Psycholinguistics

Speech comprehension

Speech production

Language acquisition

(developmental psycholinguistics)

Language impairment

(e.g., aphasia)

Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman & Nina Hyams. 2003. An Introduction to Language, 7th ed. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, p. 397.

Comprehension Levels and Units

Level Units 

Phonological sounds 

Lexical words

Syntactic sentences

Discourse discourse

Carroll, David W. 1999. Psychology of Language, third edition. Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, Chapter 4.

Sentence Comprehension Model

1. Segment the speech stream

2. Parse the sentence

3. Look words up in mental lexicon as they are presented

4. Access meaning and grammatical

categories

5. Construct a syntactic representation [we use trees when we diagram them]

(Sentence meaning is built up from the meaning of the component words and sentence structure)

Left to Right Parsing

The old yellow ship can float .

Art N N N N N

Adj Adj V V V

V Mod

Psycholinguistic Experimental Tasks

Lexical Decision

Priming

Naming  

OTHERS NOT MENTIONED:

Phoneme Monitoring

Semantic Verification

Word Association

Psycholinguistic Experiments What do we measure?

Response Time (RT)

 

Accuracy (or Error Rate)

Ambiguous Headlines

British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands 

Enraged Cow Injures Farmer with Ax

Killer Sentenced to Die for Second Time in 10 Years 

Stolen Painting Found by Tree

Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman & Nina Hyams. 2003. An Introduction to Language, 7th ed. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, p. 406.

Garden Path Sentences 1

1. The horse raced past the barn fell.

2. When Fred eats food gets thrown.

3. Mary gave the child the dog bit a bandaid.

4. I convinced her children are noisy.

5. Helen is expecting tomorrow to be a bad day.

Source: http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~kbarker/garden-path.html (last update December 06, 1999) Send any additions or suggestions to: kbarker@site.uottawa.ca  

Garden Path Sentences 2

6. I know the words to that song don't rhyme.

7. She told me a little white lie will come back to haunt me.

8. Until the police arrest the drug dealers control the street.

9. The dog that I had really loved bones.

Source: http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~kbarker/garden-path.html (last update December 06, 1999) Send any additions or suggestions to: kbarker@site.uottawa.ca  

Garden Path Sentences 3

10. That Jill is never here hurts.

11. The man who whistles tunes pianos.

12. The old man the boat.

13. The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.

14. Have the students who failed the exam take the supplementary.

Source: http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~kbarker/garden-path.html (last update December 06, 1999) Send any additions or suggestions to: kbarker@site.uottawa.ca  

Garden Path Sentences 4

15. Every woman that admires a man that paints likes Monet.

16. The raft floated down the river sank.

17. We painted the wall with cracks.

Source: http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~kbarker/garden-path.html (last update December 06, 1999) Send any additions or suggestions to: kbarker@site.uottawa.ca  

Late Closure

Ashcraft, Mark H. 1994. Human Memory and Cognition, second edition. New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, p. 432.

Stages of Production(Levelt, 1989)

1. Conceptualizing 2. Formulating 3. Articulating  4. Self-Monitoring

Carroll, David W. 1994. Psychology of Language, second edition. Pacific Grove, California: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, p. 192.

Incremental ProcessingA Rough Schematic

PLANNING vvv www xxxx yyy zzzz

 

SPEAKING vvv www xxxx yyy zzzz  

 

(Spaces represent pauses)

Based in part on the discussion in Carroll, David W. 1994. Psychology of Language, second edition. Pacific Grove, California: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, p. 208.

Variables that Influence Lexical Access

(These must be accounted for)

1. Word frequency 2. Phonological Variables 3. Syntactic Category 4. Morphological Complexity 5. Semantic Priming 6. Lexical Ambiguity

Carroll, David W. 1999. Psychology of Language, third edition. Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, pp. 119-126

Lexical Decision and Word Frequency(Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1993)

List 1 List 2

gambastya mulvow

revery governor

voitle bless

chard tuglety

wefe gare

cratily relief

decoy ruftily

puldow history

raflot pindle

oriole develop

voluble gardot

boovle norve

chalt busy

awry effort

signet garvola

trave match

crock sard

cryptic pleasant

ewe coin

himpola maisle

Carroll, David W. 1999. Psychology of Language, third edition. Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, p. 120.

Consonant-Vowel Spectrograms

Ashcraft, Mark H. 1994. Human Memory and Cognition, second edition. New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, p. 385.

Word-Superiority EffectStimuli: words, non-words, letters

 

Procedure: Show subjects one of these using tachistoscope briefly:

word (a word)

owrd (a non-word)

d or k (a letter) 

Task: Reply to "Did you see a given letter (e.g., "d") in final position?"

 

Results: More accurate if the letter appeared in a word.

 

Conclusion: The word has an effect on letter recognition. There must be some

top-down processing—though bottom-up processing can occur

Reicher, G. M. 1969. Perceptual recognition as a function of meaningfulness of stimulus material. Journal of Experimental Psychology 81: 275-280. Cited (p. 93) in Carroll, David W. 1999. Psychology of Language, third edition. Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.