PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

Language Production:Introduction

Homework 3 (Due in 1 week) Try to be vigilant for four or five days in noting speech errors

made by yourself and others. Write each slip down (carry a small notebook and pencil with you). Then, when you have accumulated a reasonably size sample (aim for 20 to 30, but don't panic if you don't get that many), try to classify each slip in terms of

the unit(s) involved the type of error

Remember that each error may be interpreted in different ways. For some of them, see if you can come up with more than one possibility.

Discourse in memory Kintsch and colleagues (1990)

Jack scanned the newspaper.Jack looked through the newspaper.Jack looked through the movie ads.Jack looked over some editorials.

It was Friday night and Jack and Melissa were bored, so they decided to catch a movie. Jack scanned the newspaper. He saw that they could just make the nine o’clock showing of the hot new romantic comedy. Off they went.

Did this sentence occur in the paragraph?

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Delay

Trace strength

SituationalmodelTextbase

Surface form

Some of the big questions

“the horse raced past the barn”

Production forms half of language ability: Input to comprehension More difficult problem than comprehension?

Developmental lag Learning a second language

What we don’t do

Dr. C: How much money is there in my current account and in my deposit account?

<SILENCE>Dr. C: Hello?

<SILENCE>Computer: Colourless green ideas sleeeeeep furiously.Dr. C: How much money is there in my current account and in my deposit account?

<SILENCE>Computer: Your current a-ccount encompasses two hundred dollars. I cannot access how..<SILENCE>.. in your deposit account money much is there.

Undesirable features Meaningless and irrelevant content. Long silences, strange pausing. Infelicities of vocabulary and structure:

‘Your current account encompasses $200’ ‘I cannot access how in your deposit account money much is

there.’ Strange intonation and pronunciation:

‘Your current a-ccount’ ‘Sleeeeeep’

What we do do

Expressing non-ordered conceptual message via ordered array of sounds. Start with a message (idea) and partition it,

sequence it, and articulate it Speakers must produce utterances with:

Appropriate meaningful content, lexical items, syntax, & pronunciation, intonation, and phrasing.

And they must do this fluently, in real time.

Getting the form right

Hearers: Details of form can sometimes (often?) be ignored

(e.g. missing words, not paying attention).

Speakers: Have to get every aspect of the form right,

whether or not germane to message.

Getting the content wrong

Paradox: Adept at getting form right but content wrong:

Subject-verb agreement errors

The report about the fires are very long Less than 5% errors in experiment designed to elicit

them (Bock & Miller 1991).



Serious structural anomalies (unparseable)

I cannot access how in your deposit account money much is there.

0.5% utterances (Deese 1984).



Sound/word errors

Can you put the desk back on my book when you’ve finished with it?It’ll get fast a lot hotter if you put the burner on.

Garnham et al 1982: Sound errors 3.2/10,000 words Word errors 5.1/10,000 words

Methodologies Production is intrinsically more difficult

subject to study than language comprehension Not susceptible to experimental study?

Yes it is, but requires careful and clever methods

Historically: observational methods Recently: experimental methods

What’s the problem?

Comprehension: Can control input precisely Moving from language to conceptual representation

Production: How do we control input? Moving from (unobservable) conceptual representation to

language

BUT: end product is observable in production but not comprehension

Common Measures

What people say: Under which circumstances do they produce

particular words, utterances etc May be intended, or may be errors How frequently do they do this

Time course: How quickly do people produce language

Neurophysiological: How is language production represented in the

brain?

Naturally occurring speech

Fluent speech: Sentence types, verb forms, prosodic markers, etc

(Deese, 1984) Distribution of extraposed structures (Arnold, Wasow,

Losongco & Ginstrom, 2000) Distribution of thuh vs thee (Clark & Fox-Tree, 1997)

Distribution of reduced phonological forms (Bard et al., 2001)

Methodologies: Observational

Naturally occurring speech

Disfluent speech: Scope of utterance planning (Ford & Holmes, 1978;

Beattie, 1983) Error detection and correction (Levelt, 1983)


Naturally occurring speech errors

"The law I sign today directs new funds and new focus to the task of collecting vital intelligence on terrorist threats and on weapons of mass production.” George W. Bush

"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again." George W. Bush

"For seven and a half years I've worked alongside President Reagan.We've had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We've had some sex ... uh...setbacks.” George Bush Sr.


Experimental approaches Not prey to same problems as observational

studies: Reduces observer bias Isolates phenomenon of interest Increases potential for systematic observation

Different problems! How to control input and output? Input: ecological validity problem (‘controlling thoughts’) Output: controlling responses:

Response specification - artificiality ‘Exuberant responding’ – loss of data

Picture naming & descriptionName these pictures

“swan”

Picture naming & description

“swing”

Name these pictures

Picture naming & descriptionDescribe the action in this picture

“The girl is throwing a ball to the boy”

“The girl is throwing the boy a ball”

Picture-word interference task

Name the picture (While ignoring the word)

tiger

Neurophysiological Measures Recent technological developments allow

research on neurophysiological aspects of production. ERPs, fMRI, PET, Which areas of the brain are involved? What is the time course of processing? Are different areas/processes/timecourses

associated with different aspects of production?

The case of Speech Errors

What errors tell us about correct speech: Observational and experimental approaches

Recommended reading: Um… Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What they Mean, by Michael Erard (2007)

Speech Errors -”Spoonerisms”

Reverend Dr. William Archibald Spooner, 1844-1930. Lecturer, tutor, and dean at Oxford university famous for speech

errors Some famous examples:

Nosey little cook

..we’ll have the hags flung out

FOR ... Battle ships and cruisers

FOR ... customary to kiss the bride

FOR ... Cosy little nook

Cattle ships and bruisers

FOR ... ..we’ll have the flags hung out

kisstomary to cuss the bride.

you’ve tasted two worms” FOR ... .. you’ve wasted two terms

Shift: one segment disappears from its appropriate location and appears somewhere else. The thing that shifts moves from one element to another of the same type

Speech errors

..in case she decide FOR ...in case she decidesto hits it. to hit it

Speech errors

Exchange: in effect double shifts, since 2 linguistic units change places

You have hissed all my mystery lectures FOR .. You have missed all my history lectures

your model renosed. FOR ..your nose remodelled.

Anticipation: in anticipation of a forthcoming segment, we replace an earlier segment with the later segment

Speech errors

It's a meal mystery FOR .. It's a real mystery

..bake my bike. FOR .. take my bike.

give the goy FOR .. give the boy

Speech errors

Perseverance: an earlier segment replaces a later one (while also being articulated in its correct location)

..he pulled a pantrum. FOR ..he pulled a tantrum.

I didn’t explain it clarefully enough

Speech errors

Addition: something is added to the target utterance

FOR I didn’t explain it carefully enough.

Blends: occur when more than one word is being considered, and the two blend into a single item

Speech errors

didn’t bother me FOR didn’t bother mein the sleast. in the least/slightest.

Deletion: something is omitted

Speech errors

..mutter intelligibly. FOR ..mutter unintelligibly.

Substitutions (malapropisms): when one segment is replaced by an intruder, but this differs from the other types of errors since the intruder may not occur at all in the intended sentence

Speech errors

“Jack” is the president FOR “Jack” is the subject of the sentence. of the sentence.

I’m stuttering FOR I’m studying psycholinguistics. psycholinguistics.

Look for regularities in the patterns of errors

Speech error regularities What can we learn from speech errors?

From this we can infer that– Speech is planned in advance. – Accommodation to the phonological environment takes place

(plural pronounced /z/ instead of /s/).– Order of processing is

– Selection of morpheme error application of phonological rule


If we look at the shift error

“a maniac for weekends.” FOR “a weekend for maniacs.”

Stress exchange:

What can we learn from speech errors?

Speech error regularities

econ 'om ists FOR e ’con omists

From this we can infer that– Stress may be independent and may simply move

from one syllable to another (unlikely explanation).– The exchange may be the result of competing plans

resulting in a blend of

e ’con omists and econ 'omics.

Is this a double substitution (/b/ for /p/ and /t/ for /d/)?– /p/ and /t/ are vocieless plosives and /b/ and /d/ voiced

plosives– Better analysed as a shift of the phonetic feature voicing.



From this we can infer that Indicates that phonetic features are psychologically

real - phonetic features must be units in speech production.

“bat a tog” FOR “pat a dog”

Consonant-vowel rule: consonants never exchange for vowels or vice versa

Suggests that vowels and consonants are separate units in the planning of the phonological form of an utterance.

Errors produce legal non-words. Suggests that we use phonological rules in production.

Lexical bias effect: spontaneous (and experimentally induced) speech errors are more likely to result in real words than non-words.

Grammaticality effect: elaborate here



That speech is planned in advance - anticipation and exchange errors indicate speaker has a representation of more than one word.

Substitutions indicate that the lexicon is organised phonologically and semantically. Substitutions appear to occur after syntactic organisation as substitutions are always from the same grammatical class (noun for noun, verb for verb etc.).

External influences - situation and personality also influence speech production.


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PSY 369: Psycholinguistics