Chapter 12 Psycholinguistics

Question 1

spoonerisms

Answer 1

slips of the tongue
useful for data about language processing
indicate that utterances are planned before they are articulated
provide evidence for particular linguistic units, such as phonemes and morphemes
Analyzing spoonerisms is a field technique
“You have hissed all my mystery lectures”

Question 2

experimental methods to study the organization of the mental lexicon

Answer 2

lexical decision

priming

Question 3

lexical decision

Answer 3

subjects must decide whether a string of letters is or is not a word
Dependent variables: response latency (the time to respond) and response accuracy (correctness/incorrectness of the response)

Question 4

Response times (lexical decision)

Answer 4

Higher-frequency words (e.g. free) yield faster responses than lower-frequency words (e.g. fret)

Unpronounceable nonwords (e.g. nlib) also yield slower responses than pronounceable ones (e.g. plib), indicating that phonotactic constraints play a role in processing

Non-words that sound like real words (e.g. blud, phocks) also yield slower responses than those that do not

Question 5

priming

Answer 5

the target item (e.g. the item to be judged in a lexical decision task) is preceded by a related prime
Response time is is faster if the prime is related: semantically (cat-dog)
orthographically (couch-touch)
phonologically (light-bite)
or morphologically (legal-illegality).

Question 6

parsing

Answer 6

The unconscious automatic analysis of sentences.

Unlike morphemes, which are stored, sentences are generated and interpreted by means of computations

Question 7

Methods of studying sentence processing

Answer 7

timed-reading experiments
eye-tracking experiments
event-related potential (ERP) experiments

Question 8

timed-reading experiments

Answer 8

subjects press a bar on the keyboard to advance from one word to the next. The dependent variable is response time

Question 9

what do timed-reading experiments show?

Answer 9

show that content words such as nouns and verbs take longer to process than function words such as determiners, conjunctions, and prepositions
show that readers pause at the end of a sentence; this is seen as the effect of integrating preceding information into the clause structure

Question 10

saccades

Answer 10

jerky eye movements while reading a sentence, can be tracked using a video camera.usually progress forwards during reading. they are called regressive saccades when going backwards

Question 11

eye-tracking experiments

Answer 11

look at saccades and regressive saccades
The dependent variables in eye-tracking experiments are fixation location, fixation time, and the number of regressive saccades.
• Eye fixations are typically centred on content words, and are typically longer for less frequent words.

Question 12

regressive saccades

Answer 12

• Syntactically complex and semantically anomalous (odd) sentences are associated with a greater number of regressive saccades.
• Regressive saccades also occur more with less proficient readers.

Question 13

Event-related potential (ERP) experiments

Answer 13

measure voltage fluctuations on the scalp, resulting from neural activity in the brain.
Random fluctuations are eliminated by averaging over many presentations of a given stimulus type
What remains is the electrical activity related to a particular type of stimulus event

Question 14

well-known ERP component

Answer 14

the N400, a negative electrical potential (voltage) about 400 milliseconds (ms) after a word is presented
This response is stronger for words that are unexpected in their semantic context
Example:
The pizza was too hot to eat. The pizza was too hot to drink. The pizza was too hot to cry.

Question 15

what do ERP experiments show

Answer 15

suggests that the interpretation of a sentence proceeds incrementally, not waiting until the sentence is complete

Question 16

Language corpora

Answer 16

can be analyzed for information about words, such as:
•  frequency
•  age of acquisition
•  syntactic contexts
•  morphological family size
•  semantics of neighbouring words

Question 17

English Lexicon Project

Answer 17

provides databases of stimulus words for psycholinguistic experiments, and response times from multiple lexical decision experiments

Question 18

Google Ngram

Answer 18

graphs the relative frequency of words or phrases (as found in Google Books) over time

Question 19

bottom-up processing

Answer 19

• As listeners hear an utterance, they perform a phonetic analysis to isolate phonemes and word boundaries, and relate these to items in the mental lexicon.

Question 20

top-down processing

Answer 20

isteners also develop a partial representation of what they hear, and form expectations to guide phonetic processing and word recognition

Question 21

slips of the tongue evidence

Answer 21

phonological features play a role in language processing, since they can be involved in reversal or spreading errors
Intended

Question 22

cohort model of speech processing

Answer 22

evidence that listeners analyze each word incrementally from beginning to end, gradually reducing the number of compatible word choices until only one is left (plus any homophones).
The unit of analysis appears to be the phoneme

Question 23

cohort model of speech processing example

Answer 23

g: gap, get, ghost, girl, glass, glee, goat, gull… gl: glad, glass, glazier, glee, glimpse, gloat… gla: glad, glamorous, gland, glass, glazier… glas: glasnost, glass…
glass

Question 24

syllable

Answer 24

evidence that the syllable plays a role in speech processing

subjects identify target syllables more quickly than target non- syllables

Question 25

internal structure of syllable

Answer 25

appears to affect language processing

When subjects blend two one-syllable words to form a single one, subjects tend to take the onset from one word and the rhyme from the other
bug + cat = bat

Question 26

Morphemes

Answer 26

the components of a multimorphemic word prime their semantic associates, independent of the whole word
• because the components are activated by morphological parsing before the complete item is processed (pre-lexical decomposition), and
• because a complete lexical item activates its components (post-lexical decomposition).

Question 27

pre-lexical parsing

Answer 27

BarkingV primes dog—but triggers negative priming for tree, suggesting that bark(N) is activated pre-lexically, then suppressed post- lexically.

pseudoaffixed word like corner primes corn, but a nonaffixed word like scandal does not prime scan

Question 28

Selectional restrictions

Answer 28

processing times are longer for nonwords that violate these
Example:
re-: attaches to V to create V
-able: attaches to V to create A
-ize: attaches to N to create V -ity: attaches to A to create N
[re-birm]-able re-[birm-ize] *re-birm-ity

Question 29

Syntax

Answer 29

involves operations (or transformations) that change the structural relations among words and phrases—for example, wh-movement

the number of these in a given sentence does not predict its processing time.

Question 30

module

Answer 30

a relatively autonomous, or independent, processing unit.
sentence processing is controlled by a module separate from the syntax (the parser)

Question 31

garden- path sentences

Answer 31

evidence for a separation between the parser and the grammar
sentences which are grammatical (and fairly simple) but still difficult to understand
Ex:
The horse raced past the barn fell
Since Jay always walks a mile seems like a short distance to him.

Question 32

two principles of parsing: (garden-path sentence)

Answer 32

Minimal Attachment

Late Closure

Question 33

Minimal Attachment

Answer 33

do not postulate unnecessary syntactic nodes

Question 34

Late Closure

Answer 34

attach new words to the clause currently being processed

Question 35

metaphors for language processing

Answer 35

A psycholinguistic model incorporates research results into a proposal about how processing takes place.
they summarize research findings and generate specific hypotheses

Question 36

Serial processing models

Answer 36

postulate that processing proceeds step by step.

better at capturing bottom- up procedures such as phonetic perception

Question 37

Parallel processing models

Answer 37

postulate that several processes occur simultaneously.better at capturing interactions between top-down and bottom- up processes, as in sentence comprehension

Question 38

Single-route models

Answer 38

claim that representations are accessed in only one way.

Question 39

Dual-route models

Answer 39

claim that representations are accessed in two competing ways.

Question 40

Psycholinguistic modelling

Answer 40

Example: accessing frequent, infrequent, and novel compounds
• blackboard: whole-word recognition
• breadboard: morphological decomposition
• blueboard: morphological decomposition

Question 41

Symbolic models

Answer 41

make reference to rules and representations involving symbols such as phonemes, words, syntactic categories (N, V, etc.), and so on.

Question 42

Connectionist models

Answer 42

make reference to associations of simple units (nodes) which have no discrete boundaries

Question 43

Language processing seems to involve both:

Answer 43

• massive storage of associated representations, and
• obligatory computations that decompose linguistic input into its syntactic, morphological, and phonological constituents.