PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

1
PSY 369 Psycholinguistics

• Language Comprehension
• Semantic networks

2
Semantics

• Two levels of analysis (and two traditions of
  psycholinguistic research)
• Word level (lexical semantics, chapter 11)
• What is meaning?
• How do words relate to meaning?
• How do we store and organize words?
• Sentence level (compositional semantics) (chapter
  12)
• How do we construct higher order meaning?
• How do word meanings and syntax interact?

3
Separation of word and meaning

• Words are not the same as meaning
• Words are symbols linked to mental
  representations of meaning (concepts)
• Even if we changed the name of a rose, we would
  not change the concept of what a rose is
• Concepts and words are different things
• Translation argument we can translate words
  between languages (even if not every word meaning
  is represented by a single word)
• Imperfect mapping - Multiple meanings of words
• e.g., ball, bank, bear
• Elasticity of meaning - Meanings of words can
  change with context
• e.g., newspaper

4
Semantics

• Meaning is more than just associations

Write down the first word you think of in
response to that word. CAT Dog, mouse,
hat, fur, meow, purr, pet, curious,
lion

• You cannot just substitute these words into a
  sentence frame and have the same meaning.
• Frisky is my daughters ______.
• Sometimes you get a related meaning, other times
  something very different.

5
Semantics

• Referential theory of meaning (Frege, 1892)
• Sense (intension) and reference (extension)
• 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

6
Word and their meanings

• Semantic Feature Lists
• Decomposing words into smaller semantic
  attributes/primitives
• Perhaps there is a set of necessary and
  sufficient features

Features father mother daughter son
Human
Older - -
Female - -
7
Word and their meanings

• Semantic Feature Lists
• John is a bachelor.
• What does bachelor mean?
• What if John
• is married?
• is divorced?
• has lived with the mother of his children for 10
  years but they arent married?
• has lived with his partner Joe for 10 years?
• Suggests that there probably is no set of
  necessary and sufficient features that make up
  word meaning
• (other classic examples game chair)

8
Semantics as Exemplars

• Instance theory each concept is represented as
  examples of previous experience (e.g., Medin
  Schaffer, 1978)
• Make comparisons to stored instances
• Typically have a probabilistic component
• Which instance gets retrieved for comparison

dog
9
Semantics as Prototypes

• Prototype theory store feature information with
  most prototypical instance (Eleanor Rosch, 1975)

Rate on a scale of 1 to 7 if these are good
examples of category Furniture
1) chair 1) sofa 2) couch 3) table 12)
desk 13) bed 42) TV 54) refrigerator
10
Semantics as Prototypes

• Prototype theory store feature information with
  most prototypical instance (Eleanor Rosch,
  1975)
• Prototypes
• Some members of a category are better instances
  of the category than others
• Fruit apple vs. pomegranate
• What makes a prototype?
• Possibly an abstraction of exemplars
• 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

11
Semantics as Prototypes

• The main criticism of the model
• The model fails to provide a rich enough
  representation of conceptual knowledge
• How can we think logically if our concepts are so
  vague?
• Why do we have concepts which incorporate objects
  which are clearly dissimilar, and exclude others
  which are apparently similar (e.g. mammals)?
• How do our concepts manage to be flexible and
  adaptive, if they are fixed to the similarity
  structure of the world?
• If each of us represents the prototype
  differently, how can we identify when we have the
  same concept, as opposed to two different
  concepts with the same label?

12
Concepts as theories

• A development of the prototype idea to include
  more structure in the prototype (e.g., Carey,
  1985 Keil, 1986)
• Concepts provide us with the means to understand
  our world
• A lot of this work came out of concepts of
  natural kinds
• They are not just the labels for clusters of
  similar things
• They contain causal/explanatory structure,
  explaining why things are the way they are
• Similar to scientific theories
• They help us to predict and explain the world

13
Lexical access

• Factors affecting lexical access

• Morphological structure
• Phonological structure
• Concretness/abstractness
• Imageability
• Frequency
• Semantic priming
• Role of prior context
• Lexical ambiguity
• Grammatical class

• Some of these may reflex the structure of the
  lexicon
• Some may reflect the processes of access from the
  lexicon

14
Lexical organization

• There may be multiple levels of representation,
  with different organizations at each level

15
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

16
Collins and Quillian (1969)
Semantic Features
has skin
Animal
Lexical entry
can move around
breathes
IS A
IS A

• Collins and Quillian Hierarchical Network model
• Lexical entries stored in a hierarchy

• Representation permits cognitive economy
• Reduce redundancy of semantic features

17
Collins and Quillian (1969)

• Testing the model
• Semantic verification task
• An A is a B True/False

An apple has teeth
Use time on verification tasks to map out the
structure of the lexicon.
18
Collins and Quillian (1969)
has skin
Animal
can move around
breathes
has feathers
can fly
Bird

• Testing the model
• Sentence Verification time
• Robins eat worms 1310 msecs
• Robins have feathers 1380 msecs
• Robins have skin 1470 msecs
• Participants do an intersection search

has wings
Robin
eats worms
has a red breast
19
Collins and Quillian (1969)
has skin
Animal
can move around
breathes
Robins eat worms
has feathers
can fly
Bird

• Testing the model
• Sentence Verification time
• Robins eat worms 1310 msecs
• Robins have feathers 1380 msecs
• Robins have skin 1470 msecs
• Participants do an intersection search

has wings
Robin
eats worms
has a red breast
20
Collins and Quillian (1969)
has skin
Animal
can move around
breathes
Robins have feathers
has feathers
can fly
Bird

• Testing the model
• Sentence Verification time
• Robins eat worms 1310 msecs
• Robins have feathers 1380 msecs
• Robins have skin 1470 msecs
• Participants do an intersection search

has wings
Robin
eats worms
has a red breast
21
Collins and Quillian (1969)
has skin
Animal
can move around
breathes
Robins have feathers
has feathers
can fly
Bird

• Testing the model
• Sentence Verification time
• Robins eat worms 1310 msecs
• Robins have feathers 1380 msecs
• Robins have skin 1470 msecs
• Participants do an intersection search

has wings
Robin
eats worms
has a red breast
22
Collins and Quillian (1969)
has skin
Animal
can move around
breathes
Robins have skin
has feathers
can fly
Bird

• Testing the model
• Sentence Verification time
• Robins eat worms 1310 msecs
• Robins have feathers 1380 msecs
• Robins have skin 1470 msecs
• Participants do an intersection search

has wings
Robin
eats worms
has a red breast
23
Collins and Quillian (1969)
has skin
Animal
can move around
breathes
Robins have skin
has feathers
can fly
Bird

• Testing the model
• Sentence Verification time
• Robins eat worms 1310 msecs
• Robins have feathers 1380 msecs
• Robins have skin 1470 msecs
• Participants do an intersection search

has wings
Robin
eats worms
has a red breast
24
Collins and Quillian (1969)

• Problems with the model
• Difficulty representing some relationships
• How are truth, justice, and law related?
• Effect may be due to frequency of association
• (organization and conjoint frequency confounded)
• A robin breathes is less frequent than A
  robin eats worms
• Assumption that all lexical entries at the same
  level are equal
• The Typicality Effect
• A whale is a fish vs. A horse is a fish
• Which is a more typical bird? Ostrich or Robin.

25
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
Verification times a robin is a bird faster
than an ostrich is a bird
26
Collins and Quillian (1969)

• Problems with the model

Animal

• Smith, Shoben Rips (1974) showed that there are
  hierarchies where more distant categories can be
  faster to categorize than closer ones
• A chicken is a bird
• was slower to verify than
• A chicken is an animal

has feathers
can fly
Bird
has wings
Chicken
lays eggs
clucks
27
Spreading Activation Models

• 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

street
vehicle
car
bus
truck
house
orange
Fire engine
fire
red
blue
apple
pear
roses
tulips
fruit
flowers
28
Spreading Activation Models

• Collins Loftus (1975)

• Retrieval of information
• Spreading activation
• Limited amount of activation to spread
• Verification times depend on closeness of two
  concepts in a network

street
vehicle
car
bus
truck
house
orange
Fire engine
fire
red
blue
apple
pear
roses
tulips
fruit
flowers
29
Spreading Activation Models

• Advantages of Collins and Loftus model
• Recognizes diversity of information in a semantic
  network
• Captures complexity of our semantic
  representation (at least some of it)
• Consistent with results from priming studies

30
Spreading Activation Models

• More recent spreading activation models
• Probably the dominant class of models currently
  used
• Typically have multiple levels of representations

31
Conceptual combination

• How do we combine words and concepts
• We can use known concepts to create new ones
• Noun-Noun combinations
• Modifier noun
• Head noun
• Skunk squirrel
• Radiator box
• Helicopter flower

32
Conceptual combination

• How do we combine words and concepts
• Relational combination
• Relation given between head and modifier
• squirrel box a box that contains a squirrel
• Property mapping combination
• Property of modifier attributed to head
• skunk squirrel a squirrel with a white stripe
  on its back
• Hybrid combinations
• A cross between the head and modifier
• helicopter flower a bird that has parts of
  helicopters and parts of flowers

33
Conceptual combination

• How do we combine words and concepts
• Instance theory has problems (but see the
  pictures on last slide)
• Modification? (brown apple)
• Separate Prototypes? (big wooden spoon)
• But sometimes the combination has a prototypical
  feature that is not typical of either noun
  individually (pet birds live in cages, but
  neither pets nor birds do)
• Extending salient characteristics?
• When nouns are alignable (zebra horse)
• But non-alignable nouns are combined using a
  different mechanism (zebra house)

34
Figurative Language

• Up to this point we have focused on meaning in
  literal language
• Figurative language uses word in ways that go
  beyond what is usually considered their typical
  meaning
• e.g., metaphors, idioms, sarcasm
• How is it understood? Do you have to understand a
  literal meaning and then metaphor? Does it
  violate communication norms?

35
Figurative Language

• Metaphor
• a figure of speech in which a word or a phrase
  literally denoting one kind of object or idea is
  used in place of another to suggest a likeness or
  analogy between them (Kruglanski, Crenshaw,
  Post, Victoroff, 2007)

36
Figurative Language

• Metaphor
• Cacciari Glucksberg (1994) How do you spot
  them?
• Syntactic difference? No.
• The old rock has become brittle with age.
  (Referring to a professor.)
• Deviance (e.g., some literal violation is
  detected)? No.
• No man is an island. (True and figurative.)
• My husband is an animal. (True and figurative.)
• Toms a real marine. (Could be true.)

37
Figurative Language

• Metaphor
• Cacciari Glucksberg (1994) Do you need to go
  through literal to metaphorical?
• Sam is a pig.
• Literal.
• Assess against context.
• If literal wont work, go figurative.
• Generally no difference in comprehension time for
  literal and figurative interpretations.
• Cacciari Glucksberg argue that literal vs.
  figurative is better thought of as a continuum
  rather than as a dichotomy.

38
Meaning beyond the word

• Not all meaning resides at the level of the
  individual words.
• Conceptual combinations
• Figurative phrases
• Sentences
• Move to compositional semantics