question 18

What are higher level cognitive processes related to language comprehension?

Answer 18

accessing semantic information

objective to understand what is being communicated

Question 19

What are the two major issues of speech perception?

Answer 19

Problems of:
1. invariance
2. segmentation

Question 20

What is important for recognition of individual words in a sentence?

Answer 20

the surrounding context in the recognition of individual words (i.e. the other words in the sentence)

Question 21

How do sound patterns within a language help with segmentation?

Answer 21

one used the rhythmical patters of the language in order to segment speech

Question 22

What is foreign accent syndrome?

Answer 22

a rare condition, resulting from bain injury, whereby an individual produces phonetic and prosodic errors in their speech such that it sounds non-native like

Question 23

What are slips of the ear?

Answer 23

also called mondegreens

hearing a different message than what was uttered: great ape for “gray tape”

occur when theres is a msiperception of a word boundary

Question 24

What helps counteract the invariance problem?

Answer 24

Our categorical percetion

We are more sensitive to differences in speech sounds across phonetic categories than within

Question 25

How was the right ear advantage demonstrated?

Answer 25

Using dichotic listening tasks; different words are presented to the right and left ears simultaneously;participants report more verbal items presented to the right ear; advantage holds for both words and nonsense syllables;particular advantage for consonant sounds

Question 26

What is the phoneme restoration effect?

Answer 26

the use of top-down processing to comprehend fragmented language;hear a complete word even when a phoneme has been removed from the input

Question 27

Cohort model of spoken word recognition

Answer 27

(like suggestions popping up as you type a google search. buttom up)

1. Initial cohort
   - large set of words form the cohort based on the initial phonemes heard
2. Word selection
   - as the speech input progresses the options decrease until only the target word is left
3. Integration
   - the point at which the sentence meaning is decided
   - when top-down processes can happen

Question 28

Critique of the cohort model

Answer 28

• word recognition can occur before the point at which the provided acoustic input is sufficient to be able to uniquely identify the word

(critique of the revised model which downplays the role of top-down processing)

Question 29

TRACE model of speech perception

Answer 29

• more interactive (lots of top-down info)
• is a “connectionist” model inspired by how real neurons work in the brain
• very interactive model, with top-down (context) having a strong effect on word perception
• when you are unconsciously weighing lots of information to guesses, we say that alternatives “compete” with one another
• model weighs information from all of the speech signal, not just the start of words
• Prediction: rhyming words (beaker/speaker) can compete with each other

Question 30

What are the weaknesses of the Trace model?

Answer 30

• vocabulary limited to one-syllable words
• top-down effects are sometimes over-emphasized
• no learning involved

Question 31

What are the strengths of the TRACE model?

Answer 31

General:

• well specified (computer model)
• explains bottom-up and top-down interaction

Explains empirical findings:

Categorical speech perception (phonemes morphed, e.g. /da/ towards /ta/; one will still hear on of the other, never a mix)

• the phonemes inhibit each other
• only the “winner” phoneme is activated in the end

Explains Word superiority effect (easier to detect a specific target phoneme when it is part of a real world)

• the top-down effect of the TRACE model
• the word layer activates the phoneme layer
• if the phoneme is presented without being part of a word, the word layer is not activated and thus gives no feedback to the phoneme layer