Psycholinguistics part 4

Question 1

Mental models

Answer 1

• Detailed conceptual representations of real-world situations the sentence evokes
• We situate the linguistic form in mental models, and we retain more information from mental models than the exact linguistic form
• Not fixed or static: can incorporate spatial and temporal information
• Can affect how active/accessible words are in our memory

Question 2

Negation in mental models, MacDonald & Just (1989)

Answer 2

Participants read a sentence, the sentence is hidden, and they must judge whether a word displayed on the screen appeared in the sentence or not. Some words in the sentence are negated and some are not, i.e. ‘Elizabeth baked bread but no cookies’

Results: Reaction times were slower for words which were negated, indicating that those words are less active in memory

Question 3

Mental models vs. linguistic content, Bransford et al., (1972)

Answer 3

Findings: variation in the linguistic form of a sentence is more likely to be recognized if the mental model the sentence produces is also different

Question 4

Factors affecting pronoun resolution

Answer 4

Referents for pronouns are determined by:
* Real-world knowledge / context
* Syntactic prominence (subjecthood)
* Gender
* Givenness
* Recency
* Syntactic constructions

Question 5

Arnold et al. (2000)

Visual world eyetracking

Answer 5

Major findings:
* When at least one of the cues (syntactic prominence or gender)
matched the pronoun referent, they were able to correctly identify
the referent
* People can simultaneously and rapidly use multiple cues (i.e.,
syntactic prominence and gender) in real-time to resolve ambiguity,
UNLESS there was pronoun ambiguity (no gender distinction) AND
the referent is the less prominent entity (the non-subject entity)

Question 6

Repeated name penalty

Answer 6

The difficulty in reading a sentence where a highly salient referent is
referred to by a full noun phrase than by a pronoun

Question 7

Focus constructions

Answer 7

These constructions can change the accessibility of a referent during pronoun resolution.

Ex. It-cleft sentence: ‘It was the bird that ate the fruit. It was hungry’ -> the bird is more accessible
Ex. Wh-cleft sentence: ‘What the bird ate was the fruit. It was rotten’ -> the fruit is more accessible

Question 8

Grice’s conversational maxims

Answer 8

1. Quality
2. Quantity
3. Relevance
4. Manner

Question 9

Contrastive inferences, Sedivy and colleagues (1999)

Answer 9

Participants’ gazes are tracked as they hear ‘pick up the tall… (glass)’ and view 1 of 2 displays: 1. a display with a glass, a pitcher, and two distractor items, or 2. a display with a glass, a shorter glass, a pitcher, and a distractor item

Results: Upon hearing the adjective (tall):
* No contrast: higher incidences of looks to the competitor (pitcher) than to target; looks to target occurred considerably later
* Contrast: people are faster to attend to the target (tall glass) than to the competitor (pitcher)
Major findings: Information about the objects used with knowledge of the contrastive function of the adjective; incremental use of contrastive inferences based on the maxim of quantity

Question 10

Referential communication
task, Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs (1986)

Answer 10

An experimental task in which speakers refer to a specific target object in the context of a number of other objects

Findings: The mean number of words used by the director and the turn-taking between the director and the matcher declined from trial 1 to trial 6 -> Joint effort between the director and the matcher (the conversational partners) to establish common ground (information that is accepted by both interlocutors)

Question 11

Aspects of the common ground, Clark (1996)

Answer 11

• Linguistic co-presence: what both interlocutors have heard or spoken previously
• Physical co-presence: what both interlocutors can see or hear
• Community membership: what interlocutors know because they
  belong to certain groups

Question 12

Isaacs & Clark (1986) on community membership

Answer 12

Referring expressions used will depend on community membership and mutual awareness of community membership (i.e. expert versus novice)

Question 13

Conceptual pact

Answer 13

Tacit agreement on a linguistic expression for a particular referent between interlocutors over the course of a communicative exchange