Transcript PSY 369: Psycholinguistics - the Department of Psychology at

PSY 369: Psycholinguistics
Representing language
Some of the big questions
Production
How do we turn our
thoughts into a spoken or
written output?
“the horse raced past the barn”
Some of the big questions
How do we
understand language
that we hear/see?
“the horse raced past the barn”
Comprehension
Some of the big questions
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Comprehension
Production
Representation
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How do we store linguistic information, how
do we retrieve that information?
Conceptualizer
Thought
Formulator
Grammatical
Encoding
Phonological
Encoding
Articulator
Semantic
Analysis
Lexicon
Syntactic
Analysis
Word
Recognition
Letter/phoneme
Recognition
Conceptualizer
Thought
Semantic
Analysis
Formulator
Grammatical
Encoding
Phonological
Encoding
Articulator
Lexicon
Syntactic
Analysis
Word
Recognition
Letter/phoneme
Recognition
The mental lexicon
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How are words stored? What are they made
up of? How are word related to each other?
How do we use them?
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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
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Word primitives
horse
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horses
barn
barns
Morpheme primitives
horse
-s
barn
Lexical primitives
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Word primitives
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Need a lot of representations
Fast retrieval
Morpheme primitives
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Economical - fewer representations
Slow retrieval - some assembly required
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Decomposition during comprehension
Composition during production
Lexical primitives
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Lexical Decision task
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See a string of letters
As fast as you can determine if it is a real
English word or not
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“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
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Lexical Decision task
table
vanue
daughter
tasp
cofef
hunter
Yes
No
Yes
No
No
Yes
Lexical primitives
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Lexical Decision task
daughter
hunter
Lexical primitives
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Lexical Decision task
daughter Pseudo-suffixed
daught -er
Takes longer
hunter
Multimorphemic
hunt -er
Lexical primitives
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May depend on other factors
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What kind of morpheme
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Frequency of usage
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Inflectional
Derivational
High frequency multimorphemic (in particular if derivational
morphology) may get represented as a single unit
Compound words
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Semantically opaque
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butterfly
Semantically transparent
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buttonhole
Lexical organization
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How are the lexical representations
organized?
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Alphabetically?
Initial phoneme?
Semantic categories?
Grammatical class?
Something more flexible, depending on your
needs?
Lexical organization
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Factors that affect organization
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Phonology
Frequency
Imageability, concreteness, abstractness
Grammatical class
Semantics
Lexical organization
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Phonology
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Words that sound alike may be stored “close
together”
Tip of the tongue phenomenon (TOT)
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What word means to formally renounce
the throne?
abdicate
Brown and McNeill (1966)
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More likely to approximate target words with similar
sounding words than similar meanings
Lexical organization
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Frequency
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Typically the more common a word, the faster
(and more accurately) it is named and recognized
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Typical interpretation: easier to retrieve (or activate)
However, Balota and Chumbley (1984)
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Frequency effects depend on task
Lexcial decision - big effect
Naming - small effect
Category verifcation - no effect
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A canary is a bird.
T/F
Lexical organization
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Imageability, concreteness, abstractness
Try to imagine each word
Umbrella
Lantern
Freedom
Apple
Knowledge
Evil
Lexical organization
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Imageability, concreteness, abstractness
Try to imagine each word
How do you
imagine
these?
Umbrella
Lantern
Freedom
Apple
Knowledge
Evil
Lexical organization
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Imageability, concreteness, abstractness
Umbrella
Lantern
Freedom
Apple
Knowledge
Evil
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More easily
remembered
More easily
accessed
Lexical organization
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Grammatical class
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Grammatical class constraint on substitution
errors
“she was my strongest propeller” (proponent)
“the nation’s dictator has been exposed” (deposed)
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Word association tasks
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Associate is typically of same grammatical class
Lexical organization
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Grammatical class
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Open class words
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Content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs)
Closed class words
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Function words (determiners, prepositions, …)
Lexical organization
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Semantics
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Free associations
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Most associates are semantically related (rather than
phonologically for example)
Semantic Priming task
tasp
nurse
doctor
fract
slithest
shoes
doctor
Lexical organization
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Related
Semantic Priming task
nurse
doctor
Unrelated shoes
doctor
Responded to faster
“Priming effect”
Lexical organization
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Semantics
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Words that are related in meaning are linked
together
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Lexical networks (next lecture)
Lexical organization
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Another possibility is that there are multiple levels of
representation, with different organizations at each level
Meaning based representations
Grammatical based representations
Sound based representations