What is psycholinguistics? Study of

acquisition, storage, production and comprehension of language;

the psychological processes that enable us to produce and comprehend language.

How it happens: a very simplistic model

Some amazing things we can do • Segmentation: breaking down the speech into “units”: speech stream has no discrete boundaries to indicate where one word ends and the other begins • Variation of input: we understand people with different

accents, different speech rates, in noisy environments

• Lexical Access o Vocabulary 50,000-100,000 words. o We access 2-4 per second with incredible accuracy

(error rate 2/1000 words). o We recognize words before the actual articulation has

ended People correctly produce words they hear 250-275 ms after the onset of the word (shadowing) Less 50-75 ms for response execution So 200 ms to identify a word =>Before acoustic offset of word!

• Sentence processing

o Incomplete sentences aren’t a problem for us. o We resolve ambiguity with great precision and ease o We understand sentences so quickly that we can complete

other people’s sentences

Psycholinguistic questions: The underlying psychological processes What people actually say The psychological reality of linguistic theories

Psycholinguistic methods: Experimental work Hypothesis testing Introspection isn’t enough…

Lexical access Speech errors: what can we learn when the system ‘breaks down’

Freudian slips: "faulty performance (Fehleistung)," from pseudo-Greek scientism parapraxis Sigmund Freud: slips betray suppressed inner thoughts

Psychopathology of everyday life: • The President of the Austrian Parliament said "I take notice that a full

quorum of members is present and herewith declare the sitting closed!" • The hotel boy who, knocking at the bishop's door, nervously replied to the

question "Who is it?" "The Lord, my boy!" • A member of the British House of Commons referred to another as the

honourable member for "Central Hell," instead of "Hull." • A professor says, "In the case of the female genital, in spite of the tempting

... I mean, the attempted ..... " • When a lady, appearing to compliment another, says "I am sure you must

have thrown this delightful hat together" instead of "sewn it together", no scientific theories in the world can prevent us from seeing in her slip the thought that the hat is an amateur production. Or when a lady who is well known for her determined character says: "My husband asked his doctor what sort of diet ought to be provided for him. But the doctor said he needed no special diet, he could eat and drink whatever I choose", the slip appears clearly as the unmistakable expression of a consistent scheme.

Note: the pilgrim's use of archaic verb forms is entirely bogus! /-st/ in didst = archaic 2nd person singular past (need 3rd person singular past) goeth is archaically inflected for 3rd person singular present (need bare stem)

where did X go?

Different units of linguistic analysis: phrase, word, morpheme, syllable, phoneme, phonological feature Types of errors: exchange, substitution, shift, anticipation, perseveration Evidence that those units are psychologically real: Gary Dell: I wanted to read the letter to my grandmother

phrase (exchange): "I wanted to read my grandmother to the letter."

word (substitution): "I wanted to read the envelope to my grandmother."

inflectional morpheme (shift): "I want to readed the letter to my grandmother."

stem morpheme (exchange): "I readed to want the letter to my grandmother."

syllable onset (anticipation): "I wanted to read the gretter to my grandmother."

phonological feature (anticipation or perseveration): "I wanted to read the letter to my brandmother."

A speaker is under time pressure, typically choosing about three words per second

out of a vocabulary of 40,000 or more, while at the same time producing perhaps five syllables

and a dozen phonemes per second, using more than 100 finely-coordinated muscles,

none of which has a maximum gestural repetition rate of more than about three cycles per second.

Word choices are being made, and sentences constructed,

at the same time that earlier parts of the same phrase are being spoken.

Mrs. Malaprop: a character Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play "The Rivals" (1775): • She's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile

(alligator) • Comparisons are odorous (odious) • ...you will promise to forget this fellow -- to illiterate him, I say,

quite from your memory" (obliterate or perhaps eradicate) • He is the very pineapple of politeness (pinnacle). Yogi Berra: • I just want to thank everyone who made this day necessary"

(possible) • Even Napoleon had his Watergate (Waterloo).

Reverend William A. Spooner, Dean and Warden of New College, Oxford, during Victoria's reign: exchange error = spoonerism: • Work is the curse of the drinking classes. • ...noble tons of soil... (noble sons of toil) • You have tasted the whole worm. (wasted the whole term) • I have in my bosom a half-warmed fish. (half-formed wish) • ...queer old dean... (dear old queen, referring to Queen Victoria). • Kinquering kongs their tikles tate (title of a hymn, “Conquering

kings their titles take”)

Distribution of errors in a corpus of exchanges:

Syntactic category rule: The target & the substituting word are almost always of the same syntactic category. Nouns replace nouns, verbs replace verbs, etc. Non-contextual word substitution: Usually semantically and pragmatically similar: U.S. President Gerald Ford once toasted Egyptian President Anwar Sadat "and the great people of Israel -- Egypt, excuse me," But not always: "Lizst's second Hungarian restaurant" for "rhapsody." (phonological similarities)

Freud’s examples are unusual:

1.The shirts fall off his buttons (buttons fall off his shirts) 2.The ricious vat (vicious rat) 3.A curl galled her up (girl called) 4....sissle theeds... (thistle seeds) 5.My jears are gammed (gears are jammed) 6....by the sery vame... (very same) 7.This is the most lescent risting (recent listing) 8.Did the grass clack? (glass crack) 9.I have a stick neff (stiff neck) 10. is noth wort knowing (not worth)

Some slips can be “Freudian” = = primed by unexpressed wishes or fears Motley (1980): • phonemic priming: 10-15% spoonerisms on the target items

dart board (bias pair) dust bin (bias pair) duck bill (bias pair) barn door (target pair: -> darn bore)

Errors more likely when the results are real words (barn door -> darn bore) than when the results are not (born dancer -> dorn bancer),

Errors more likely when the rest of the target words are phonologically similar more with same vowel (left hemisphere->heft lemisphere) than with different vowel (right hemisphere->hight remisphere)

• contextual priming on top of phonemic: subjects male college undergraduates

"electrical" context: the subjects were attached to (fake) electrodes & told that mild shocks would be administered if they performed badly. "sexual" context: the test was administered by a provocatively-dressed and conventionally attractive female experimenter (it's not clear if subjects' sexual preference was controlled for).

“Electrical” errors (e.g. shad bock) more frequent in electrical context “Sexual” errors (e.g. tool kits). More frequent in sexual context Effect by far not as strong as that of phonemic priming.

Other interesting error phenomena Tip of the Tongue: you know the word but you just can’t remember it What do you know about its phonology? Its grammatical gender? Aphasia: language breakdown can tell us a lot about how language normally works Shallow processing: we don’t always get the real meaning of sentences

How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark? If you don’t print that I’ll sue you