Comprehending Sentences Flashcards
Describe Broca’s aphasia
difficulty producing language however comprehension is relatively spared - agrammatism
Describe Wernicke’s aphasia
difficulty comprehending the language you receive, fluency in speech
Name some grammatical ambiguities
lexical-categorical structural attachment on-line garden path
What is a lexical-categorical ambiguity?
unclear which grammatical category a word belongs to - verb, noun, adjective
e.g. Fire! Noun or verb?
What is a structural ambiguity?
unclear where constituents begin/end and at what level they attach to the sentence
e.g. British left waffles
What is attachment ambiguity?
unclear where an adjective refers to in a sentence
e.g. complaints about NBA referees growing ugly
What is on-line processing?
processing speech word by word, information can be understood before the sentence is finished
What is a garden path phenomenon?
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
What is parsing?
recognising each word’s class and its linear and hierarchical relation to the others in the sentence
What is the Chomskyan view of parsing?
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
What is the Alternative view of parsing?
grammar is constructed from combinations of words and their meanings
What is a bridging inference?
when new information is presented it may not be clearly linked to the old information so bridging is needed to interpret meaning
What is an elaborative inference?
adding information that isn’t strictly necessary to interpret the text
immediate; making all inference asap
delayed; making inferences when they are needed
How are co-references determined?
recency parallel position gender lexical cues prosody
How is a co-reference determined by recency?
the most recent noun is being referred to
How is a co-reference determined by parallel position?
matching the anaphora with the antecedent in the same relevant phrasal position
How is a co-reference determined by lexical cues?
references are easier to understand when a hyponym is followed by a hypernym
What is a hyponym?
a more specific term for an object e.g. swallow instead of bird
What is a hypernym?
a more general term for an object e.g. bird instead of swallow
How is a co-reference determined by prosody?
pitch/tone/pause can provide referential cues
What is Miller’s theory of sentence comprehension?
derivational theory of complexity; sentences with more transformations are harder to understand
What is Bever’s model of sentence comprehension?
various strategies; perceptual, semantic and labelling strategies
What is Kimball’s model of sentence comprehension?
7 principles of parsing Top-down parsing Right association New nodes Two sentences Closure Fixed structure Processing
What is Faizer & Fodor’s model of sentence comprehension?
2 stage model
preliminary phrase packer
sentence structure supervisor
