Language I

Question 1

What is psycholinguistics and what is it a core component of?

Answer 1

Psycholinguistics is the study of human language processing and is a core component of psychology drawing upon cognitive science, philosophy and linguistics

Question 2

What is language central to and why?

Answer 2

• Cognitive psychology (language processing is a core aspect of cognition)
• Neuroscience (understanding the neural substrates underlying the language system)
• Developmental psychology (language is a window into the mind of the developing child)
• Social Psychology (looking at communication between/ within groups/ people)
• Clinical psychology (patient/ doctor interactions, language deficits as indicators of disorders
• Applied psychology (including marketing and advertising)

Question 3

Why is there ambiguity in language?

Answer 3

• words and phrases with different meaning sometimes sound the same
• some meaning are indirect?

Question 4

Are we conscious of the ambiguities in language?

Answer 4

We are rarely consciously aware of all the ambiguities in written and spoken language

Question 5

How does you eye move when you are reading?

Answer 5

• Eye-movements consist of eye fixations (for about 250msec each) and saccades (where the eye jumps from one location to another)
   Ensures that the different bit of the external world are projected onto you’re the fovea in your eye
• 10-15% of all eye movements are backwards (called regressions) and they allow the reader to (re) look at previously read text
• When fixating at a point in a word, you can see about 4 characters to the left and about 12-15 to the right of fixation. This is the perceptual span (McConkie & Rayner, 1975)
   None of this is conscious

Question 6

How does eye-tracking take place?

Answer 6

• participants read text on a computer screen
• Infrared light is shone into the eye – it generates two reflections which are them measured by eye-tracking camera.
• Two reflections result – by measuring how these reflections move relative to each other, it’s possible to calculate what the eye is looking at

Question 7

What does eye-tracking tell us?

Answer 7

• How long people’s eye fixate on particular words and which words they go back to re-read
• The time spent on a word reflects the processes associated with how long it takes the reader to access the meaning of the word and integrate with the meanings of the words read previously
• Reflects how common (frequent) or rare (infrequent) words are

Question 8

What was Rayner and Duffy’s (1986) experiment using eye-tracking?

Answer 8

 Ps shown two sentences:
 ‘The concerned student calmed the child’
 ‘The concerned stewards charmed the child’
 ‘Student’ is a frequent word and ‘steward’ is an infrequent word
 Found that there was an increased fixation time with ‘steward’ over ‘student’

Question 9

What did Just and Carpenter (1980) say about reading rates?

Answer 9

Reading rates reflect the time course of the operation of comprehension processes

Question 10

What is the immediacy hypothesis and the eye-mind hypothesis?

Answer 10

 The immediacy hypothesis – the reader tries to comprehend a word as soon as it is encountered (i.e. they don’t delay processing)
 The eye-mind hypothesis – there is no delay between looking at a word and the brain processing that word
 So together these assume that the brain starts processing a word as soon as it is encountered and the eye moving onto the next word signals processing has terminated

Question 11

What is an EEG?

Answer 11

electroencephalography?

Question 12

What does an EEG do?

Answer 12

• EEG measures voltage changes on the scalp associated with presentation of stimuli
• Focuses on cerebral cortex generally
• Primarily measures post-synaptic potentials (not active potentials)
• Event-related Potentials (ERPs) are components of the EEG and labelled according to their polarity (+ve or -ve) and the latency in milliseconds following onset of the stimulus
• Can also measure spontaneous brain activity

Question 13

What are the advantages of the EEG?

Answer 13

• Low cost

- Measure brain activity on the order of milliseconds

Question 14

What are the limitations of the EEG?

Answer 14

• Poor spatial precision

- Limited ability to accurately record from structure of brain

Question 15

What is the N400 ERP?

Answer 15

• The N400 is a negative potential that peaks around 400msec. after stimulus onset. Kutas and Hillyard (1980) in a landmark study demonstrated it reveals sensitivity to semantic incongruity
• ‘I take coffee with cream and dog’
• Last word is semantically anomalous and results in N400
• Very rapid response

Question 16

What is the P600 ERP and what was Osterhout and Olcomb (1992) experiment about it?

Answer 16

• Positive potential
• The P600 typically indexes syntactic violations (structural mismatch)
• Osterhout and Holcomb (1992)
   Gave Ps the sentence ‘the broker persuaded to sell the stock was tall’
   (means ‘the broker who was persuaded to sell the stock was tall’)
   The verb is initially interpreted as the past tense of ‘persuade’ rather than as a reduced relative (‘who was persuaded’)
   Report a P600 associated with reading ‘to’ in the sentence

Question 17

What is parsing?

Answer 17

• Passing is the means by which we understand the structural relationships between different words in a sentence
• Computing the syntactic structure of sentences is called parsing
• Sentence parsing involves determining the relationship between the different elements of a sentence and assigning them to syntactic categories (e.g. noun, adjective, verb, etc.)
• You use lots of implicit knowledge (i.e. knowledge you can’t consciously access or accurately describe) incredibly rapidly during parsing

Question 18

What is syntax?

Answer 18

building of sentences according to grammatical rules; arrangements of words into an order that results in a meaningful sentence

Question 19

what is local ambiguity and give an example?

Answer 19

• usually just one word is ambiguous. E.g.
• When Fred passes the ball it always gets to its target
• When Fred passes the ball always gets to its target
• The phrase ‘the ball’ is temporarily ambiguous – it could be the object of the verb ‘passes’ or it could be the subject of the next phrase ‘always gets to its target’. You find out only after you’ve read ‘the ball’ which interpretation correct

Question 20

What is global ambiguity and give an example?

Answer 20

• usually a phrase is ambiguous
• The spy saw the cop with binoculars
• This is ambiguous between an interpretation where the phrase ‘with the binoculars’ is attached to the verb phrase (VP-attachment) and an interpretation where it is attached to the noun phrase (NP-attachment)

Question 21

What is the garden path model and what is the problem with it?

Answer 21

• The Garden path model (Frazier, 1979) defines simplicity in terms of the simplest syntactic structure that can be constructed
• Stage 1: identify syntactic categories and build initial structure
• Stage 2: assess outcome against context, semantic plausibility, real world knowledge, revise if necessary
• This model was very influential
• But the bulk of empirical evidence suggests that syntax isn’t ‘special’ and that lots of different types of information influence parsing as it unfolds in real-time.

Question 22

What do constraint based models of parsing suggest?

Answer 22

Constraint based models propose that the parser is able to utilise all potentially relevant information to guide the early stages of processing (not just syntax, but context and semantics too)

Question 23

What is discourse processing?

Answer 23

• Discourse processing is the means by which we connect sentences that we are reading (e.g. into a paragraph or conversation)
• Discourse processing involves the linking together of units of text in order to construct a coherent mental representation

Question 24

What did Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) propose about discourse processing?

Answer 24

proposed that understanding a discourse involves three levels of representation

• A level representing the surface form
• A level representing the text base
• A level representing the situation model

Question 25

Give an example of the three levels of representation of discourse processing (frog, bug)

Answer 25

1. The frog ate the bug
2. The bug was eaten by the frog
3. The frog had the bug for breakfast
4. The bug has the frog for breakfast
   - Each sentence has a unique surface code, (1) and (2) have the same text base (or propositional) representation. (1), (2) and (3) generate the same situational model

Question 26

How can you describe surface level representation, text base relationships and the situation model?

Answer 26

• Surface level representation
- Can be split into Noun-phrase and Verb phrase which can further be split up into nouns and verbs and determinants
• Text base relationships
- Captures the semantic representation of the text
• Situation model
- The gist

Question 27

What do people remember it terms of discourse?

Answer 27

the text base and primarily the situational model

Question 28

What was Bransford, Barclay and Franks (1982) memory for gist?

Answer 28

• 1A three turtles rested on a floating log, and a fish swam beneath them
• 1B three turtles rested on a floating log, and a fish swam beneath it
• 2A three turtles rested beside a floating log, and a fish swam beneath them
• 2B Three turtles rested beside a floating log, and a fish swam beneath it
• Ps heard 1A or 2A during an initial phase. When they heard sentence 1B in the testing phase (following sentence 1A) they thought they has heard that sentence in the initial phase
• However, when they heard sentence 2B they didn’t confuse it with 2A. As 1A and 1B lead to the same situational models whereas 2A and 2B lead to different situation models
• Bransford et al. concluded that readers remember text at a situation mode level

Question 29

What is an inference?

Answer 29

a piece of information that is not explicitly stated in the text but is represented in the situation model

Question 30

What are the three types of inferences?

Answer 30

logical, bridging and elaborative

Question 31

What are logical inferences and give an example

Answer 31

• Based on formal rules and are 100% certain (singer 1994 p 481) ‘follow from the meaning of words’
• E.g. ‘John is a bachelor’, therefore John is male

Question 32

What are bridging inferences?

Answer 32

• Help us to relate new information to previous information
• We use them to make information coherent by linking new information to previous information
• E.g. ‘Mary unpacked some picnic supplies. The beer was warm’ we infer the beer is part of the picnic supplies

Question 33

What are elaborative inferences?

Answer 33

• Elaborative inferences involve extending what’s in the text with world knowledge. Semantic associations form the basis of this type of inference
• ‘e.g. ‘the delicate vase fell onto the floor’ we would assume that the glass broke

Question 34

What was Rapp and Gerrig (2006) experiment into the influence of Reader Preferences on inference generation?

Answer 34

• Ps read ‘the director and cameraman were ready to shoot close-ups when suddenly the actress fell from the 14th story’
• Found that the inferences people generated were influenced by how they felt about the characters in stories (if they liked the actress they thought she would live)

Question 35

Who proposed the event-indexing model and why?

Answer 35

Zwaan, Langston and Graesser (1995) proposed the event-indexing model to account for how readers build situational models

Question 36

What is the event-indexing model?

Answer 36

• It proposes that events are connected along dimensions of time, space, protagonist, causality, and intentionality and that readers (at least implicitly) keep track of events along these dimensions
• Makes predictions that can very easily be tested and are falsifiable

Question 37

What was O’Brien and Albrecht’s (1992) experiment to do with the event-index model?

Answer 37

• Examined how readers keep track of spatial information during reading. Ps read passages like:
• ‘As Kim stood [inside/ outside] the health club she felt a little sluggish……….She decided to go outside and stretch her legs a little’
• The sentence ‘she decided to go outside and stretch her legs a little’ matches one condition (inside) but not the other (outside). Reading times increased in the mismatched condition
• Shows that readers are keeping track of spatial information associated with characters
• They have reported similar effects for sentences that are consistent or inconsistent with physical properties of the central character

Question 38

What does O’Brien’s and Albrecht’s data (1992) disprove?

Answer 38

Data are not compatible with the Minimalist account of Inference Generation (McKoon and Ratcliff, 1992) which proposed that the only inference that readers generate online are those that are ‘necessary in order to maintain local coherence’ and ‘based on easily available information’
- O’Brien and Albrecht show that sentences don’t need to be together to make inferences

Question 39

What was Therrialut, Rinck, & Zwaan (2006) into shifts of time space and protagonist?

Answer 39

• presented participants with text containing shifts in time, space and protagonist. Instructions asked readers to focus on each of these three dimensions
• Shifts in time and protagonist always caused an increase in reading times. Spatial shifts had the biggest effect only when experimental instructions asked readers to focus on that aspect of the story

Question 40

What was Anderson, Garrod & Sanford (1983) work on shifts in time?

Answer 40

• At the Cinema. Jenny found the film rather boring. The projectionist had to keep changing reels. It was supposed to be a silent classing. Ten minutes/ seven hours later the film was forgotten. He was fast asleep
• The final sentence took longer to read in the ‘seven hours’ condition as the character ‘the projectionist’ is considered scenario bound (i.e. Jenny isn’t at the cinema anymore so why is the projectionist relevant?)

Question 41

How did Speer and Zacks (2005) examine how event boundaries are mentally represented during reading to do with time shifts?

Answer 41

• presented readers with words after time shifts (e.g. a moment later/ an hour later). The words related to content that was presented before the time shift.
• Participants were slower to respond to these words after long time shifts suggesting that the long time shift resulted in information related to events before the time shift being less accessible to memory
• Shows that event boundaries make it harder for people to access information before that boundary

Question 42

What do anaphors do?

Answer 42

take their meaning from the thing they refer back to

Question 43

What was HAviland and Clark (1974) experiment?

Answer 43

• found that (3) was read more slowly after (1) than after (2)
  1. Mary unpacked some picnic supplies
  2. Mary unpacked some beer
  3. The beer was warm
• They proposed that when ‘the beer’ was encountered in (2) it triggered a search for an explicit antecedent. When it was not found, readers then had to engage in inferential processing (which takes time). This is a necessary inference readers have to make in order to understand the text (or maintain textual cohesion)

Question 44

How did Sanford and Garrod (1983) show that for highly constraining contexts situational anaphora can be easy to understand?

Answer 44

1. Keith took his car to London or
2. Keith drove to London
3. The car kept overheating
   - They found that (3) was as easy to read following (1) as following (2). They proposed that ‘the car’ in (3) is not explicitly mentioned in (2) but arises from the role associated with the vehicle used to ‘drive to London’. Anaphors can map onto entities in the situational model that might not be in the text base

Question 45

What doesn’t the theory that for highly constraining contexts situational anaphora can be easy to understand work for and why?

Answer 45

• doesn’t work for pronouns as they usually need explicit antecedents:
• Keith drove to London yesterday
• It kept breaking down
• As pronouns carry only numbers and gender information, they can usually match many possible referents in a text

Question 46

Why did Grosz and Sidner (1985) suggest we find pronouns so easily despite the fact that they only carry numbers and gender information (so are quite ambiguous)?

Answer 46

because pronouns refer to characters that are in focus

Question 47

What is the repeated name penalty and what is it explained by?

Answer 47

• When a character is in focus, it should be referred to by using a pronoun, Gordon, Grosz and Gilliom (1993) reported a name penalty when the name was repeated compared to if pronouns were used – even though it is unambiguous the text doesn’t flow
• This finding is explained by Centering Theory (Grosz, Joshi & Weinstein, 1995)
• Centering is a model of how attention shifts during a discourse
• The repeated name penalty (slower reading time) arises when the character in focus is referred to using a proper name rather than a pronoun

Question 48

What are quantifiers?

Answer 48

expressions that communicate something about quantity – e.g. more than, less than, few etc.

Question 49

What was Sanford, Moxey and Paterson (1996) experiment into how different discourse elements can be brought into focus by the quantifier?

Answer 49

1. A few of the fans went to the match. They….
2. Few of the fans went to the match. They…
   - People are likely to continue (1) with something like ‘…had a really good time’
   - People are likely to con continue (2) with something like ‘…watched it on TV instead’
   - The pronoun ‘they’ is therefore being used to refer to different subsets of people in each of the two cases

Question 50

What was Jarvella et al. (1995) experiment about quantifiers?

Answer 50

had readers read:

• In the first round. John Smith got almost/ only 500 votes. The Irish lawyer was leading.
• What was met was the expectation by almost 500 vs only 500. This influenced how the ‘Irish Lawyer’ was interpreted – whether it referred to ‘John Smith’ or to some other (unmentioned) person
• When it was ‘almost’ people thought the Irish Lawyer was John Smith
• When it was ‘only’ people thought that the Irish Lawyer was someone else

Question 51

What Is the Moses illusion and what does this show about the depth of processing?

Answer 51

• Erickson and Mattson (1981) found that participants tended to respond ‘two’ rather than realise that it was Noah not Moses who was engaged in Ark-related activities. This is known as the Moses Illusion
• Shows that during reading you are not just using the information given to you but also top-down processing (inferences about the world)

Question 52

What is the summary of this topic?

Answer 52

• Parsing is the process by which people understand sentences. Sentences can often be locally or globally ambiguous
• Readers build a situational model in their head during reading that corresponds to the gist of the narrative. This model likely contains many inferences
• The event indexing model proposes key dimensions that people keep track of during reading
• Readers also need to understand how to interpret pronouns and other types of anaphoric expressions