Language Comprehension

Question 1

What is a mental model?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

What is the sentence meaning made up of

Answer 2

the propositions stated + the “speech act”

Question 3

What does comprehension do

Answer 3

it activates and adds propositions to existing knowledge in memory

Question 4

What is syntax?

Answer 4

sentence structure

Question 5

What kind of structure do sentences have

Answer 5

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

Question 6

What are sentence structure clues?

Answer 6

• word order
• function words
• word modifying

Question 7

What are function words

Answer 7

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

Question 8

What are • Word-modifying “morphological inflections

Answer 8

signalling a number

Question 9

What did Broca’s alphasia patients have trouble comprehending?

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What are examples of ambiguity?

Answer 10

• lexical ambiguity
• syntactic ambiguity
• ambiguity of reference
• speech act ambiguity

Question 11

What is lexical ambiguity?

Answer 11

• Words with several distinct senses (different meanings)

Question 12

What is syntactic ambiguity?

Answer 12

• Ambiguous sentence structures

Question 13

What is ambiguity of reference

Answer 13

who is him or his

Question 14

What is speech act ambiguity?

Answer 14

is this acknowledgement or permission

Question 15

What does discourse explicity state?

Answer 15

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

we infer the rest

Question 16

What do we infer text based on?

Answer 16

• extra-linguistic context
• body language
• linguistic context
• general knowledge
• communication conventions

Question 17

Inferences are made automatically meaning

Answer 17

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

Question 18

What did Granham tes?

Answer 18

cued verbatim recall for lists of sentences,

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

Question 19

What did Bransford, Barclay adn Franks test?

Answer 19

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’

Question 20

Why do we sometimes backtrack

Answer 20

to make sense of lexical ambiguity

Question 21

what are 3 possible strategies given local ambiguity/

Answer 21

• minimal commitment
• serial
• parallel

Question 22

What is the minimal commitment strategy?

Answer 22

• Postpone interpretation until all potentially disambiguating information available

Question 23

What is the serial strategy?

Answer 23

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

Question 24

What is the parallel strategy?

Answer 24

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

Question 25

What does minimal commitment, serial adn parallel stratefies all require

Answer 25

working memory

Question 26

what is semantic priming

Answer 26

“Semantic priming” effect provides a measure of activation of the meaning of the prime.

Question 27

What did Rayner et al find about lexical ambiguity?

Answer 27

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.

Question 28

What is syntactic parsing?

Answer 28

We don’t wait until the end of a sentence to “parse” (i.e. assign syntactic roles, analyse syntactic structure) as each word arrives.