PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

1
PSY 369 Psycholinguistics

• Review for Exam 1

2
Cohort model

• Three stages of word recognition
• 1) Contact Activate a set of possible candidates
  based on initial phonemes
• 2) Selection Narrow the search to one candidate
  using further bottom-up and some top-down
  information
• Recognition point (uniqueness point) - point at
  which a word is unambiguously different from
  other words and can be recognized
• 3) Integration combine the single candidate into
  semantic and syntactic context
• Semantic priming effects happen in this stage

3
Cohort model

• Prior context I took the car for a

Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3
/s/
/sp/
/spi/
/spin/
soap spinach psychologist spin spit sun spank
spinach spin spit spank
spinach spin spit
spin
time
4
Comparing the models

• Each model can account for major findings (e.g.,
  frequency, semantic priming, context), but they
  do so in different ways.
• Information flow
• Search model is serial and bottom-up
• Logogen is parallel and interactive (information
  flows up and down)
• Cohort is bottom-up parallel initially, then
  interactive at a later stage
• The decision process
• Logogen model activation increases with no
  effort
• In the cohort model, words must be actively
  rejected from the cohort

5
Homework 1

• Two banks in neighboring towns were reported
  robbed by the state police yesterday.
• Purpose of question 2
• Gain insight to the complexity of a single
  sentence
• It feels easy to understand it,
• But, look how hard it is to consciously analyze
  the different levels of linguistic information

6
Homework 1

• 2a) Phonology - useful website
• http//www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc-soundsipa.htm
• Notice, not a one-to-one correspondence between
  letters and phonemes
• two /t/ /u/
• banks /b/ /ei/ /N/ /k/ /s/
• in /i/ /n/
• neighboring /n/ /ei/ /b/ /o/ /r/ /i/ /N/
• towns /t/ /au/ /n/ /z/
• were /w/ /e/ /r/
• reported /r/ /i/ /p/ /o/ /r/ /t/ /e/ /d/
• robbed /r/ /a/ /b/ /d/
• by /b/ /ai/
• the /TH/ //
• state /s/ /t/ /ei/ /t/
• police /p/ /Ou/ /l/ /I/ /s/
• yesterday /j/ /e/ /s/ /t/ /e/ /r/ /d/ /ei/

7
Homework 1

• 2b) Morphology
• Free Bound
• two two
• banks bank -s inflectional
• in in
• neighboring neighbor -ing inflectional
• towns town -s inflectional
• were were
• reported report -ed inflectional
• robbed rob -ed inflectional
• by by
• the the
• state state
• police police
• yesterday day yester- derivational

8
Homework 1

• 2c) Syntax Two banks in neighboring towns were
  reported robbed by the state police yesterday.
• 2 different deep structures --transformations--gt
  arrive at same surface structure
• It was reported by the state police yesterday
  that two banks in neighboring towns were robbed.
• It was reported that two banks in neighboring
  towns were robbed by the state police yesterday.
• So the tree structures end up attaching the
  prepositional phrase to one verb or the other in
  the resulting surface structure.

9
Homework 1

• 2de) Lexical Ambiguity Two banks in neighboring
  towns were reported robbed by the state police
  yesterday.
• 2 different meanings RIVER bank, MONEY bank
• How do we know which meaning?
• Frequency of meaning?
• Content of rest of the sentence? robbed, do we
  hold both interpretations until it gets resolved
  here (6 words later)?
• Prior Context?
• A) May is discussing a local newspaper story with
  her co-worker, Ash, over lunch.
• B) May, a bank manager, wonders aloud whether she
  should upgrade the security system in the bank.
  Ash, the assistant manager says

10
Homework 1

• 2f,g,h) introspect about comprehension processes
  involved

11
Exam 1 Review

• Chapters 1,2,3,5.
• What is language? Psycholinguistics?
• Kinds of linguistic information
• Basic cognitive structures and processes
• Storing and retrieving information about words
• Exam format
• Multiple choice (similar to quizzes)
• Vocabulary matching
• Short answer

12
What is psycholinguistics?
Psycho
Linguistics
13
What is psycholinguistics?
Psycho
Linguistics

• Mental Processes
• Short Term Memory
• Long Term Memory
• Encoding
• Retrieval
• Mental Representations

• Linguistic Theory
• Phonology
• Morphology
• Syntax
• Semantics
• - Rules

14
Systems of Communication

• There are a variety of methods to communicate
• E.g., Dogs bark, Birds sing, Bees dance
• People talk - we use language (as well as other
  methods) for communication
• How does language differ from other systems of
  communication? What are the properties of human
  language?

15
Features of Language (Hockett, 1960)

• Arbitrariness
• Displacement
• Productivity
• Discreteness
• Semanticity
• Duality of patterning

16
Levels of analysis
17
Phonology

• The sounds of a language
• Phonemes, allophones phones
• Articulatory features
• Rules about how to put the sounds together
• Rule If /p/ is used in word initial position you
  add aspiration (a puff of air), if word internal
  dont aspirate

18
Morphology

• Morpheme smallest unit that conveys meaning

19
Syntax

• More than surface linear position matters,
  underlying structure is important.

20
Syntax

• Generative Grammar
• The pieces

• Grammatical features of words
• Dog Noun
• Bite Verb

• Phrase structure rules - these tell us how to
  build legal structures
• S --gt NP VP
• VP --gt V (NP)
• NP --gt (A) (ADJ) N

21
Syntax

• Generative Grammar

• Recursion you can embed structures within
  structures
• NP --gt (A) (ADJ) N (PP)
• PP --gt Prep NP
• So we NPs can be embedded within PPs which in
  turn may be embedded within NPs.
• The dog with the bone of the dinosaur from the
  cave with the paintings of the animals with fur
  bit the man.
• Productivity The result is an infinite number of
  syntactic structures from a finite set of pieces

22
Syntax

• Transformational grammar Chomsky (1957, 1965)
• Two stages phrase structures for a sentence
• Build Deep Structure
• Build from phrase structure rules
• One constituent at a time
• Convert to Surface Structure
• Built from transformations that operate on the
  deep structure
• Adding, deleting, moving
• Operate on entire strings of constituents

23
Semantics

• Philosophy of meaning
• Sense and reference
• The worlds most famous athlete.
• The athlete making the most endorsement income.
• 2 distinct senses, 1 reference

Now

• Over time the senses typically stay the same,
  while the references may change

24
Semantics

• Two levels of analysis (and two traditions of
  psycholinguistic research)
• Word level (lexical semantics)
• How do we store words?
• How are they organized?
• How do words relate to meaning?
• Sentence level (compositional semantics)
• How do word meanings and syntax interact?

25
Pragmatics

• Sentences do more than just state facts, instead
  they are uttered to perform actions
• How to do things with words (J. L. Austin, 1955
  lectures)
• Using registers
• Conversational implicatures
• Speech acts

26
Cognitive Psychology
Information flows from one memory buffer to the
next
27
Cognitive Psychology
Information flows from one memory buffer to the
next
28
Cognitive Psychology
Information flows from one memory buffer to the
next
29
Cognitive Psychology
Working Memory
Information flows from one memory buffer to the
next
30
Working Memory

• Working memory instead of STM

31
Cognitive Psychology

• Properties
• Capacity Unlimited?
• Duration Decay/
• interference
• Organized

Information flows from one memory buffer to the
next
32
Long term memory Organization
The Multiple Memory Stores Theory

• Different memory components, each storing
  different kinds of information.
• Declarative
• episodic - memories about events
• semantic - knowledge of facts
• Procedural - memories about how to do things
  (e.g., the thing that makes you improve at riding
  a bike with practice.

Declarative

• episodic

• semantic

Procedural
33
Storing linguistic information

• How are words stored? What are they made up of?
  How are word related to each other? How do we use
  them?
• Mental lexicon The representation of words in
  long term memory
• Lexical Access How do we activate (retrieve) the
  meanings (and other properties) of words?

34
Lexical primitives

• Word primitives

• Need a lot of representations
• Fast retrieval

• Morpheme primitives

• Economical - fewer representations
• Slow retrieval - some assembly required
• Decomposition during comprehension
• Composition during production

35
Lexical organization

• How are the lexical representations organized?
• Alphabetically?
• Initial phoneme?
• Semantic categories?
• Grammatical class?
• Something more flexible, depending on your needs?

36
Lexical organization

• Factors that affect organization
• Phonology
• Frequency
• Imageability, concreteness, abstractness
• Grammatical class
• Semantics

37
Lexical organization

• Factors that affect organization
• Phonology
• Frequency
• Imageability, concreteness, abstractness
• Grammatical class
• Semantics

38
Lexical organization

• Another possibility is that there are multiple
  levels of representation, with different
  organizations at each level

39
Semantic Networks

• Semantic Networks
• Words can be represented as an interconnected
  network of sense relations
• Each word is a particular node
• Connections among nodes represent semantic
  relationships

40
Semantic Networks

• Hierarchical Models Collins and Quillian (1969)

has skin
Animal
can move around
breathes
has fins
has feathers
can swim
Fish
can fly
Bird
has gills
has wings
41
Semantic Networks

• Prototypes Rosch, (1973)
• Some members of a category are better instances
  of the category than others
• Fruit apple vs. pomegranate
• What makes a prototype?
• More central semantic features
• What type of dog is a prototypical dog
• What are the features of it?
• We are faster at retrieving prototypes of a
  category than other members of the category

42
Semantic Networks

• Spreading activation Collins Loftus (1975)
• Words represented in lexicon as a network of
  relationships
• Organization is a web of interconnected nodes in
  which connections can represent
• categorical relations
• degree of association
• typicality

43
Lexical access

• How do we retrieve the linguistic information
  from Long-term memory?
• What factors are involved in retrieving
  information from the lexicon?
• Models of lexical retrieval

44
Recognizing a word
Search for a match
dog
cap
wolf
tree
yarn
cat
cat
claw
fur
hat
45
Lexical access

• Factors affecting lexical access
• Frequency
• Semantic priming
• Role of prior context
• Phonological structure
• Morphological structure
• Lexical ambiguity

46
Models of lexical access

• Serial comparison models
• Search model (Forster, 1976, 1979, 1987, 1989)
• Parallel comparison models
• Logogen model (Morton, 1969)
• Cohort model (Marslen-Wilson, 1987, 1990)

47
Logogen model (Morton 1969)
Auditory stimuli
Visual stimuli
Auditory analysis
Visual analysis
Logogen system
Context system
Semantic Attributes
Available Responses
Output buffer
Responses
48
Search model
49
Cohort model

• Prior context I took the car for a

/s/
/sp/
/spi/
/spin/
soap spinach psychologist spin spit sun spank
spinach spin spit spank
spinach spin spit
spin
time