Language Processing Flashcards
What is bottom up processing?
Phonological level -> Lexical level -> syntactic level -> discourse level
what is top down processing?
Discourse level -> syntactic level -> lexical level -> phonological level
ex: peanut is in love
What is the metal lexicon (words)?
where we stores words and info about them (pronunciation, morphemes, syntactic properties, contextual info)
one lexicon for all languages
way we retrieved is based on other cues
What is lexical access (words)?
accessing and retrieving word we want
no consensus on how its organized or access but some factors affect it
What are factors that affect lexical access?
word frequency, recency, phonological neighbourhood (sounds like another = slower), lexical ambiguity (multiple meanings = slower)
What are other factors that affect word processing?
word length (longer is slower), concreteness (faster than abstract), age of acquisition (earlier learned is faster), familiarity (frequency/familiarity is faster), prevalence (within population is faster), valence (pos or neg is fast) arousal (intensity is fast) dominance (power over is fasteR), danger (faster) usefulness (faster)
What is modularity and interactivity (sentences)?
modularity is bottom up: processing one level at a time (ex words, then sentences)
interactivity is top down: influences from other levels (ex discourse and parse)
What is the global context and local context?
global context (general, knowledge of all)
local context (specifics)
What is the n400 effect?
drop in activation due to inconsistency of semantics in a sentence
shows whatever they heard is not consistent
What is the peanut study?
global processed faster and no n400
only found n400 effect if next to coherent sentence
means global is processed at same time or faster than local
How do we process sentences?
recognize words > parse sentence > relate to discourse
bottom up approach
What is sentence parsing?
dissenting each word and retrieving its syntactic properties
minimal attachment strategy
late closure strategy
What is minimal attachment strategy?
Recognizing word by word, process faster if it’s simple with only one tree
What is late closure strategy?
More words that come after, process faster if belonging to something processed immediately
Related things together is easier to process
What are other factors that affect sentences processing?
stereotypes (incongruence is slower), personality (ex introverts more sensitive to incongruencies), empathy (higher is more n400 and slower), disgust sensitivity (conservatives have more incongruencies and are slower), political view (conservatives have more incongruencies and are slower)
