PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

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PSY 369 Psycholinguistics

• What is Language and how is it related to
  Cognitive Psychology?

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What is language?

• What do you think language is?

Do you speak Klingon?
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What is language?

• What do you think language is?

• A difficult question to answer

Language is a purely human and non-instinctive
method of communicating ideas, emotions and
desires by means of voluntrily produced symbols.
Edward Sapir (1921)
A language is a set (finite or infinite) of
sentences, each finite in length and constructed
out of a finite set of elements. Noam
Chomsky (1957)
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What is language?

• Some generally agreed upon characteristics
• A system of communication
• Thought be many to be uniquely human
• Symbolic
• Elements are used to represent something other
  than itself
• Voluntary
• Language use is under our individual control
• Language is systematic
• There is hierarchical structure that organizes
  linguistic elements
• Modalities
• Spoken, written, signed (sign language)
• Assumed primacy of speech - it came first

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Language is complex

• Studied from a variety of perspectives
• Linguistics
• Language in the world
• Psycholinguistics
• Language in the mind
• Neurolinguistics
• Language in the brain

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Demos

• Read a list and then have them recall the items

1, 9, 8, 7, 1, 7, 7, 6, 2, 0, 1 , 4
1987, 1776, 2014
Car gravel painting tree running bright cold book
chopsticks mansion television
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously while gray
Irish sheep graze voraciously

• Play/show some sentences from google translate
  (mute the projector here)

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Demos

• Read a list and then have them recall the items

1, 9, 8, 7, 1, 7, 7, 6, 2, 0, 1 , 4
1987, 1776, 2014
Car gravel painting tree running bright cold book
chopsticks mansion television
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously while gray
Irish sheep graze voraciously

• Play/show some sentences from google translate

The record store is closed today
The record store is closed today
The record store is closed today
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Demos
Rocky slowly got up from the mat, planning his
escape. He hesitated a moment and thought. Things
were not going well. What bothered him most was
being held, especially since the charge against
him had been weak. He considered his present
situation. The lock that held him was strong but
he thought he could break it. He knew, however,
that his timing would have to be perfect. Rocky
was aware that it was because of his early
roughness that he had been penalized so severely
- much too severely from his point of view. The
situation was becoming frustrating the pressure
had been grinding on him for too long. He was
being ridden unmercifully. Rocky was getting
angry now. He felt he was ready to make his move.
He knew that his success or failure would depend
on what he did in the next few seconds.
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Overview of comprehension
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What is Cognitive Psychology?

• It is the body of psychological experimentation
  that deals with issues of human memory, language
  use, problem solving, decision making, and
  reasoning.
• Cognitive Psychology refers to all processes by
  which the sensory input is transformed, reduced,
  elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. Ulric
  Neisser (1967)

• Sensory Stores
• Short-term memory
• Working memory
• Long-term memory
• Declarative
• Episodic
• Semantic
• Procedural

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The standard model
Information
Information flows from one memory buffer to the
next
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Sensory memory

• Properties
• High capacity
• Extremely fast decay
• Separate systems for different sensory modalities

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Short term memory

• Properties
• rapid access (about 35 milliseconds per item)
• limited capacity (7/- 2 chunks George Miller,
  1956)
• fast decay, about 12 seconds (longer if rehearsed
  or elaborated)

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Short term memory

• Increasing your STM span
• Chunking
• Grouping information together into larger units
• Ill read a few more lists of words for you to
  recall
• Barn snow tree car rock book key plant dress cup
  slide lamp
• Dog cat mouse shoe sock toe couch pillow blanket
  table desk chair
• Down flowers the by with chased yellow several
  girls a river boy.
• A boy chased several girls with yellow flowers
  down by the river.
• Notice that the previous two are the same words,
  but the syntax allows for grouping into
  meaningful chunks

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Long term memory

• Properties
• Capacity Unlimited?
• Duration Decay/interference, retrieval
  difficulty
• Organization
• Multiple subsystems for type of memory
• Associative networks

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Long term memory Organization
The Multiple Memory Stores Theory

• This theory suggests that there are 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
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Long term memory Organization

• How is semantic memory structured?
• Networks

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Attention
Everyone knows what attention is. It is the
taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid
form, of one out of what seem several
simultaneously possible objects or trains of
thought. Focalization, concentration, of
consciousness are of its essence. It implies
withdrawal from some things in order to deal
effectively with others William James (1890)
However Britt Anderson recently writes There
is no such thing as attention (Frontiers in
Psychology, 2011).
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Attention An information filter

• Information bottleneck. There is so much info,
  only some is let through, while the rest is
  filtered out
• Early selection (e.g., Broadbent, 1958, Triesman,
  1964)
• Late filters (Deutsch Deutsch, 1963)
• Everything gets in, bottleneck comes at response
  level (can only respond to limited number of
  things)
• Cocktail party effect, dichotic listening

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Attention Limited resource

• Only have so much energy to make things go, so
  need to divide it and allocate it to processes
• Single pool (e.g., Kahneman, 1973)
• Central bank of resources available to all tasks
  that need it
• Multiple pools (e.g., Navon Gopher, 1979)
• Several banks of specialized resources divided
  up in terms of input/output modalities, stages of
  info processing (perception, memory, response
  output)
• Dual task experiments

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Attention Integration

• Attention is used to glue features together
• Feature integration theory Visual search exps

Find the X
Pop out
Slow search
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Other Common Theoretical Issues

• Example
• Letter Recognition - How do we recognize a group
  of lines and curves as letters?
• Mechanisms
• Template matching
• Feature detection and integration
• Information Flow
• Top-down vs. Bottom-up
• Modular vs. Interactive
• Automatic vs. Controlled processing

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Letter RecognitionA Feature Detection based
theory
Selfridges Pandemonium system, 1959
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Bottom-up Top-down

• Terms come from computer science
• Bottom up (data driven) relies upon evidence that
  is physically present, building larger units
  based on smaller ones
• Top down (knowledge driven, context), using
  higher-level information to support lower-level
  processes

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Word RecognitionInteractive Activation Model
(AIM)
Previous models posed a bottom-up flow of
information (from features to letters to words).
IAM also poses a top-down flows of information

• Nodes
• (visual) feature
• (positional) letter
• word detectors
• Inhibitory and excitatory connections between
  them.

• McClelland and Rumelhart, (1981)

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Automaticity

• Controlled processes
• Require resources
• Under some volitional direction
• Slow, effortful
• Automatic processes
• Require little attention
• Obligatory
• Fast

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Summing up

• Psycholinguistic view
• Language and cognition are inextricably linked
• Notice that almost all of the experiment
  demonstrations involved language elements as
  stimuli