W6: Language 2: Language Comprehension Flashcards
Global aphasia
following a stroke, able to speak fluidly but problems accessing words and understanding others.
Ambiguity in the speech stream
impossible to know where one word ends and another one starts. Word boundaries are unclear. ( ice cream, I scream)
Ambiguity at the word level
words that sound the same but have different meanings. Difficulty linking words that are pronounced with the same to meaning.
Ambiguity at the phoneme level
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.
Homonyms
words that sounds and are spelt the same “Bank”, “Bank”.
Homophones
words that sound the same, “Muscle”, “mussel”
Homographs
words that are spelt the same “Bow” tie, ‘bow’ and arrow, “bow” bend at the waist.
Coarticulation
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.
Categorical perception
of sounds provides a way for us to work out where one sound ends, and another sound starts.
VOT
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.
Disambiguating the Ambiguity: Categorical perception
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.
Regional Accents
the range of sounds allowable for a single phoneme could differ dramatically depending on the accent in which it is spoken.
Mental representation
top-down processing of existing mental representations of words stored in our mental lexicon can be used to work out what we are hearing.
The Mental lexicon:
Syntax, Phonological, semantics, orthographic.
Lexical access will be faster for words that are …
short and frequent compared to words that are long and infrequent.
Lexical access will be slower for
words with lots of neighbors compared to words with fewer neighbors.
Neighborhood density
nb of words that sound similar, words that differ by 1 phoneme (e.g. walk, talk)
Lexical decision task
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.
Luce & Pisoni, 1998
Fast response (Yacht), Slow response (peach)
Context = What is the impact of sentence context in recognizing words and resolving ambiguity?
Word Monitoring (Maslen, Wilson & Taylor, 1980)
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.
Zwitserlood, 1989: cross modal priming
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.
Midels of speech comprehension
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.
