Comprehending Sentences

Question 1

Describe Broca’s aphasia

Answer 1

difficulty producing language however comprehension is relatively spared - agrammatism

Question 2

Describe Wernicke’s aphasia

Answer 2

difficulty comprehending the language you receive, fluency in speech

Question 3

Name some grammatical ambiguities

Answer 3

lexical-categorical
structural
attachment
on-line
garden path

Question 4

What is a lexical-categorical ambiguity?

Answer 4

unclear which grammatical category a word belongs to - verb, noun, adjective
e.g. Fire! Noun or verb?

Question 5

What is a structural ambiguity?

Answer 5

unclear where constituents begin/end and at what level they attach to the sentence
e.g. British left waffles

Question 6

What is attachment ambiguity?

Answer 6

unclear where an adjective refers to in a sentence

e.g. complaints about NBA referees growing ugly

Question 7

What is on-line processing?

Answer 7

processing speech word by word, information can be understood before the sentence is finished

Question 8

What is a garden path phenomenon?

Answer 8

sentences which lead you to the wrong interpretation until a word changes the meaning
confusion indicates that before the sentence ends we have committed to a certain way of parsing
e.g. Mary gave the child the dog bit a plaster

Question 9

What is parsing?

Answer 9

recognising each word’s class and its linear and hierarchical relation to the others in the sentence

Question 10

What is the Chomskyan view of parsing?

Answer 10

people don’t need to understand a sentence in order to parse it - can distinguish grammatical/ungrammatical sentences regardless of sense & children build a grammar that is largely independent of meaning

Question 11

What is the Alternative view of parsing?

Answer 11

grammar is constructed from combinations of words and their meanings

Question 12

What is a bridging inference?

Answer 12

when new information is presented it may not be clearly linked to the old information so bridging is needed to interpret meaning

Question 13

What is an elaborative inference?

Answer 13

adding information that isn’t strictly necessary to interpret the text
immediate; making all inference asap
delayed; making inferences when they are needed

Question 14

How are co-references determined?

Answer 14

recency
parallel position
gender
lexical cues
prosody

Question 15

How is a co-reference determined by recency?

Answer 15

the most recent noun is being referred to

Question 16

How is a co-reference determined by parallel position?

Answer 16

matching the anaphora with the antecedent in the same relevant phrasal position

Question 17

How is a co-reference determined by lexical cues?

Answer 17

references are easier to understand when a hyponym is followed by a hypernym

Question 18

What is a hyponym?

Answer 18

a more specific term for an object e.g. swallow instead of bird

Question 19

What is a hypernym?

Answer 19

a more general term for an object e.g. bird instead of swallow

Question 20

How is a co-reference determined by prosody?

Answer 20

pitch/tone/pause can provide referential cues

Question 21

What is Miller’s theory of sentence comprehension?

Answer 21

derivational theory of complexity; sentences with more transformations are harder to understand

Question 22

What is Bever’s model of sentence comprehension?

Answer 22

various strategies; perceptual, semantic and labelling strategies

Question 23

What is Kimball’s model of sentence comprehension?

Answer 23

7 principles of parsing
Top-down parsing
Right association
New nodes
Two sentences
Closure
Fixed structure
Processing

Question 24

What is Faizer & Fodor’s model of sentence comprehension?

Answer 24

2 stage model
preliminary phrase packer
sentence structure supervisor