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8/19/2019 Hofmeister Slides
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PHILIP HOFMEISTER UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX
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Average speech rate is around 150 wpm; reading rate tendsto be higher 180-200 wpm
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COMPUTATIONALPROBLEM
In any given sentence, the listener may need to
identify words, e.g. dictionary-style look-up
identify lexical categories (noun, verb, etc.)
resolve syntactic ambiguities
combine words with previous words (potentially over longspans)
integrate visual information
take into account speaker’s social status
remember prior sentences & topic
plan next utterance
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PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Computational problem: howcan humans complete thecognitive tasks necessary tocommunicate with one anothergiven rapid, incremental natureof language?
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BASIC FACTS
Language processing is incremental
You don’t wait to process a word or sentence
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COMPUTATIONALPROBLEM
Computational problem is compounded by incrementality& uncertainty
That desert trains . . .
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COMPUTATIONALPROBLEM
Computational problem is compounded by incrementalityThat desert trains . . .
[ NP That desert] trains young people to be tough.
[ S That desert trains come irregularly] is well-known.
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WORDPROCESSING
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How do weperceive sounds &words?
How do weperceive soundaccurately given anoisy input?
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PHONEMERESTORATION
EFFECT
Context plays an early role in perceptualprocesses
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PHONEMICRESTORATION
The state governors met with the respectivelegislatures convening in the capital city
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PHONEMERESTORATION
Even when people know the phoneme is missing,they still hear it
Seems to be a very fast-acting & strong effect ofcontext
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PHONEMERESTORATION
Or is it?
maybe you just think you heard it after the factto make sense of the input
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PHONEMERESTORATION
It was found that the *eal was on the TABLEIt was found that the *eel was on SHOE
Participants restored a phoneme based onevidence that came later!
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PHONEMERESTORATION
What to make of these conflicting results?Sentence contexts may have post-lexicaleffects
Word contexts may have earlier, even pre-lexical effects
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WORDPROCESSING
How are words stored & accessed in the brain?
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WORDPROCESSING
All words are not processed the sameSome take a long time to process; others ashort time
If the mind just has a dictionary, why would ittake longer to look up any word?
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VISUAL WORDRECOGNITION
Several factors have been identified as being
critical in the speed of word recognitionfrequency: how often has the word beenexperienced?
age of acquisition: when was the word firstlearned?
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FREQUENCYEFFECTS
Whaley (1978): frequency is the most important
factor in word recognitione.g. “abhor” named & recognized slower than“sleep”
effects are measurable for very frequent vs.very infrequent, frequent vs. infrequent
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FREQUENCYEFFECTS
predictability of frequency breaks down withextremely infrequent words
individuals differ in their experience
what’s common for me may be uncommon foryou
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AGE OFACQUISITION
frequency is highly correlated with age of
acquisitionmore frequent words are typically learnedearlier, e.g. “go”, “see”, not “abhor”
words learned earlier named more quickly andaccurately
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EXPERIENCE
In short, both factors suggest that personalexperience plays a huge role in how we processwords
much of our experience is shared
both AOA & frequency likely have independenteffects (Morrison & Ellis, 2000)
AOA particularly effects reading rate
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SENTENCEPROCESSING
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AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION
Many strings contain some ambiguity ofinterpretation (although we typically don’texperience confusion)
The boy saw the girl with the telescope
I heard Liam say he saw the movie yesterday
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AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION
Syntactic category ambiguityThat . . .
That is weird. = [deictic noun]
That show is weird. [=determiner]
That people like pole-vaulting is weird.[=complementizer]
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AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION
Why is ambiguity so important?
you don’t know how to interpret “that” immediately,and may have to wait a fairly long time before receivingdisambiguating info
ambiguity makes the computational problem harder
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AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION
How do people deal with ambiguity?
Option #1: Select a default analysis based onsyntactic principles and go with that
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AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION
. . . that . . .Analyze as determiner
Sets expectations for upcoming noun phrase
Upside: parser always knows what to do
Downside: it may be wrong!
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MINIMALATTACHMENT
The man the woman
NP NP
NP
The man
the woman
NP S
NP
NP
Choose the simpler analysis
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AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION
How do people deal with ambiguity?
Option #2: The short-sightedness of thelanguage processing system determines howambiguity is dealt with
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BACK TO THE DATA
Tom said that Bill had taken the cleaning out yesterday
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John said that he heard Karen wrecked her car yesterday.
Sentences get harder to process as the dependenciesbetween arguments increase in length (Gibson 1998)
memory representations decay
discourse processing interferes with past discourse
processing
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AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION
How do people deal with ambiguity?
Option #3: The language system strategicallyuses multiple constraints, including context &probabilistic information to quickly resolveambiguity
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Brown corpus of English77.5% of “that” are complementizers
11.1% are determiners
11.5% are demonstrative pronouns
= context-independent lexical frequencies
GIBSON (2006)
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Sentence-initially, however, that is more likely to be adeterminer than a complementizer
In other words, your analysis of the ambiguous wordthat depends on where you see it
GIBSON (2006)
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CONSTRAINT-BASED THEORIES
On constraint-based views of language processing, humanssolve the computational problem of language by utilizinga number of sources of information to make sense of theinput
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PRODUCTION
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SPEECHERRORS
Errors @ different levels of language processing
phonological, syntactic, and semantic
Slips of the tongue
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SPEECHERRORS
anticipations: substitutions of upcoming units
sidewalk➜ widewalk
table of contents➜
cable of contentsperseverations: repetition of preceding unit
walk the beach ➜ walk the beak
addition
spic and splan; TARGET: spic and span
deletion
his immoral soul; TARGET: his immortal soul
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SPEECHERRORS
metathesis (aka exchanges / spoonerisms)fill the pool➜ fool the pill
chimichangas➜ chichimangas
slippery crags ➜ crippery slags
Are my keys in the door➜ Are my doors in the key?
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SPEECHERRORS
evidence for the psychological reality of phones,morphemes, and syntactic units
substitution of words & phrases tells us aboutthe organization of meaning
substituted words tend to be semanticallyrelated
turn the lights off ➜ turn the lights on
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SPEECHERRORS
exchanges only seem to involve elements at thesame level of processing
sounds and words don’t exchange
sounds and morphemes don’t exchange
fill the bucket➜ bill the fucket
# fill the bucket ➜ buckill the fet
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SPEECHERRORS
exchanges only seem to involve elements at thesame level of processing
sound exchanges rarely (if ever) happen acrossdifferent word position
hit the ball➜ bit the hall
# hit the ball➜ hib the tall
phonemes in onsets exchange with other onsetphonemes, nuclei exchange with other nuclei,etc.
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How selfish are we as speakers?
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COMMONGROUND
Wardlow Lane &Ferreira (2008)
Q: Would speakersonly use modifierslike big or smallwhen listenercould see both abig and smallobject?
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COMMONGROUND
Wardlow Lane &
Ferreira (2008)some informationwas privileged
e.g. only speakercould see twohearts mentioned
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COMMONGROUND
Wardlow Lane &Ferreira (2008)
RESULTS: Even iflistener couldn’tsee one elementin the contrastset, speaker wasmore likely to usea modifier
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COMMONGROUND
Wardlow Lane &Ferreira (2008)
LOW SALIENCECONDITION:experiment pointsto the relevantobject to name
HIGH SALIENCE:reference tocontrasting item
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COMMONGROUND
Wardlow Lane &Ferreira (2008)
Speakers morelikely to usemodifyingdescriptions whenit’s highly salientto them, but notto listener
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COMMONGROUND
Speaker needs and sense of salience outweighdemands for communicative success
speakers were using terms such as “big heart”when listener only saw one heart
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EGOCENTRICLANGUAGE
At least in some circumstances, speakers ignoretheir listener(s) perspective
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LANGUAGE &
MIND
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In many western cultures, we talk of spatialrelations with words like “to the left of”, “to theright of”, etc.
frame of reference: speaker or listener biased
In other languages, spatial relations can be basedon absolute (i.e. unchanging) features
Object-centered coordinates: frame of referencebased on items’ “perspective”
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Bowerman, Levinson, and colleagues argue thatmany speakers not only don’t use relative framesof reference, they don’t think in terms of relativeframes of reference
Guguu Yimithirr
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g(Australia): onlyuse Absoluteframe ofreference
“There’s anant on your
south leg”
Tzeltal(Mexico):absolute frameof referencebased ongeographical
landmarks
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Halligan (2003): all individuals have anegocentric view of space
Alternative: individuals recruit different framesof reference and language capitalizes uponthese different available systems
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Experiment showed participant a path a man traveled on Table 1
Participant turned around and asked to show how the man traveledout of a maze
Again, Tzeltal overwhelmingly Absolute FoR
LANGUAGE &
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LANGUAGE &MIND
Answering how language influences cognitionturns out to be a very tricky question
Very difficult to separate culture & experiencefrom language