Developing Knowledge and Processing

Question 1

Whats the difference between Competence and performance in psycholinguistics?
And why?

Answer 1

Competence is what we know of language, like linguistic theories and language rules.

Performance deals with how we process language both in comprehension and production of language.

We distinguish because competence can’t fully predict how we use language. That is, even though we know that something is wrong e.g. spoonerisms, we still produce them.

e.g. She showed me her tool kits (kool tits)

Question 2

Phonology

Answer 2

Phonology is defined as the study of sound patterns and their meanings, both within and across languages. An example of phonology is the study of different sounds and the way they come together to form speech and words - such as the comparison of the sounds of the two “p” sounds in “pop-up.”

Sound patterns are studied as “phonemes” which are “any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat.”

Question 3

Lexical knowledge

Answer 3

The vocabulary of language. Units (one or more words) are called “lexemes”, and can be either grammatical (i.e. of, by) or lexical, which means they carry meaning (i.e. “program coordinator”, “sloth”).

Question 4

Morphology and

4 Morphological operations

Answer 4

Deals with the structure of words, e.g. root, prefix and suffix (dis-enchant, bewilder-ment).

Operations:
conversion: Change of word-classes
Derivation: Done with e.g. prefix/suffix
- “independent” is derived from “dependent”
Compounding: Joining words, e.g. “dog catcher”, “life saver”
blending: Brunch

Question 5

Syntactic knowledge

Answer 5

Knowledge about the rules that govern how words can be combined, also known as grammar.
Knowledge about sentence constituents (nouns, verbs) and syntactic categories based on the syntactic relationships between linguistic terms.

Question 6

Syntactic analysis:
Substitution
Movement
Passivization

Answer 6

Question 7

Deictic expression

Answer 7

Deictic expressions point to an entity or property in the context (e.g. “the boat over there”, over there has deictic use)

Question 8

Key parts of Jackendoff’s (2002) architecture of the language faculty are

Answer 8

Structures: phonological, syntactic, conceptual
Processors: phonological, syntactic, conceptual
Working memory
Interfaces to auditory system, vocalisation, vision, and action

Question 9

Characteristics of language processing:

Answer 9

Time course: incrementality, expectations
Information flow and representations: modularity,
embodiment
Impact on cognitive resources: complexity, ambiguity

Question 10

Modularity!
What are the assumptions and which researcher* came up with them

*provocative and wrong dude

Answer 10

Fodor proposed that the mind is highly modular and that each module is informationally encapsulated. e.g. language and visual areas only have access to output from the module, but can’t interfere with internal processes.

This has been proven wrong, as e.g. the visual world paradigm has provided evidence for highly interactive processing.

Question 11

Complexity:

Center embedding

Answer 11

The cat that the dog that the man walked barked meowed

Question 12

Ambiguity:
word ambiguity
Word-order ambiguity
Thematic role ambiguity
Attachment ambiguity

Answer 12

Word ambiguity: one word has multiple meanings dependent on the context.

Word-order ambiguity: In some languages (german) you can both use subject-object and object-subject oder. e.g. Die Mutter grüßt die Tante (The mother greets the aunt) can be understood both ways.

Thematic role ambiguity: The same noun phrase can be both agent and patient, e.g. “The princess called by the king was talking to her nurse”.

Attachment ambiguity: The man greeted the woman with flowers. Who has the flowers?

Question 13

Levelt’s model of speech production: explain the steps

Answer 13

Question 14

How is Dell’s model of speech production different from Levelt’s?

Answer 14

The main difference is that in Dell’s model is that it includes feedback. This means that when a lemma(word) is selected, the phonemes are created, and a signal is sent backwards in the model which strengthens the relationship between a phoneme and a lemma.

This is thought to create the lexical bias in speech errors, where it has been shown that speech errors are more often real words than non-words. This is thought to be because real words have phoneme representations at the lemma level, and non-words do not.

Question 15

Speech perception: Coarticulation

Answer 15

Coarticulation refers to the concept of two or more speech sounds being produced so that one influences the other.

Question 16

Motor theory of speech perception:

Answer 16

The motor theory of speech perception is the hypothesis that people perceive spoken words by identifying the vocal tract gestures with which they are pronounced rather than by identifying the sound patterns that speech generates.

That is, we relate sound to gestures and gestures to phonemes, rather than sound directly to phonemes. This leads to the activation of motor cortex during speech perception, and it has been theorised that mirror neurons mediate the relationship between speech production and speech perception.

Question 17

Multi-model speech perception: McGurk effect, what is it?

Answer 17

http://auditoryneuroscience.com/index.php/McGurkEffect

Using this experiment it’s been shown that both vision and touch influences what we hear. So we would understand each other better if we put our hand in each others mouth during conversation.

The linguists at Kitkat club do this every first wednesday of the month

Question 18

”?????????????” learning is a mechanism for learning the meaning of words across multiple exposures, despite exposure-by-exposure uncertainty as to the word’s true meaning.

Answer 18

Cross-situational