Psycholinguistics

Question 1

Methods: Saccades

Answer 1

quick uneven eyes movements during reading

Question 2

Spoonerisms

Answer 2

• Tendency to exchange initial consonants of words
• Sentence would have to be planned out before person begins to say it
• Errors often involve mixing + matching morphemes within words
• Provide evidence that sentence must be first planned

Question 3

Spoonerisms

Answer 3

• Evidence that morpheme is fundamental building block of sentence production
• Morphological components of words can function independently during sentence planning

Question 4

Eye Movements

Answer 4

• at rest take snapshot of 2/3words lasting from 200-250 milliseconds
• while being taken, language processing system calculates where to jump next
• jump to next fixation location: 8 letters to right, reader is essentially blind
• tracked by device that illuminates participants’ eyes with low intensity infrared light + records reflection

Question 5

Eye Movements

Answer 5

• fixation longer for less frequent words + centred on content words
• regressive saccades: backward jumps in sentence associated with misparsing/miscomprehension
• make up 10-15% of saccades
• syntactically complex + semantic anomalous sentences create more regressive saccades
• poor readers jump back + forth through sentences

Question 6

Syntactic parser

Answer 6

system makes use of grammatical knowledge, but also contains special procedures + principles that guide order in which elements of sentence processed + manner in which syntactic structure is built
•Close correspondence betw grammatical structure + sentence parsing
•Module: mechanism of processing relatively autonomous from other processing mechanisms
•Processing involves coordination of separate modules

Question 7

Garden Path Sentences

Answer 7

lead syntactic parser down garden path to wrong analysis
•The horse raced past the barn fell
•Horse subject, raced past the barn VP
•No room for extra VP
•Raced past the barn must be relative clause

Question 8

Garden Path Sentences

Answer 8

• We construct syntactic representations from beginning to end + sentence parsers organized to make # of assumptions about how sentence will proceed
• Since jay always walks a mile seems like a short distance to him
• Inclined to build always walks a mile as single VP when walks + a mile belong to diff clauses

Question 9

Minimal attachment

Answer 9

all other things being equal, we do not postulate new syntactic nodes unless we absolutely have to

Question 10

Late closure

Answer 10

we prefer to attach new words to clause currently being processed as we proceed from beginning to end
•Parsing system operates automatically + independently