Cognitive Processes PSY 334

1. Cognitive ProcessesPSY 334 Chapter 11 – Language Structure June 2, 2003

2. Judgments of Probability • Subjects match the Bayesian objective probabilities when making choices with feedback: • Gluck & Bower diagnoses match predictions • Subjects overestimate when asked to explicitly estimate frequencies of symptoms. • Behavior but not conscious judgment corresponds to Bayes theorem.

3. Subjective Utility • Subject choices are not well predicted by utility theory. • The value placed on money does not correspond to its face value • $8 is worth 2 times as much as $3, not 2.67 times as much • Utility curve is steeper in the loss function than in the gain • Loss of $10 weighted more strongly than gain of $10

4. Chance, Luck & Superstition • We tend to see more structure than may exist: • Avoidance of chance as an explanation • Conspiracy theories • Illusory correlation – distinctive pairings are more accessible to memory. • Results of studies are expressed as probabilities. • The “person who” is frequently more convincing than a statistical result.

5. Linguistics • Linguistics – studies the structure of natural language. • Psycholinguistics – studies the way people process natural language. • Linguistics focuses on: • Productivity – an infinite number of utterances are possible in any language. • Regularity – utterances are systematic in many ways.

6. Grammar • Words can be combined into trillions of novel sentences, but not randomly. • From runners physicians prescribing a states joy rests what thought most. • Grammar is a set of rules that generates acceptable sentences and rejects unacceptable ones.

7. Three Kinds of Grammar • Syntax – word order and inflection (where emphasis is placed). • Did hit the girl the boys? • Semantics – meaning of sentences. • Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. • Sincerity frightened the cat. • Phonology – sound structure of sentences (pronunciation).

8. Prescriptive vs Descriptive • Linguistic intuition – speakers can make judgments about utterances without knowing the explicit rules. • Ambiguities: • They are cooking apples – structural. • I am going to the bank – lexical. • Everyday speech (performance) does not conform to linguistic theory (competence).

9. Phrase Structure • Important to both linguistics and psychology of language processing. • Phrase structure – the hierarchical division of the sentence into phrases. • Verb phrase • Noun phrase • Rewrite rules – rules for generating sentences out of the parts.

10. Pauses • When people produce sentences, they generate a phrase at a time. • Pauses occur at the boundaries of phrases. • Pauses are longer at boundaries of major phrases compared to minor ones. • Pauses occur at the smallest level above the word that bundles coherent semantic information (meaning).

11. Speech Errors • Errors show the reality of phrase structure. • When people repeat themselves they tend to repeat or correct a whole phrase. • Anticipation – an early phoneme is changed to a later phoneme (toin coss) • Occurs within a phrase – 13% across phrases • Word errors can occur across phrases – 83%

12. Transformations • Some constructions seem to violate phrase hierarchy: • Whom is the dog chasing down the street? • The dog is chasing whom down the street? • A transformational grammar has been proposed which hypothesizes a deep structure that guides such violations. • This idea about grammar is controversial.