PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

Representing language

Some of the big questions

“the horse raced past the barn”

ProductionHow do we turn our thoughts into a spoken or written output?

Some of the big questions

Comprehension

“the horse raced past the barn”

How do we understand language that we hear/see?

Some of the big questions Comprehension Production Representation

How do we store linguistic information, how do we retrieve that information?

Lexicon

SemanticAnalysis

SyntacticAnalysis

WordRecognition

Letter/phonemeRecognition

FormulatorGrammatical EncodingPhonological Encoding

Articulator

Conceptualizer

Thought

Lexicon

SemanticAnalysis

SyntacticAnalysis

WordRecognition

Letter/phonemeRecognition

FormulatorGrammatical Encoding

Phonological Encoding

Articulator

Conceptualizer

Thought

The mental lexicon 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 the

meanings (and other properties) of words?

Lexical primitives Word primitives

Morpheme primitives

horse horses barn barns

horse -s barn

Lexical primitives Word primitives

Morpheme primitives Economical - fewer representations Slow retrieval - some assembly required

Decomposition during comprehension Composition during production

Need a lot of representations Fast retrieval

Lexical primitives Lexical Decision task

See a string of letters As fast as you can determine if it is a real

English word or not “yes” if it is “no” if it isn’t

Typically speed and accuracy are the dependent measures

table

vanue

daughter

tasp

cofef

hunter

Lexical primitives Lexical Decision task

table

vanue

daughter

tasp

cofef

hunter

Yes

No

Yes

No

No

Yes

Lexical primitives Lexical Decision task

daughter

hunter

Lexical primitives Lexical Decision task

daughter

hunter

Pseudo-suffixed

Multimorphemic

daught

hunt -er

-er

Takes longer

Lexical primitives May depend on other factors

What kind of morpheme Inflectional Derivational

Frequency of usage High frequency multimorphemic (in particular if derivational

morphology) may get represented as a single unit Compound words

Semantically opaque butterfly

Semantically transparent buttonhole

Lexical organization How are the lexical representations

organized? Alphabetically? Initial phoneme? Semantic categories? Grammatical class? Something more flexible, depending on your

needs?

Lexical organization Factors that affect organization

Phonology Frequency Imageability, concreteness, abstractness Grammatical class Semantics

Lexical organization Phonology

Words that sound alike may be stored “close together”

Tip of the tongue phenomenon (TOT)

Brown and McNeill (1966) More likely to approximate target words with

similar sounding words than similar meanings

What word means to formally renounce the throne?

abdicate

Lexical organization Frequency

Typically the more common a word, the faster (and more accurately) it is named and recognized

Typical interpretation: easier to retrieve (or activate)

However, Balota and Chumbley (1984) Frequency effects depend on task Lexcial decision - big effect Naming - small effect Category verifcation - no effect

A canary is a bird. T/F

Lexical organization Imageability, concreteness, abstractness

Umbrella

Lantern

Freedom

Apple

Knowledge

Evil

Try to imagine each word

Lexical organization Imageability, concreteness, abstractness

Umbrella

Lantern

Freedom

Apple

Knowledge

Evil

Try to imagine each word

How do you imagine these?

Lexical organization Imageability, concreteness, abstractness

Umbrella

Lantern

Freedom

Apple

Knowledge

Evil

More easily remembered

More easily accessed

Lexical organization Grammatical class

Grammatical class constraint on substitution errors

“she was my strongest propeller” (proponent)

“the nation’s dictator has been exposed” (deposed)

Word association tasks Associate is typically of same grammatical class

Lexical organization Grammatical class

Open class words Content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs)

Closed class words Function words (determiners, prepositions, …)

Lexical organization Semantics

Free associations Most associates are semantically related (rather than

phonologically for example) Semantic Priming task

tasp

nurse

doctor

fract

slithest

shoes

doctor

Lexical organization Semantic Priming task

nurse

shoes

Responded to fasterRelated

Unrelated

“Priming effect”

doctor

doctor

Lexical organization Semantics

Words that are related in meaning are linked together

Lexical networks (next lecture)

Lexical organization Another possibility is that there are multiple levels of

representation, with different organizations at each level

Sound based representations

Meaning based representations

Grammatical based representations