Social Aspects of Language Processing

Question 1

What does the CIA mean?

Answer 1

The coordinated interplay account.

Question 2

There are 2 models when it comes to speaker effects on semantic interpretation. Name them!
Bonus point: In 2008 Van Berkum did a study about this, which model turned out to be true?

Answer 2

First is the Two-step model of semantic interpretation
The second is the Immediate pragmation view.
So basically the first one says that when someone is talking to us, the new information comes with a delay, the second says - noo, we process that information immediately.
Van Berkum study participants heard the sentence that was mismatched with the voice of the speaker (like a child saying “let’s get drunk and get wasted tonight”). Participants took the speaker’s voice as the main source of information, rather than the meaning of the sentence itself. This means that the immediate pragmation view is correct.

Question 3

Did your grandma focus on your positive character traits or your negative ones? Emotion processing changes over age. Carminati & Knoeferle’s study says that:

Answer 3

Older adults have a positivity bias (focus more on positive information), and younger adults have a negativity bias (focus more on negative information).
If you have trouble remembering this, think about climate change. All of us are worried that the world is gonna end in 50 years and we’re doomed, right? not the older people, they’re going to die soon anyway.

Question 4

Which three steps are there in the coordinated interplay account?

Answer 4

1. Sentence interpretation
2. Utterance-mediated attention
3. Scene integration

the occurence of these 3 steps can overlap.

Question 5

Pia and her bestie revised CIA in 2014 and took into account….what?

Answer 5

Working memory effects, time, response index

Question 6

Pia and her bestie revised CIA in 2018 too, what did they add this time?

Answer 6

speaker characteristics (age for example)
comprehender characteristics AKA ProCom AKA properties of comprehender
expectations derived from a social context

Question 7

What hypothesis regarding two-step models did van Berkum et al.
(Cognitive Neuroscience, 2008) make?
(This is a question from the class)

Answer 7

If contextual information relating to the speaker is only activated with delay, then speaker-voice knowledge incongruence should elicit different ERP effects than semantic violations.