Language Comprehension Flashcards
What is a mental model?
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
What is the sentence meaning made up of
the propositions stated + the “speech act”
What does comprehension do
it activates and adds propositions to existing knowledge in memory
What is syntax?
sentence structure
What kind of structure do sentences have
tree-like structure, an ordered hierarchy of constituents (“phrases”), which occupy essential roles in relation to a main verb
What are sentence structure clues?
- word order
- function words
- word modifying
What are function words
small fixed set of grammatical words that do structure-signalling jobs (e.g. ‘the’ introduces a noun)
What are • Word-modifying “morphological inflections
signalling a number
What did Broca’s alphasia patients have trouble comprehending?
- syntactically complex sentences
- simple reversible sentences
- sentences whose meaning depends critically on affixes and function words
What are examples of ambiguity?
- lexical ambiguity
- syntactic ambiguity
- ambiguity of reference
- speech act ambiguity
What is lexical ambiguity?
• Words with several distinct senses (different meanings)
What is syntactic ambiguity?
• Ambiguous sentence structures
What is ambiguity of reference
who is him or his
What is speech act ambiguity?
is this acknowledgement or permission
What does discourse explicity state?
only some of the propositions needed to construct a coherent mental model
we infer the rest
What do we infer text based on?
- extra-linguistic context
- body language
- linguistic context
- general knowledge
- communication conventions
Inferences are made automatically meaning
try to remember it later, hard to separate the story from inferences made.
What did Granham tes?
cued verbatim recall for lists of sentences,
e.g. John cooked the chips
FRY was a better retrieval cue than COOK
What did Bransford, Barclay adn Franks test?
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’
Why do we sometimes backtrack
to make sense of lexical ambiguity
what are 3 possible strategies given local ambiguity/
- minimal commitment
- serial
- parallel
What is the minimal commitment strategy?
• Postpone interpretation until all potentially disambiguating information available
What is the serial strategy?
• Construct most probable interpretation, backtrack if it turns out to be the wrong one
What is the parallel strategy?
Construct multiple interpretations in parallel, delete those that don’t work out
What does minimal commitment, serial adn parallel stratefies all require
working memory
what is semantic priming
“Semantic priming” effect provides a measure of activation of the meaning of the prime.
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.
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.
