language and reading 2

Question 1

what are the three ways in which we process a sentence?

Answer 1

recognise individual words
assign syntactic structure
intepretation

Question 2

what does assign syntatic structure mean?

Answer 2

syntactic combination rules put words into meaningful groups

Question 3

what does intepretation mean?

Answer 3

determine the intended meaning of the sentence in context

Question 4

what is syntax?

Answer 4

words don’t just follow on from each other- grouped into phases and clauses

Question 5

what can tree diagrams show?

Answer 5

structuring of phrases, clauses and sentences
root= top, branches= bottom
nodes= smaller constituents

Question 6

what is syntatic ambiguity?

Answer 6

clause/sentence may have more than one function, depending on different grammatical meanings of individual words

Question 7

what is parsing?

Answer 7

assigning syntatic structure to a sentence

Question 8

what is global ambiguity?

Answer 8

mearning remains ambiguous even when you get to the end of a sentence

Question 9

what is temporal ambiguity?

Answer 9

meaning starts off being ambiguous, but there is a favourable intepretation by the end of the sentence

Question 10

what can theories of parsing be divided into?

Answer 10

two stage, serial processing
one stage, parallel processing

Question 11

what is the garden path theory?

Answer 11

serial model
simplest structure is chosen depending on minimal attachment and late closure

Question 12

what is minimal attachment?

Answer 12

choosing the tree with the fewest number of nodes

Question 13

what is late closure?

Answer 13

happens if the trees have the same number of nodes
reader associates incoming material with the most recent material, due to working memory constraints

Question 14

what is constraint satisfaction?

Answer 14

parallel model
all revevant sources of information are immediately available
competing sentence structures are activated simultaneously- the one receiving the most support is chosen

Question 15

what is the unrestricted race model?

Answer 15

model of syntatic processing combining features of garden path theory and constraint satisfaction

Question 16

what is non literal language?

Answer 16

one thing is said in order to express another, meaning cannot be derived by the grammatical meaning of the words

Question 17

what is a metaphor?

Answer 17

expression which describes a person/object in a literal way, by referrin to something considered to have similar characteristics

Question 18

what is an idiom?

Answer 18

words which have a particular meaning, different to the meaning of each word on its own

Question 19

what is irony?

Answer 19

expression suggesting a different (usually humourous or angry) meaning for the words used

Question 20

what are three theories of figurative language processing?

Answer 20

standard pragmatic view
gradient salience hypothesis
direct access view

Question 21

what is the standard pragmatic view?

Answer 21

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

Question 22

what is the graded salience hypothesis?

Answer 22

for familiar ironies, the ironic meaning is analysed straight away
has its own meaning in the mental lexicon
processing only occurs for unfamiliar ironies

Question 23

what is the direct access view?

Answer 23

literal and ironic language are treated in the same way
no additional processing for ironic language compared to literal language

Question 24

who investigated context and world knowledge?

Answer 24

Hagoort et al

Question 25

what happened in Hagoort et al’s study?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

what is an example of a N400 being produced?

Answer 26

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

Question 27

what is an example of shallow processing?

Answer 27

the Moses Illusion

Question 28

what happened in the Moses Illusion?

Answer 28

‘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