Week 3-Language Part 2

Question 1

Define Speech Processing

Answer 1

A process of progressively extracting invariant, discrete representations from a variable, continuous input.

Question 2

What are 2 features of a speech signal? and how can they be an issue with regards to speech processing?

Answer 2

1. Continuous. Distributed in time. Fast-fading Words are not neatly segmented so (e.g., by pauses i.e., when it starts and ends) so we cannot resample what was said. Consecutive speech sounds blend into each other due to mechanical constraints on articulators.
2. Variable Speaker differences; pitch affected by age and sex; different accents, talking speeds, often heard in noise.

Question 3

Give a simple definition of the word segmentation problem

Answer 3

When do words start and end?

Question 4

Define Word Segmentation (Cutler & Norris, 1988)

Answer 4

The rhythmic structure of English is stress- timed (some syllables are emphasised)

LEttuce TROUsers CiGAR

Question 5

What is the Metrical Segmentation Strategy (MSS)?

Answer 5

In English, stressed (strong) syllables are likely onsets of words. Continuous speech is
segmented at stressed syllables. Cutler & Norris (1988)

Question 6

What are stressed syllables?

Answer 6

Full vowels e.g., LEttuce

Question 7

What are unstressed syllables?

Answer 7

Reduced vowels e.g., beHIND

Question 8

What are content words?

Answer 8

Nouns, verbs and adjectives

Question 9

What are Grammatical words?

Answer 9

Articles, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions

Question 10

What evidence is there in favour for the MSS? (Cutler & Carter, 1987)

Answer 10

The 74% of stressed syllables in English
corresponds to sole or initial syllable of a content word. This is not the case
for unstressed syllables - only 5% corresponds to content words

Question 11

Why is the Metrical segmentation strategy not infallible?

Answer 11

■ Because it is a strategy (* examples of incorrectly
segmented words with complex syllabic structure).

-Listeners need other source of information to segment successfully.

Alert *lert
Assassinate *sassinate

■ MSS is language specific. Other languages may use different strategies.

■ It solves the child’s paradox (how could a child segment a word, if the child does not know the word?)

Question 12

What is the Hierarchy of segmentation cues? (Mattys et al., 2005)

Answer 12

Tier 1: Lexical
-Lexical
-Sentential context (pragmatics, syntax, semantics) –> Lexical knowledge
-Interpretive conditions are optimal

Tier 2: Segmental
-Sub-lexical
-Phonotactics Acoustic-phonetics (coarticulation, allophony)
-Interpretive conditions contain poor lexical information

Tier 3: Metrical Prosody
-Sub-lexical
-Word stress
-Interpretive conditions contain poor segmental information

Question 13

What is Lexical Selection?

Answer 13

■ Segmented stream is the input for lexical selection.
– searching process that determines the best fit in our mental lexicon between the input and the abstract lexical representations.
– fast: it starts as soon as there is some information about the word, and can finish before the word has been fully pronounced.

■ Words in context can be recognised within 175-200ms of their onset, or when only a part of their acoustic content has been
presented.

Question 14

What evidence is there for Lexical Selection from Shadowing? (Marslen-Wilson, 1975)

Answer 14

 Task: Participants hear a sentence and they repeat aloud what they heard.

 Results: Participants corrected the words (such as mispronunciations) when repeating them.
 The corrections occurred before the incorrect word was presented in full.

 We are fast in recognising words - not mere repetition of sounds but they access known lexical representations

Question 15

What evidence is there for Lexical Selection from gating? (Tyler & Wessels, 1983)

Answer 15

 Task: Participants are given a word to listen. The word is chopped in different fragments/gates of different durations.

 The gates start from the beginning of the word, and become increasingly larger (e.g., +25ms every time).

 The task is to say what is the word.

-Listeners consider multiple word candidates that are consistent with the incoming speech.

-Listeners can also recognise a word if it has a uniqueness point.

Question 16

What is the Cohort model? (Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978)

Answer 16

 A word is recognised at the point where it is the only word still consistent with the input (Recognition Point).

 Optimally efficient system: maximally effective use of incoming signal, a word will be
recognized as soon as the info is available to differentiate it from competitors, even before the end of the word.

Question 17

What are the 3 stages of the Cohort model? (Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978)

Answer 17

1. Access: activation of initial set of candidates based on word-initial cohort.
2. Selection: words that mismatch the incoming signal removed from the cohort.
3. Integration: their syntactic and semantic properties integrated with the context.

Question 18

What does the Cohort model suggest?

Answer 18

 The Cohort model suggests that word onsets, i.e., information that we have at the very beginning helps to set up the search and the cohort.

 This is consistent with evidence showing that word onsets are particularly salient (Cole
and Jakimik, 1980) but information coming at later points can also activate lexical entries.

Question 19

What evidence from Allopenna et al. (1998) supports the salience of word onsets and additional late activation?

Answer 19

Task: Pick up the beaker;
put it below the diamond
HOWEVER their are other objects which are there to act as a distractor (BEetle), prime destructor (speakER) and a baseline (pram - no overlap of sounds here).

Measure: Eye-movements (interested in the proportions of fixations)

Results: Rhymes compete! people got distracted by beetle and speaker at some point. This resulted in modifications of the Cohort Model

 This is helpful since word boundaries are not always reliably detected and word onset may not be available (e.g., because of noise)

Question 20

What is meant by Access to meaning? (Swinney, 1979)

Answer 20

■ Ambiguous context

■ “Rumour had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found bugs in the corner of his room.”

■ Disambiguating context

■ “Rumour had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, cockroaches and other bugs in the corner of
his room.”

Swinney (1979):
Task: lexical decision
on the target word

Presentation point of the written target: early or late (200ms later)

ANT
(related to dominant meaning)
SPY
(related to non- dominant meaning)
SEW
(unrelated control)

Question 21

What was Swinney’s (1979) findings?

Answer 21

■ Different meanings are initially activated: contextual info is not used to determine which words are considered for recognition

■ Contextual information is critical for the selection of the appropriate meaning amongst the activated alternatives.

*significantly faster lexical
decision, compared to the
response to the unrelated target word (sew)

Question 22

What procedure did Marslen Wilson, Brown, & Tyler (1988) do for Context effects (in monitoring)?

Answer 22

Task: Listening to sentences & monitoring for specific words

Results:
1. Word in isolation: guitar ~300ms
2. Normal: The boy held the guitar. ~240ms (quicker due to contextual information).
3. Pragmatic Anomalous: The boy buried the guitar. ~268ms
4. Semantic Anomalous: The boy drank the guitar. ~291ms
5. Categorical Anomalous: The boy slept the guitar. ~320ms

-Multiple types of contextual information are integrated during spoken word recognition

Question 23

Where does speech processing occur in the brain?

Answer 23

 Bilateral activity in Heschl’s gyrus (low level processing), STG (superior temporal gyrus) and MTG (medial temporal gyrus) for simple mapping of sound to meaning

 Left-lateralised activation in the dorsal stream, and especially left
IFG (inferior frontal gyrus), for more complex spoken inputs (e.g., sentences)

Question 24

What is the evolutionary context for speech processing in the brain? (Gil-da-costa et al., 2006)

Answer 24

 Non-human primates also communicate by exchanging meaningful
calls

 This triggers comparable bilateral activity in the brain of a macaque

 Suggests evolutionary continuity of the bilateral system that supports mapping from sound to meaning (ventral stream)

 Strong dorsal connections between temporal and frontal areas in the left hemisphere are unique to humans (important for syntax).

Question 25

True or false: Sentences are not stored in the mental lexicon

Answer 25

True!

■ We need rapid
mechanisms for parsing
and extraction of the
information they convey
(‘who is doing what to
whom’) (which requires different areas of the brain)

Question 26

What are the Syntactic rules?

Answer 26

 Syntactic rules: the rules that govern how words can be combined

 They allow all permissible sentences to be generated; and rule out
all illegal sentences

“Powerful little fruits produce open-source initiatives”
No meaning, but syntactically correct

 Principles for combining words into sentences that do not depend on meaning

 Based on knowledge about grammatical categories such as
nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions etc.,

Question 27

Give an example of Syntactic parsing

Answer 27

■ THE GIRL hits the woman WITH A BAG
■ The girl hits the WOMAN WITH A BAG

■ Comprehension depends (in part) on the grammatical relations that
listeners can establish among the words in a sentence

Question 28

What are the 4 main theories of sentence processing?

Answer 28

1. Garden-path model (Frazier & Rayner, 1982): Initial parsing is purely syntactic, meaning is not involved in the selection of the initial syntactic structure (i.e., less focus on semantics).
2. Constraint-based theories (MacDonald et al, 1994): The initial
   interpretation depends on all available sources of information (syntactic, semantic, general world knowledge)
3. Unrestricted race-model (Van Gompel et al, 2000):
   All sources of information used to identify a syntactic structure
4. ‘Good-enough’ representations (Ferreira et al, 2002): Processing
   depth / type of information used depend on the task (i.e., you will not do the same analysis everytime).

Question 29

What Evidence is there for sentence processing: Sentence parsing cues

Answer 29

■ Types of information used to understand sentences:
– syntactic principles
– statistical regularities
– grammatical categories
– prosodic cues
– semantic information
– world knowledge
– (…and more)

Question 30

What is Syntactic principles? (Frazier, 1987)

Answer 30

Late closure principle: new items are attached to the phrase or the clause most recently processed, if grammatically possible.

The girl hits the woman with a bag
Preferred interpretation? The girl has a bag
X The woman has a bag

(this is achieved through syntactic parsing as the object is assigned to the most recently processed object in this case the woman).

Question 31

Syntactic principles: What is minimal attachment? (Frazier, 1987)

Answer 31

 Minimal attachment links each incoming word to the existing structure using the simplest syntactic structure that is consistent
with the input.

 A strategy of parsimony: The parser builds the simplest structure that obeys the rules of language.

Question 32

What evidence is there for statistical regularities? (Slobin, 1966)

Answer 32

 Evidence: Effects of word order have been demonstrated in sentence
to picture matching tasks (match a sentence heard to a picture that is similar to that), where active sentence types are processed
(canonical word order, more frequently used) faster than passive sentence types

Question 33

What are Grammatical categories?

Answer 33

■ Individual words provide reliable cues for sentence interpretation (narrowing down the options for what it could be) (esp. grammatical words like prepositions, articles, pronouns)
The girl hits the …

■ A grammatical word and signals a new phrase node
The girl and the boy run away

■ A complementiser (that, which, etc.) signals embedded sentence
The girl who hits the woman runs away

Question 34

What is the Neurobiology of syntax? (Vigneau et al., 2011; Rolheiser et al., 2011)

Answer 34

 Meta-analysis of 128 neuroimaging studies of syntactic processing

 Extended fronto-temporal processing
network, more prominent on the left

 Requires intact left fronto-temporal white matter connections (dorsal
and ventral)

Question 35

Give an example of neuro-cognitive model of syntax (Friederici, 2011;
Friederici & Gierhan, 2013)

Answer 35

■ Strict left-lateralization of
grammatical function; primacy of Broca’s area

■ Emphasis on distinguishing between simple and complex
syntactic computations

■ Two neural computational systems supporting syntax:
– Ventral pathway (BA45 –
aSTG) for simple syntax The cat sat on the mat

– Dorsal pathway (BA 44 –
pSTG) for complex syntax The juice that the child spilled stained the rug

Question 36

What is Communication?

Answer 36

■ Exchange of information between individuals using a common system of symbols, signs, or behaviour

■ Broader than language as it also refers to:
- non-verbal communication
- use of iconic and indexical signs - animal communication, etc.,

■ People use a variety of additional communication mechanisms to complement language, some of them possibly informative in the
context of language evolution e.g., gestures

Question 37

What are the 4 types of gestures?

Answer 37

1. Beats: Simple, brief, repetitive movements. Coordinated with the speech prosody but bear no obvious relation to the meaning of the accompanying speech
2. Pointing: Simple conventionalised movements that refer to spatial locations, or
   bind objects to spatial locations
3. Symbolic gestures Movements with specific, conventionalised meaning such as OK, thumbs up, fingers crossed, etc.,
4. Lexical gestures: Hand movements of different shape and length, non repetitive and changing in form, that appear related to the meaning of the accompanying speech

Question 38

Why are gestures used? (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 1998)

Answer 38

■ Not necessarily because others can see us, or we understand that gestures are conveying useful information to the listener

■ Congenitally blind people gesture as much as sighted people, even when they talk to other blind people

■ Clearly some communicative and informative function

■ However, gestures are often rather vague and meaningless without words, and performed in the absence of listeners

■ Hp: Gestures may facilitate word production

Question 39

When does the onset of gestures occur? (Morrel-Samuels & Krauss, 1992)

Answer 39

■ Most of the gestures start between 500ms and 1s before the words

■ Familiar words:
– closer gesture asynchrony
– briefer gesture

Question 40

What are the effects of gestures on speech fluency? (Rauscher et al., 1996)

Answer 40

■ Task: Describe clips from the cartoon Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote

-Performance measured on speech with or without spatial content (i.e., gestures)

-Fake skin conductance electrodes applied to
immobilise hands and arms, and prevent gesturing (i.e., deception)

Findings: Preventing gestures has a negative effect on speech fluency,
only if the content of speech is spatial-related (shows a causal role between gesturing and speech fluency)