W6: Language 2: Language Comprehension

Question 1

Global aphasia

Answer 1

following a stroke, able to speak fluidly but problems accessing words and understanding others.

Question 2

Ambiguity in the speech stream

Answer 2

impossible to know where one word ends and another one starts. Word boundaries are unclear. ( ice cream, I scream)

Question 3

Ambiguity at the word level

Answer 3

words that sound the same but have different meanings. Difficulty linking words that are pronounced with the same to meaning.

Question 4

Ambiguity at the phoneme level

Answer 4

words that change the way the sound depends on their environment. Surrounding sounds change the way we articulate phonemes. Air is pushed up the vocal tract and hits points in the mouth that form an obstruction resulting in different types of consonants.

Question 5

Homonyms

Answer 5

words that sounds and are spelt the same “Bank”, “Bank”.

Question 6

Homophones

Answer 6

words that sound the same, “Muscle”, “mussel”

Question 7

Homographs

Answer 7

words that are spelt the same “Bow” tie, ‘bow’ and arrow, “bow” bend at the waist.

Question 8

Coarticulation

Answer 8

we make sounds by moving the different part of our articulatory apparatus (mouth, throat and tongue) sounds can become blurred or blended when we ‘articulate’ them.
The phonemes that we hear may change the way they sound depending on the sounds that are produced before or after the phoneme.

Question 9

Categorical perception

Answer 9

of sounds provides a way for us to work out where one sound ends, and another sound starts.

Question 10

VOT

Answer 10

voice onset time.
O VOT  The vocal cords, vibrate as the closure for P in Pan is released.
+ VOT  the vocal cords, vibrate after the closure for ‘B’ in Ban is released.

Question 11

Disambiguating the Ambiguity: Categorical perception

Answer 11

Facilitates distinction between ‘toll’ and ‘doll’.
Children appear to be hardwired to recognize different phonemes based on features such as ‘voicing’.
Chinchillas are also able to discriminate sounds based on these features.

Question 12

Regional Accents

Answer 12

the range of sounds allowable for a single phoneme could differ dramatically depending on the accent in which it is spoken.

Question 13

Mental representation

Answer 13

top-down processing of existing mental representations of words stored in our mental lexicon can be used to work out what we are hearing.

Question 14

The Mental lexicon:

Answer 14

Syntax, Phonological, semantics, orthographic.

Question 15

Lexical access will be faster for words that are …

Answer 15

short and frequent compared to words that are long and infrequent.

Question 16

Lexical access will be slower for

Answer 16

words with lots of neighbors compared to words with fewer neighbors.

Question 17

Neighborhood density

Answer 17

nb of words that sound similar, words that differ by 1 phoneme (e.g. walk, talk)

Question 18

Lexical decision task

Answer 18

participants press one key for “word”, another key for “non-word”.

Reaction times are measured as the time between stimulus presentation and button press. Slower reaction times are found for words with lots of neighbors compared to words with few neighbors.

Question 19

Luce & Pisoni, 1998

Answer 19

Fast response (Yacht), Slow response (peach)
Context = What is the impact of sentence context in recognizing words and resolving ambiguity?

Question 20

Word Monitoring (Maslen, Wilson & Taylor, 1980)

Answer 20

Asked to monitor speech for word motorwway and say the word whenever they hear it. Timing from the begninnign of the word motorway.
Language system predicts which words might come up next and activated them in the lexicon. Sentence context helps us activate potential word candidates, but it does not necessarily facilitate the selection of the word.

Question 21

Zwitserlood, 1989: cross modal priming

Answer 21

Prime word: auditory, target word (visual) Faster reaction time for related captain-ship, compared to unrelated item.
Target word: ship, Prime word: captain => related prime-target pair.
Target word: wicket, prime word: captain => unrelated prime-target pair.

Question 22

Midels of speech comprehension

Answer 22

Evidence of how we access lexical items has resulted in the development of computational models of speech comprehension that allow us to model the process of lexical access.