Sentences and Meaning Flashcards
What is lexical access?
The process of finding and retrieving all the stored knowledge we have about a word (semantic representation)
What is the gating task?
When you play bits of a word in gradually increasing chunks and ask people to guess what the word might be, context influences the recognition point.
What is cross-modal priming?
Briefly activate numerous meanings of potential candidates so there’s no hard decision between word recognition and meaning activation so we must be doing some lexical access before word recognition.
What is a homophone?
Different meanings, same sound
What is a homograph?
Different meanings, same written form
What is a homonym?
Different meanings, same written and spoken form
What is a heterographic homophone?
Different meanings and written forms, same sounds
What is a heterographic homograph?
Different meanings and sounds, same written form
What are polysemous words?
Often used interchangeably with homonym - stricter definition is multiple senses within same dictionary definition (e.g. Twist)
What increases the speed of word recognition?
Many senses and fewer meanings
How is word recognition involved with semantic processing?
It can be explained in terms of semantic feature models od lexical representation and word recognition involves a meaning resolution process
How do sentence models differ in terms of the influence of sentence context?
- when (early/late)
- how (interactive/autonomous)
- role of meaning frequency
Explain the Multiple Access Model.
When an ambiguous word is encountered, all meanings are accessed in a context-independent way - the contextually appropriate meaning is then selected.
Explain context-guided single-reading lexical access
Context is used to restrict access to only the appropriate meanings and so inappropriate meanings are never accessed.
Explain the Multiple Access Model is terms of its components
Autonomous
Late contextual access
Low frequency influence
What are reminder-priming studies?
Spoken prime word is followed by a semantically related target and this leads to a fast lexical judgement whereas unrelated words are slower. This provides a measure of meaning activation.
What is syntactic ambiguity?
E.g. noun/verb ambiguity
How is noun/verb ambiguity solved? e.g. WATCH
Sentences can be verb-biased or noun-biased
What is meaning frequency?
Ambiguous words vary in the relative frequency of meanings.
What are balanced ambiguous words?
Both meanings are equally common
What are unbalanced ambiguous words?
One meaning is dominant
What do weaker interactive models suggest about sentential context effects?
That sentential contexts will not always rule out the inappropriate meanings immediately, they may just bias activations
What is suprisal?
processing difficulty is a reflection of whether a sentence’s continuation is highly predictable and whether the unfolding sentence ends up conforming to the most likely outcome
When is suprisal lowest?
When the probability that a sentence will continue is a particular way is very high, and the sentence does in fact continue that way
When is suprisal highest (leading to greatest processing difficulty)
When the sentence actually continues in a way that was extremely improbable.
Why are object relative clauses harder to process than subject relative clauses?
Because sentences involve holding some parts of the sentence in memory until they can be related to other parts of the sentence. As the distance between these related parts get biggers, so do the demands on memory and the prospects of processing failure.
What is the framing effect?
A phenomenon in which decisions of preferences regarding two identical outcomes are observed to be a dramatically different, depending on the wording of the outcomes.
What is the reading span test?
A behavioural test intended to measure an individual’s verbal working memory - individual reads a sequence of sentences while holding the last word of each sentence in memory. The no. of words successfully remembered corresponds to that individual’s memory span.
What is grammar?
A mutually agreed convention about sentence structure to allow multiple concepts to be piped through a linear system
What is the goal of sentence processing?
To assign thematic roles to words by determining the syntactic structure of the sentence (parsing)
What is parsing?
The act of interpreting a sentence syntactically
How is parsing different to word recognition?
- It’s a constructive not recognition process.
- It allows us to deal with novel sentences in a meaningful way (unlike most novel words)
What is a sentential compliment? (S’)
something that can be part of a sentence but also makes sense alone