Psycholinguistics Lesson 1 Flashcards
How people produce and comprehend language is known as _____ _______.
Language Processing
How long does language processing take?
Less than a second
Name 3 ways psychologists study language comprehension in “real time”.
- measuring reaction times to specific tasks
- measuring time spent looking at a word using eye tracking method
- measuring electrophysiological “brain waves” after hearing words or sentences
Describe a Lexical Decision task.
Participant sits at computer, presented with stimuli- half are words and half are non words, the participant hits Y if they think its a word or N if its not.
In a lexical decision task the participant must try to respond as quickly as possible, but what must they try to avoid?
try to avoid errors
In a lexical decision experiment what are psychologists interested in/measuring?
The reaction time to words
High frequency words make the lexical decision task _____.
easier
Low frequency words make the lexical decision task _____.
harder
Define what a high frequency word is.
A word that we use more often
We have a _____ response and make ____ errors with Low frequency words.
slower, more
what is the name for a word we don’t use or see often?
Low Frequency word
We are faster to respond and make less mistakes when faced with ____ _____ words.
High Frequency
A stimulus seen earlier is sometimes referred to as the ____.
prime
What can the prime word influence?
how we respond to the target.
Give an example of a related prime and target.
prime= doctor target= nurse
Doctor and Nurse are said to be ___ related.
semantically
Give an example of an unrelated prime and target word.
prime= table target= nurse
Define Semantic Priming
Semantic priming means that the meaning of a word seen earlier (eg. doctor) can facilitate the identification of a later word (eg. nurse).
______ priming effect= lexical decision is faster after a semantically ____ word rather than an _____ word.
Semantic
related
unrelated
Where are doctor and nurse related?
In the mental lexicon
What do we call the dictionary in our mind?
The mental lexicon
Table and nurse are unrelated so they are not _____ in the mental lexicon.
connected/linked
If doctor is presented as a prime, what gets activated?
Its memory node gets activated
When people process nurse as a target after seeing doctor it is already ______ so activation reaches the _____ more quickly.
activated
threshold
Why is there a slower reaction time to nurse when an unrelated word like table is said beforehand?
Because Activation doesn’t spread from table to nurse in the mental lexicon hence a slower response
What is an ambiguous word?
An ambiguous word is a word that has more than one meaning.
Sum up the “Exclusive Access Hypothesis”
This is the theory that we do not consider the several meanings of an ambiguous word- instead we use contextual cues so only one meaning gets activated
in other words we immediately select the right meaning
Name this theory- All of the meanings of the ambiguous word are activated, even though only one meaning is appropriate in the context, then we decide on the correct meaning.
Exhaustive Access Hypothesis
Exhaustive Access Hypothesis is based on the assumption that …
There is an autonomous lexical processor which recognises words on the basis of lexical properties alone- not context
Name the experiment in which Exclusive and Exhaustive Access Hypotheses were tested.
Swinney 1979
in Swinney 1979, to investigate the impact of ____ on ambiguous words, bracketed words “ (spiders roaches and other) bugs” were either _____ or ____ from the story
context
included or excluded
When the story is read WITH brackets, the context is compatible with _________.
only one meaning
When the story is read without brackets ____ meaning is possible.
either
What was the ambiguous word spinney 1979 used?
bugs- insect or listening device
Do people consider both meanings when the context is compatible with either meaning?
Yes, both meanings were activated as they had a fast lexical decision to both “ant” and “spy”
Do people consider both meanings when the context is compatible with only one meaning?
Yes, all meanings are initially accessed however quickly context kicked in later on in the sentence and the lexical decision was only fast to “ant”
The conclusion of Swinney 1979 was that all meanings are initially accessed, what theory is this consistent with?
The Exhaustive Access Hypothesis
People _____ consider inappropriate/irrelevant _____ of ambiguous words and then screen them out.
Unconsciously
meanings
People process the word they are _____.
fixating
What do psychologists examine during reading and how do they do this?
They examine language comprehension by studying eye movements
What happens when we read a sentence?
We fixate most words for 100-4000ms then jump to the next word (saccade) for 10-120ms
During saccades we __________
don’t perceive any visual information
What does the eye tracker record?
What word the participant fixates and for how long (ms)
when you have your eyes recorded why do you sit in a head rest?
to prevent movement
What light is used in an eye tracker to shine on the right eye?
Infra-red light
The eye tracker measures the angle between 2 reflections, name these.
pupil and cornea
What types of words to readers fixate on for longer before moving on?
Infrequent Words
Why are eye movement times a lot less than lexical decision times?
Because the participant is simply reading (more natural) rather than deciding whether it is a word or not.
How long participants look at the word when they first fixate it- Name this
Fixation Duration
Define Gaze Duration
How long participants look at the word before they move onto the next word- sometimes look at the word multiple times before moving on
Fixation Duration is faster in _____ frequency words than ___ frequency words.
high
low
Gaze Duration is significantly longer in what type of words?
Low Frequency words (compared to high frequency words)
What is meaning dominance?
In words that have more than one meaning, some meanings may be more frequent/dominant than others.
Define- Biased ambiguous word
A word that has multiple meanings but some meanings are more dominant/frequent than others
If an ambiguous word has 2 meanings that are equally frequent- what do we call this?
a balanced ambiguous word
Participants read sentences containing a balanced ambiguous word (coach) and an unambiguous word, in what experiment?
Rayner and Duffy 1986
What had to be the same in order for the Rayner and Duffy 1986 experiment to be fair?
The ambiguous word and the unambiguous word had to have the same frequency
There was longer fixation on the _____ _____ word than the ______ word. Why?
balanced ambiguous word
unambiguous
Because when reading the balanced ambiguous word the 2 meanings (of coach) had to compete for selection.
Summarise what happens when the ambiguity is BALANCED. Rayner and Duffy 1986.
When the ambiguity is balanced both meanings get activated, which slows down reading times.
What experiment is Rayner and Duffy’s findings consistent with?
Swinney 1979
In Rayner and Duffy’s second part of the experiment they had participants read sentences containing a ___ ambiguous word (port) and an unambiguous word (soup).
biased
They fixated the biased ambiguous word (port) and unambiguous word (soup) for _______ time.
the same
In what sentence did the ending take longer to read “had a strange flavour”?
in the sentence with the biased ambiguous word (port)
So initially the biased ambiguous word was _______ difficult than the unambiguous word
no more
Why did the reading at the end of the sentence containing the biased ambiguous word slow down?
Becauses port is biased- so often means harbour more than wine, therefore the reader initially accesses the harbour meaning only. They then had to revise this when the context became incompatible with the “harbour” interpretation.
when ambiguity is biased, people first access…..
the frequent meaning and the 2 meanings don’t compete
What theory was the second part of Rayner and Duffy’s experiment consistent with?
The Exclusive Access Hypothesis
Name 3 examples of stimuli that activate neurons in the brain.
Light, sound, type of language
What does ERP stand for?
Event-Related Potentials
Activated neurons emit ____
electrical activity
How is neuron activation measures?
It is measured using electrodes placed on the scalp.
How do psychologists comoute different electrical patterns to show general trends/results?
By averaging over a large number of trials and participants
what can ERP provide?
Neural evidence for different processes in the brain when presented with different stimuli.
what is semantics?
The meanings of words and sentences
What is syntax?
The rules for combining words into sentences eg. grammar.
What is this sentence an example of?
“The cats won’t bake”
A semantically anomalous sentence
What is this sentence an example of?
“The cats wont eating”
A syntactically anomalous sentence
What ERP does reading a semantically anomalous (implausible) sentence result in?
N400- a large negative wave at 400ms
What ERP does reading a syntactically anomalous (ungrammatical) sentence result in?
P600- a large positive wave at 600 ms
What does N400 and P600 tell us about the brain?
It tells us that the brain responds differently to semantic anomaly vs. syntactic anomaly
P600 can also be called SPS, what does SPS stand for?
Syntactic Positive Shift
ERP suggests that different brain ____ are employed for processing semantic info and syntactic info.
mechanisms
What ERP does a World Knowledge Violation result in?
N400
Trains in the Netherlands are white and crowded is an example of a _____
world knowledge violation
Trains in the Netherlands are sour and very crowded is an example of a _______
semantic violation
It does not take longer to discover that is a sentence is ___ than to detect its _____ anomalous.
untrue,
semantically
Name 2 other things that provide evidence suggesting syntax and semantics activate different areas of the brain. (N400 and P600)
The results of brain scans
And studies of brain damaged patients
