language and reading 2 Flashcards
what are the three ways in which we process a sentence?
recognise individual words
assign syntactic structure
intepretation
what does assign syntatic structure mean?
syntactic combination rules put words into meaningful groups
what does intepretation mean?
determine the intended meaning of the sentence in context
what is syntax?
words don’t just follow on from each other- grouped into phases and clauses
what can tree diagrams show?
structuring of phrases, clauses and sentences
root= top, branches= bottom
nodes= smaller constituents
what is syntatic ambiguity?
clause/sentence may have more than one function, depending on different grammatical meanings of individual words
what is parsing?
assigning syntatic structure to a sentence
what is global ambiguity?
mearning remains ambiguous even when you get to the end of a sentence
what is temporal ambiguity?
meaning starts off being ambiguous, but there is a favourable intepretation by the end of the sentence
what can theories of parsing be divided into?
two stage, serial processing
one stage, parallel processing
what is the garden path theory?
serial model
simplest structure is chosen depending on minimal attachment and late closure
what is minimal attachment?
choosing the tree with the fewest number of nodes
what is late closure?
happens if the trees have the same number of nodes
reader associates incoming material with the most recent material, due to working memory constraints
what is constraint satisfaction?
parallel model
all revevant sources of information are immediately available
competing sentence structures are activated simultaneously- the one receiving the most support is chosen
what is the unrestricted race model?
model of syntatic processing combining features of garden path theory and constraint satisfaction
what is non literal language?
one thing is said in order to express another, meaning cannot be derived by the grammatical meaning of the words
what is a metaphor?
expression which describes a person/object in a literal way, by referrin to something considered to have similar characteristics
what is an idiom?
words which have a particular meaning, different to the meaning of each word on its own
what is irony?
expression suggesting a different (usually humourous or angry) meaning for the words used
what are three theories of figurative language processing?
standard pragmatic view
gradient salience hypothesis
direct access view
what is the standard pragmatic view?
function of irony is to communicate the opposite of what is said
literal meaning is accessed first, then realisation that this doesn’t match with the context, then reanalysed as being ironic
what is the graded salience hypothesis?
for familiar ironies, the ironic meaning is analysed straight away
has its own meaning in the mental lexicon
processing only occurs for unfamiliar ironies
what is the direct access view?
literal and ironic language are treated in the same way
no additional processing for ironic language compared to literal language
who investigated context and world knowledge?
Hagoort et al
what happened in Hagoort et al’s study?
investigated how quickly information from context/world knowledge can be taken into account when computing sentence meaning
used ERPs
if we encounter a word that doesn’t fit with the sentence, a N400 is produced= large spike in electrical activity produced by the brain around 400ms after seeing a word
what is an example of a N400 being produced?
Dutch trains are yellow
when participants read a sentence that makes sense, eg) ‘Dutch Trains are yellow’ this produces a small N400
however, if they hear ‘Dutch Trains are white’ this leads to a large N400 as it doesn’t fit their world knowledge
what is an example of shallow processing?
the Moses Illusion
what happened in the Moses Illusion?
‘How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark’
‘Two?…’
None- it was Noah!
suggests people have not processed a sentence as deeply as they could
Moses being a Biblical character fits the context
