Comprehension

1. Comprehension Language and Psychology

2. Overview • The comprehension of sounds • The comprehension of words • The comprehension of sentences

3. The nature of comprehension

4. The phoneme restoration effect • It was found that the _eel was on the axle. • It was found that the _eel was on the shoe. • It was found that the _eel was on the orange. • It was found that the _eel was on the table.

5. The phoneme restoration effect • It was found that the wheel was on the axle. • It was found that the heel was on the shoe. • It was found that the peel was on the orange. • It was found that the meel was on the table.

6. The phoneme restoration effect • Listeners do not accurately record what they hear. • They report what they expected to hear from the context.

7. What is comprehension? • Comprehension is not the passive recording of what is heard or seen. We do not necessarily hear all words spoken to us. • Comprehension is strongly susceptible to the slightest of change in discourse which the listener is attending to. • Comprehension is not processed in a linear sequence. We process chunks of information, not individual words and not meaning in isolation.

8. The comprehension of sounds

9. Who are you referring to? Benny Penny

10. What phonemic information is used to distinguish Penny from Benny? • Voice onset timing (VOT) • The brief burst of air which precedes the articulation of all stop consonants. • Provides phonetic information listeners use to distinguish between sounds like [p] and [b] • [p] is 50 millisecond (1/20 second) later than [b].

11. [g] vs. [k] http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1999-05027-010

12. Q1: How do we perceive the subtle difference so rapidly and so accurately? • We are born with the ability to perceive subtle phonetic differences. • Categorical perception • We perceive the phonetic differences in binary either-or fashion.

13. Categorical perception

14. Q2: Is the ability to categorically perceive phonetic differences influenced by the linguistic environment?

15. THE COMPREHENSION OF WORDS

16. The psychological mechanisms that affect lexical processing: Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) • the representation of information is distributed (not local) • memory and knowledge are stored in the connections between units. • learning can occur with gradual changes in connection strength by experience. http://web.lemoyne.edu/~hevern/psy101_11F/psy101lectures/12memory2_outline.html

17. How to access words in the mental lexicon: The logogen model

18. The logogen model (Morton, 1969, 1970) http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Lexical_Access

19. The frequency effect • The high frequency words have low threshold of activation. • The low frequency words have high threshold of activation. http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Lexical_Access

20. What can the PDP model account for? • The Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon • The bathtub effect • Spreading activation network

21. Tip-of-the-Tongue (TOT) phenomenon • We try to retrieve a word we think we know, but we just cannot recall the word at that moment. http://www.reference.com/browse/tip_of_the_tongue

22. the bathtub effect • We tend to remember the beginning and the end of a word better than the middle part.

23. Spreading activation networks • concepts are connected via nodes and the strength of the connection is represented by the distance between the nodes http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Semantics_in_the_Brain

24. The process of spreading activation • Activation begins at a single node and then spread in parallel form throughout the network. • The force of activation is reduced over distance, thus ensuring that closely related concepts are more likely to be activated than distant concept.

25. THE COMPREHENSION OF SENTENCES

26. Comprehension Difficulties • Transformational complexity • Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC) • Ambiguity

27. Transformational/Generative Grammar

28. Derivational Theory of Complexity Difficulty in comprehension was derived from the number of transformations that were added on to the original phrase structure of the sentence.

29. Problems • Unexplainable exceptions • Passive sentence takes less time to recall than negative sentences. • John was hit > Tom did not hit John.

30. The semantic factor • It takes less time for semantically plausible sentences. • The struggling swimmer was rescued by the lifeguard. • The struggling swimmer rescued the lifeguard.

31. The semantic factor • Negation is grammatically simple, but semantically difficult to comprehend. • The struggling swimmer was rescued by the lifeguard. • The struggling swimmer was not rescued by the lifeguard.

32. Ambiguity • The phoneme monitoring task • Subjects listen to paired sentences and are asked to react as soon as they hear a target phoneme. • Sentences containing more complex information in the clause before the target phoneme will create a greater lag in reaction time.

33. Sentences containing more complex information in the clause before the target phoneme will create a greater lag in reaction time. Semantic Ambiguity • The men started to drill before they were ordered to do so. • The men stared to march before they were ordered to do so.

34. Garden-pathing • The linear left-to-right unfolding of sentence structure helps the listener/reader anticipate the next word or words which will follow. • Without her contributions failed to appear. • Since she always jogs a mile seems a short distance.

35. Failure syntactic parsing principles Without her contributions failed to appear http://www.ling.sinica.edu.tw/eip/FILES/journal/2007.6.21.11349123.6028631.pdf

36. Lexical ambiguity: Locative particle vs. verb of main clause 我們在別墅下面向海洋

37. Questions?