language and language processing 2

Question 1

language processing - the context

Answer 1

• Language is a complex system/Languages are complex systems – last time we saw something of (the complexity of) how linguists describe languages
  
  • As psychologists we want to know how languages are used in daily life
  • PSYCHOLINGUISTICS is: The study of the representations, mechanisms, and processes that underlie our ability to acquire and use language. – Never mind what Jed said!

Question 2

chromsky - competence and performance

Answer 2

· We know, in some sense (maybe only implicitly), about the structures of our language – structures of words, structures of sentences (Chomsky called that knowledge Linguisitic Competence)
· We use that knowledge in processing language, but we sometimes make mistakes or introduce extraneous elements into utterances (ums and ers for example). (Chomsky called that Linguistic Performance)
· So we need to be careful in using information from the use of language to make inferences about what knowledge people have stored.
- Chomsky eventually concluded that Performance could tell us relatively little about Competence

Question 3

two aspects of language processing

Answer 3

· Comprehension:
- Listening
- Reading
· Production:
- Speaking
- Writing
· They are intertwines in everyday dialogue

Question 4

how are comprehension and production related?

Answer 4

· A plausible view is that:
- They use a common store of knowledge
- They each have a dedicated processes for using that knowledge
· Other views are possible
E.g., analysis-by-synthesis - the use of production

Question 5

three stages of processing

Answer 5

· Words
· (Sentence) structure
· Meaning
· As a text, discourse, or dialogue unfolds through time, processing at all three stages takes place for different parts of the text
· In the case of comprehension, and for a particular part of the text, the processes have to occur, at least to some extent, in the order: words, structure, meaning
- You need to know the words, before you can assign a structure, and you need to know the words and the structure before you can assign a meaning (compositionality)

Question 6

three stages of processing 2

Answer 6

· In spoken language, the listener is largely constrained by how the speaker is speaking – how fast, how clearly etc. (although, it might be possible to ask “could you speak more slowly/say that again?”).
· In reading, we have more control over the order in which information comes in, but we usually stick fairly closely to the order that it would come in if the same material were spoken

Question 7

We don’t always progress forever onwards - a harder text with more regressions

Question 8

three stages of processing - production

Answer 8

· Production goes the other way round
· You have a meaning that you want to convey (not yet expressed in natural language, but maybe in the “Language of Thought”)
· Then you need sentence structures that allow you to convey the complex meanings you have in mind
· And then you need to find the words to express your ideas.

Question 9

psycholinguistic research - a pragmatic point

Answer 9

· Historically, there has been a tendency to focus on comprehension in psycholinguistics, because it is easier to set up well controlled experiments on comprehension than it is for production or for studying dialogue.
· There has also been a tendency to study written/printed language rather than spoken language, also for pragmatic reasons.
- This tendency is not ideal, given the primacy of spoken language.

Question 10

words

Answer 10

· We hear noises of a particular kind, or see (usually) black marks on a white ground, and have to divide them into (probable) words and then identify each pattern that is a probable word with one of the words we know and have stored in memory (in our “mental lexicon”)
- Then we can find out what it means
· In written/printed language the division into words is usually clearly signalled by spaces and punctuation
· In spoken language there are not usually breaks in the sound stream, even though we think we hear them
- To some extent we have to break the sound stream into words according to what makes sense (the segmentation problem), on the assumption that all (or most) bits of the sound stream have to
Be assigned to one and only one word.

Question 11

the mental lexicon

Answer 11

· Our knowledge of words is stored in the mental lexicon (or dictionary)
- If we know two or more languages, there are questions about how the two or more dictionaries are related (or are they separate?)
- There are also questions about how both speech and writing access the same dictionary
· If they do, which seems likely, do auditory properties of words influence spoken word recognition, and vice versa?
- And there are questions about whether comprehension and production use the same lexicon
· And given that words can be morphologically complex, is that complexity represented in the mental lexicon or are related forms (“eat” and “eats” for example) just stored separately? Work by Marcus Taft suggests not.

Question 12

processing words

Answer 12

· Since about 1990 most people have agreed that the process of identifying words relies on a set of interconnected detectors, one for each word you know, together with detectors for letters (or phonemes) and for subcomponents of letters (or phonological features).
· See McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981, for the original version of this type of network model (the Interactive Activation Model for written word recognition).
· The corresponding model for spoken words is the TRACE model of McClelland & Elman, (1986)
· The system works very quickly – too quickly for us to notice it working. But experiments can detect effects of factors such as how long a word is, how common it is, whether it has a regular or irregular spelling, and whether there are many or few other words that are spelled the same or sound the same

Question 13

McClelland and Rumelharts interactive activation model

Answer 13

• the cascade of activation from visual features, to letters, to words
• arrows ending in (triangle) indicate facilitation - features to letters that have them, letters to words that have those letters in those positions
• arrows ending in (circle) indicate inhibition - between-layer inhibition and within-layer inhibition

Question 14

processing structure

Answer 14

· As with words, we have to use our knowledge of what structures are allowed in our language to help us to structure the words which we are just identifying and in the order in which they occur
· Unlike words, of which there are a finite number, there are indefinitely many structures for sentences in English (or any other language), but the possibilities can be represented finitely in terms of rules of combination
- SENTENCE = NOUN PHRASE + VERB PHRASE ((the chair)(fell over))
- NOUN PHRASE = ARTICLE + NOUN ((the)(chair))
- VERB PHRASE – VERB + PARTICLE ((fell)(over))
- The process of working out structure in comprehension, using stored rules, is known as syntactic processing or parsing

Question 15

structure

Answer 15

· A major issue is that different structures might be possible, and which is the correct one may be discovered later in the sentence
- I told the man that I saw……..
· ….last night to meet me at the station tomorrow (THAT introduces a relative clause)
· ….four foxes eating from my neighbours’ wheely bin (THAT introduces a complement clause)
· Or not at all
- Visiting relatives can be boring
· Relatives who are visiting or the act of visiting relatives
- British left waffles on the Falkands
- The cop saw the man with the telescope
· Who had the telescope?

Question 16

processing structure 2

Answer 16

· However, intuitively we feel we are understanding a sentence as in unfolds, not waiting till the end to figure out what it means.
· There are two main ideas about how this happens
1. At each point (each word) we make a choice (e.g. chose the simplest structure that the sentence up to that point could have) If it’s the wrong choice, we have to revise later The garden-path theory (Lyn Frazier)
2. We develop all possibilities in parallel, and discard them if they become incompatible with later parts of the sentence Constraint-based theories (MacDonald, Seidenberg, McClelland)

Question 17

structure - do we compute it?

Answer 17

· Another idea is that we don’t always fully analyse the structure of a sentence, but just do processing that is GOOD ENOUGH to produce the right meaning
- At least most of the time
· Back in 1976, Caramazza and Zurif showed that agrammatic (Broca’s) aphasics seemed to process sentences by putting the main content words together in a plausible way, so they interpreted:
- The lion that the baby is scaring is yellow
- To mean that The (yellow) lion is scaring the baby
· More recently it has been suggested that this kind of process is common is unimpaired ordinary language users too (e.g. Ferreira et al., 2002)

Question 18

Can referential context determine the initial analysis? Garden paths vs contextual constraint:

Answer 18

· Altmann et al. (1992): use an ambiguity in the meaning of “that” to test the idea that people always chose the simplest structure first (the “garden path” theory) complement clause (simpler structure):
- He told the woman that he was worried about many other people relative clause (more complex structure, but can be used to distinguish between different women):
- He told the woman that he was worried about to wait outside control:
- He asked the woman that he was worried about to wait outside
· Context: no context or a context with two women that you might need to distinguish between
· When you get to the bit in grey (“many people” or “to wait”) you know if you have made a mistake in your analysis.

Question 19

meaning

Answer 19

· Psycholinguists study word meaning (as in the previous lecture on concepts)
· They tend not to study compositional meaning within clauses
· They study aspects of processing related to some types of pragmatic meaning
- Particularly inferences, which are related to, among other things, presupposition and implicature (from Pragmatics)
· They also study ways of making links between clauses
- Pronouns (“he”, ”she”, “it”, “they”, etc.)
- Connectives (“because”, ”and so”, “before”, “after”, etc.)
· Making those links correctly may depend on inferences (e.g., to work out which of two woman is being referred to by “she” or “her”)

Question 20

Meaning and inference - just one example - implicit causality and cosnequentiality:

Answer 20

· 1. John charmed Bill because he had an engaging manner
· 2. John charmed Bill and so he was keen to continue the friendship
· In 1 the cause of the charming is probably (something about) John
· In 2 the consequence of the charming is probably (something to do with) Bill
· Do we anticipate (infer) these causes and consequences when they remain implicit and before they are confirmed at the end of the sentence (and in any case, they might not be confirmed: John charmed Bill because he was easily taken in.)
· And do we at least wait till we see/hear “because” or “and so”?
· Or do causes take priority? Or consequences? (if so, we would have to ask: why?)

Question 21

Garnham, Child and Hutton (2020)

Answer 21

• visual world experiment - look at 4 pictures while listen to a sentence
• looking at a picture indicates that the thing depicted is in your mind
• top 2 panels are for verbs, where the cause is the subject and the consequence is the object

Question 22

Dialogue - comprehension and production intertwined:

Answer 22

· What else is involved in engaging in dialogue other than the basic processes of com- prehension and production?
· Alignment - Pickering and Garrod (2004) - participants in a dialogue align their linguistic output at a variety of levels, from low-level factors such as how they pronounce the sounds of their language and how fast they talk, to high-level factors such as the expressions they use to refer to the things they are talking about.
· Much previous work, e.g. by Herb Clark and colleagues, shows how, in dialogue, pairs of speakers home in on agreed expressions for objects they have not seen before, but which they mention several times.

Question 23

Alignment in dialogue:

Answer 23

· Alignment is not total: speakers don’t say exactly the same thing in exactly the same way!
· But there is greater similarity than would be expected if alignment processes were not taking place.

Question 24

Audience design in dialogue:

Answer 24

· Is ‘audience design’ an important factor in language production?
- Tailoring what you say to what you know about who you are speaking to?
· In a clear sense, it ought to be, if your goal is to be understood.
· And it’s reflected, for example, in the Wilkes-Gibbs and Clark results on tangram naming (“stair-climber”)
· But it’s hard to do quickly (e.g. Keysar, Barr, & Horton, 1998). Communication is often more egocentric than it should be.