Language Comprehension Flashcards

1
Q

What is a mental model?

A

a representation of the meaning conveyed, constructed in memory as we read: who is doing what and to what or whom, where, how, and why

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2
Q

What is the sentence meaning made up of

A

the propositions stated + the “speech act”

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3
Q

What does comprehension do

A

it activates and adds propositions to existing knowledge in memory

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4
Q

What is syntax?

A

sentence structure

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5
Q

What kind of structure do sentences have

A

tree-like structure, an ordered hierarchy of constituents (“phrases”), which occupy essential roles in relation to a main verb

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6
Q

What are sentence structure clues?

A
  • word order
  • function words
  • word modifying
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7
Q

What are function words

A

small fixed set of grammatical words that do structure-signalling jobs (e.g. ‘the’ introduces a noun)

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8
Q

What are • Word-modifying “morphological inflections

A

signalling a number

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9
Q

What did Broca’s alphasia patients have trouble comprehending?

A
  • syntactically complex sentences
  • simple reversible sentences
  • sentences whose meaning depends critically on affixes and function words
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10
Q

What are examples of ambiguity?

A
  • lexical ambiguity
  • syntactic ambiguity
  • ambiguity of reference
  • speech act ambiguity
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11
Q

What is lexical ambiguity?

A

• Words with several distinct senses (different meanings)

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12
Q

What is syntactic ambiguity?

A

• Ambiguous sentence structures

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13
Q

What is ambiguity of reference

A

who is him or his

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14
Q

What is speech act ambiguity?

A

is this acknowledgement or permission

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15
Q

What does discourse explicity state?

A

only some of the propositions needed to construct a coherent mental model

we infer the rest

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16
Q

What do we infer text based on?

A
  • extra-linguistic context
  • body language
  • linguistic context
  • general knowledge
  • communication conventions
17
Q

Inferences are made automatically meaning

A

try to remember it later, hard to separate the story from inferences made.

18
Q

What did Granham tes?

A

cued verbatim recall for lists of sentences,

e.g. John cooked the chips
FRY was a better retrieval cue than COOK

19
Q

What did Bransford, Barclay adn Franks test?

A

Subjects learned sentences for a verabatim recognition test,
e.g. ‘Three turtles rested on a floating log and a fish swam beneath them’

Later, more likely falsely to recognise as “old”

‘Three turtles rested on a floating log and a fish swam beneath it’

than are subjects who learned

‘Three turtles rested beside a floating log and a fish swam beneath them’

20
Q

Why do we sometimes backtrack

A

to make sense of lexical ambiguity

21
Q

what are 3 possible strategies given local ambiguity/

A
  • minimal commitment
  • serial
  • parallel
22
Q

What is the minimal commitment strategy?

A

• Postpone interpretation until all potentially disambiguating information available

23
Q

What is the serial strategy?

A

• Construct most probable interpretation, backtrack if it turns out to be the wrong one

24
Q

What is the parallel strategy?

A

Construct multiple interpretations in parallel, delete those that don’t work out

25
What does minimal commitment, serial adn parallel stratefies all require
working memory
26
what is semantic priming
“Semantic priming” effect provides a measure of activation of the meaning of the prime.
27
What did Rayner et al find about lexical ambiguity?
Fixation durations as an on-line measure of the processing cost of lexical ambiguity It looks as if the higher frequency meaning gets activated here even when not supported by the prior context.
28
What is syntactic parsing?
We don't wait until the end of a sentence to "parse" (i.e. assign syntactic roles, analyse syntactic structure) as each word arrives.