language and comprehension Flashcards
challenges of comprehension: what are the different types of comprehension ambiguities?
ambiguity in the speech stream, ambiguity at the word level, ambiguity at the phoneme level
explain ambiguity in the speech stream
difficult to know where one word ends and the other one starts when speaking, so word boundaries are tricky to define. gaps in speech don’t necessarily correspond to word boundaries
give an example of an ambiguity in the speech stream
I scream or ice-cream
explain ambiguity at the word level
words that sound the same but have different meanings, need to hear them in context in order to understand the meaning of the word
explain ambiguity at the phoneme level
words that chance the way they sound depending on the environment e.g, who/how/where they were said (depends on context)
words that sound and are spelt the same =
homonyms
give an example of a homonym
BANK-BANK
words that sound the same but are spelt differently =
homophones
give an example of a homophone
MUSCLE-MUSSEL
words that are spelt the same but sound differently =
homographs
give an example of a homograph
BOW (bend over) - BOW (and arrow)
give an example of misunderstood word boundaries (speech stream ambiguity)
fork handles misunderstood for four candles
air is pushed up the vocal tract and hits points in the mouth that form an obstruction resulting in different types of consonants =
place of articulation
sound changes in a sentence or context when followed by another sound that has a different place of articulation =
coarticulation
phonemes can change sounds within their own context
give an example and explanation of coarticulation
n sound in 2 different sentences changes its sound because it is followed by a consonant that has a different place of articulation
ability to distinguish between sounds by categorising them =
categorical perception
/b/ and /p/ = what type of consonants?
bilabial
point at which vocal chord vibrations start relative to the release of a closure =
Voice Onset Time (VOT)
/p/ and /b/ use same point of articulation when saying these sounds. why can we perceive them as 2 different sounds?
due to our categorical perception.
/p/ = voiceless,
/b/ = voiced,
it is possible to measure the point at which people recognise /p/ or /b/ based on when voicing starts
regional accents and foreign accents result in more _______
ambiguity
how are we able to understand what is being said with foreign accents?
might have a mental representation for similar sounding words so we take a guess on what we think we might hear and the context
not being able to define the categories of sounds =
invariance problem
preventing ambiguity can happen by?
acoustic properties of phonemes, categorical perception (ability to filter out noise in the speech stream), top down processing (matching sounds to existing mental representations of words already heard)
what is the process involved with top down processing of existing mental representations?
words stored in our mental lexicon can be used to work out what we are hearing by matching the ACOUSTIC INPUT to the existing activated mental representations
what has been described to be like a dictionary?
mental lexicon
thinking about frequency effects in lexical access, would ‘gall’ or ‘ball’ be quicker to activate and why?
finding ‘ball’ in lexicon would take less time because ball learnt at younger age and accessed all the time. stronger neuron connections as activated more frequently that gall
words accessed more frequently are _____ and _____ to activate than words not accessed as frequently
easier and quicker
what type of words will provide faster lexical access?
short and frequent words
lexical access will be slower for words with lots of neighbours compared to words with fewer neighbours due to more competition. what principle is this?
neighbourhood density
what classes as a neighbour?
words that sound similar or differ by 1 phoneme e.g. talk and walk
neighbourhood density is due to _______ spreading activation
phonological
lots of neighbours =
lots of activation = lots of word items competing = interferes with ability to target word access
no neighbours =
easy access as no competition
lexical access is facilitated by features of lexical access. these are what?
frequency, neighbourhood density, competition between related items
evidence of reaction time differences suggests that lexical access is facilitated by what 3 things?
top down processing, spreading activation and the features of lexical items
what are the methods use to assess language production?
lexical decision tasks, word monitoring, priming paradigms
describe the lexical decision task and results found
ppts told to press a button if they recognise a word and another if they don’t recognise. reaction times measured as time between the stimulus presentation and button press. slower reaction times for words with lots of neighbours. differences found were really small but meaningful > 30-80ms
what other interactions are there with neighbourhood density that can be manipulated
length and frequency
word: low frequency + few neighbours = _______ reaction time.
word: high frequency + lots of neighbours = ________ reaction time.
slower, faster
frequency is likely to trump neighbourhood density
what did studies looking at context with word monitoring find
found if the sentence made sense (had meaningful context) then ppts said the word more quickly than if sentence didn’t make sense
what did results from word monitoring suggest?
suggests that as you listen to a sentence you are already comprehending the meaning and context of it so activate all possible options in your lexicon when the sentence makes sense as expecting to hear a specific word
the language system predicts which words might come up next and activates them in the lexicon =
word monitoring
what would you typically find in a priming paradigm
when 2 things (prime and target) are related semantically there would be a faster reaction time in saying the target. shows the PRIMING EFFECT
one item is an auditory modality and one is a visual modality = what type of priming?
cross modal priming
describe Zwitserloods experiment and results using cross modal priming
prime word = auditory, target word = visual. ppts would hear the prime word and see the target word. (related prime-target pair) ppt then asked to make a lexical decision about that target word. lexical decision expected to be quicker for related pairs than unrelated pairs
what is an advantage of cross modal priming?
can present full words, part words, sentences. can see what happens in the mental lexicon by presenting the target at different points through a word or sentence
faster reaction times for related or unrelated targets?
related
what features allows the system to access lexical items?
acoustic input, top down processing, lexical characteristics (frequency, neighbourhood density), activation of related items via spreading activation, context
