Introduction to Psycholinguistics

Y.D. Stephen Lai, Ph.D 2011/02

What is psycholinguistics?

Language activities take place every day & everywhere

with great ease in a completely subconscious manner We understand sentence even though speech streams include no discrete boundaries to indicate where one word ends and another begins; We understand speech even faster than we can produce it, and we are so fast that we can even nish each others sentences; Incomplete sentences are no problem for us; We understand stammering non-uent politicians and non-native speakers; We deal with ambiguity all the time without breaking down (computer parsers often maintain thousands of possible interpretations); We have a vocabulary of about 60,000 words. We access somewhere between 2-4 words/second with low error rates, 2/1000 words (though you may sometimes find it difficult to search a word, i.e., tip of the tongue).

Because

What is psycholinguistics?

Can you describe the process underlying linguistic communication (speaking and comprehending)?

What is psycholinguistics?

Language is complex & dynamic

multiple levels of representation & knowledge each level has rich internal structure, unique constraints & representations processing unfolds over time:

both across levels, and in response to signal levels interact dynamically in complex ways

What is psycholinguistics?

Processing: from sound to meaning

What is psycholinguistics?

The process of linguistic communication involves the resolution of uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible signals and meanings.
Ambiguity at the word-level: e.g., l-i- [quor] li-quid, li-quor, li-nen, li-sten, li-st, li-ck, li-mb, li-nk Ambiguity at the phrase-level: e.g., red bug eater [red bug] eater vs. red [bug eater] Ambiguity at the sentence-level: e.g., John knows Mary since he was a child vs. likes cheese

What is psycholinguistics?

Issues of importance:

How can a xed set of knowledge and resources be deployed to manage this uncertainty? And how are the information represented in mind? This is the study of language processing

Language processing: a study of how humans comprehend and produce language (sentences, words within sentences, and sequences of sentences, etc.) in real time. We can divide this into language comprehension (understanding what is spoken and what is written) and language production (choosing what to say or write based on what you want to mean)

How can such knowledge and resources be learned from nite input? This is the study of language acquisition.

Language acquisition: a study of how humans acquire knowledge of their native language (as infants and as children)

Dimensions of Psycholinguistics
Development of processing

Level of Processing Direction of Processing

Depth of Processing

Dimensions of Psycholinguistics

What is psycholinguistics?

In sum, psycholinguistics can be defined as a study that explores

Language processing mechanisms and operations Or The relation between current theories of language and human linguistic performance

through observational studies, experiments, and computational modeling.

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Field technique (observation)

Spoonerisms= slips of the tongue

e.g., Feature switching
Intended to be said Big and fat Is Pat a girl? Cedars of Lebanon

Actually said Pig and vat Is bat a curl? Cedars of Lemmanon

Segment switching
Intended to be said The dear old queen Noble sons of toil You have wasted the whole term. Actually said The queer old dean Noble tons of soil You have tasted the whole worm.

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Field technique (naturally occurring)

More examples: Word switching & morpheme switching

Intended to be said Rules of word formation Id forgotten about that. Easily enough Actually said Words of rule formation Id forgot aboutten that. Easy enoughly

What it shows:
The entire phrase must be planned in advance, or else we couldnt switch segments, morphemes, and words like this. This reveals something about the manner in which sentence (and phrase) production is planned in the mind. Morpheme is the fundamental building component during sentence production.

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Field technique (naturally occurring)

Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: trying to access a word based on meaning, spelling, initial letter, rhyme, etc. e.g., Oh, its that color thats really bright green.and its also a really strong liquorbut it sounds a bit like loose.it starts with a sh sounds.chartreuse! Thats it! What it shows:

How words are organized in the mind = mental lexicon. Access of the mental lexicon must be very quick, since word recognition takes just 1/3 of a second

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research:

By the way, here are the related questions regarding the mental lexicon:

How are entries in the mental lexicon linked to each other? How are entries in the mental lexicon accessed? What information is actually contained in an entry?

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Experimental Techniques Lexical Access

Identification task: A word flashes on a computer screen, and the subject identify what a specified letter/word/color is.

Dependent variable (things which are measured):

Response accuracy = whether the subject is correct or not.

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Experimental Techniques Lexical Access

Word-superiority effect (Cattell, 1886; Reicher, 1969):

People are more accurate in recognizing a letter in the context of a word than they are when a letter is presented in isolation, or when a letter is presented within a nonword. e.g., FONHGTAEW vs. FOG HAT NEW e.g., WXRK vs. WORK Task: identify whether the last letter is K or H What it shows: As our reading experience is accumulated, it is WORD rather than letter string that is viewed as a basic unit during reading process.

Automatic Subconscious (also see Stroop effect: http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/ready.html)

Do you have any explanation?

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Experimental Techniques Lexical Access

Rumelhart and McClelland's interactive-activation model of word recognition

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Experimental Techniques Lexical Access

Lexical decision task (LDT): A word flashes on a computer screen, and the subject indicates whether the word is a real word or a nonsense word by pressing a button labeled YES or a button labeled NO.

Dependent variables (things which are measured):

Response latency = how long it takes the subject to decide if the word is a real word (e.g., glove) or a nonsense word (e.g., blove) Response accuracy = whether the subject is correct or not.

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Experimental Techniques Lexical Access

How this relates to the mental lexicon: in order to decide if a word is a real word or a nonsense word, the mental lexicon must be accessed.

Real word: find the mental entry Nonsense word: realize that there is no mental entry

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Experimental Techniques Lexical Access

Frequency effect
e.g., Chinese (Ahrens, 1998): Higher frequency words (mixed with fake words): Lower frequency words (mixed with fake words): What it shows: more frequent words take less time (e.g., or free in English) to access than less frequent words (e.g., or fret in English). This tells us that some part of the lexicon is organized by individual frequency of the word. What about crane vs. cliff? (both share similar familiarity, but one is polysemous)

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Experimental Techniques Lexical Access

Priming task The presentation of one stimulus (PRIME) affects the speed (usually speeding up) of the response to another stimulus (TARGET) "X primes Y" means "X is a prime for Y" or "the presentation of X speeds up (or slows down) the response to Y relative to a control Dependent variable: if the prime affects the response latency or not.

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Experimental Techniques Lexical Access

Priming effect
e.g., Words prime themselves (prime) book ------ (target) book e.g., Words are primed by morphologically related words (prime) books ------ (target) book; (prime) management ------ (target) manage ? (prime) cancel ------ (target) can e.g., Orthographically related: dock primes for doctor (prime) dock ------ (target) doctor e.g., Phonologically related: (prime) worse ------ (target) nurse e.g., Words are primed by semantically related words: (prime) bread ------ (target) butter

What does these show?

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Experimental Techniques Lexical Access

What it shows: These all show us ways in which the mental lexicon is organized by spelling similarity, by phonological similarity, and by constituent morphemes. Thus, there are many different ways to prime for a single entry in the lexicon suggesting that the entries are linked to each other in several different ways

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Experimental Techniques Lexical Access

Other applications:
e.g., Frequency effect again with semantically ambiguous words! Hogaboam and Perfetti (1975): Preceding context (PRIME): (1) The jealous husband read the letter. (2) The antique typewriter was missing a letter.

Task: Is the last word (of a TARGET sentence) ambiguous? Result: Subjects are faster with (2)

What it shows: common (primary) meanings are more rapidly accessed than uncommon (secondary) meanings. In (1), context just reinforces primary meaning; accessing secondary meaning takes longer. In (2), context reminds subjects of the secondary meaning; primary meaning is accessed quickly.

Methods of Psycholinguistic Research: Experimental Techniques Sentence Processing

Sentence processing: analysis of the meanings of words and analysis of its syntactic structure, an unconscious automatic analysis called as PARSING. Two commonly adopted methods:

Time-reading experiments Eye-movement experiments

Timed-reading Experiment (Self-paced)

Assumption: a difficult sentence takes longer to parse. Therefore, timing how long it takes to process the sentence allows us to rank how difficult different sentences are to process. Bar-pressing paradigm (self-paced reading): The subject reads a sentence one word at a time, and presses the space bar to indicate they have processed that word. One word appears on the screen at a time. ` http://fordyce.inf.ed.ac.uk/users/marai/index-reading.html The pattern of how long it takes to process a word reflects the semantic and syntactic structure of the sentence.

Content words take longer to process than function words.(semantic) Subjects pause at the end of clause boundaries. (syntactic)

Bolands (1997)

e.g., Boland (1997): examination of influence of discourse context and probabilistic factors in the initial assignment of syntactic category
Unambiguous possessive pronoun, noun She saw his duck and chickens near the barn. Unambiguous accusative pronoun, verb She saw him duck and stumble near the barn.

Bolands (1997)

Context (you can imagine it as a PRIME):

Context bias toward possessive pronoun, noun As they walked around, Kate looked at all of Jimmys pets. Context bias toward accusative pronoun, verb As they walked around, Kate watched everything that Jimmy did.

Whats your prediction?

If discourse context influences the initial assignment of syntactic category, RTs for the pronoun his ought to be faster when the discourse context is biased toward the possessive, and RTs for him ought to be faster when it is biased toward the accusative. If frequency of use of the noun vs. verb meanings of the homograph, RTs in possessive contexts should decrease

Bolands (1997)

Results:

Discourse context did not have a significant effect on RTs on any word. Completion that favors a noun usage for the homograph in she saw her duck is related to RTs for the word and.

Eye-movement experiments

Reading involves eye movements of a subject. So, experiments can be done with eye-tracking.

Eye-movement experiments

Eye-movement experiments

Eye-movement experiments

Eye-movement experiments

Things to be measured:

Fixation Saccade

Eye-movement experiments

Fixation:

Eye is a (relatively) still and fixated to the certain point, e.g., reading a single word. All the information from the scene is (mainly) acquired during fixation. Duration varies from 120-1000 ms, typically 200-600 ms. They are Interspersed with saccades...

Eye-movement experiments

Saccade:

Jumps which connect fixations Very rapid -- duration is typically only 40-120 ms Very fast (up to 600 o/s) and therefore the vision system is suppressed during the movement Ballistic; the end point of saccade cannot be changed during the movement Saccades are used to move the fixation point

Why measure the two behaviors?

Eye-movement experiments

Because when readers encounter processing difficulty,

one reader may fixate on the problematic region until the difficulty is attenuated; one may also move his/her eyes to the regions prior the current problematic area (regressive saccades); one may move his/her eyes to the regions that follow the current area. Assumption: The eye movements reflect processing. Thus, longer fixations and backwards movements reflect processing difficulty.

Eye-movement experiments

Subjects tend to fixate on content words. Subjects eyes move backwards in the sentence when a mis-parse occurs. Syntactically complex and semantically anomalous bits of sentences tend to create lots of backwards movements.
syntactically complex: The defendant examined by the lawyer = The defendant who was examined by the lawyer semantic anomalous: I like my coffee with cream and socks. While Mary was mending the sock fell off * * * * * * ** * 1 2 3 6 4 7 58 9 (order of fixation)

Brain activity: ERPs

We can measure electrical activity in the brain when a subject is reading a sentence

Reflect electrical activity of bundles of cortical neurons Typical peak time, polarity

Standard effects: N400, P600

N400 = negative voltage change approximately 400ms after a word is read which is semantically odd. P600 = positive voltage change approximately 600ms after a word is read which is syntactically odd.

Brain activity: ERPs

e.g. for N400, The pizza was too hot to cry/eat.

e.g. for P600, Sarahs belief in fairies vs. Sarahs in belief fairies

Brain activity: ERPs

The cat will EAT/BAKE. ? The cat will EAT/EATING. ?

a.

b.

Brain activity: ERPs

What this means: processing of sentences is immediate and online happens as each word is read, rather than waiting until the end of a sentence/clause/phrase to put things together.

Linguistics and Language Processing: Bottom-up and Top-down Models

Language comprehension involves a lot of work

Segmentation, lexical access (looking up words/morphemes in the mental lexicon & finding the appropriate meanings of ambiguous words,) syntactic parse (disambiguating syntactic ambiguity)etc. What it shows: fast, automatic, robust, accurate disambiguation, guess Sentence comprehension involves top-down & bottom-up processing.

Bottom-up and Top-down Models

Top-down: beginning interpretation of a sentence spontaneously and automatically based on what information is available to us. For instance, we do not have to wait until we have analyzed all the phonemes in a sentence in order to understand it. Bottom-up: doing step-by-step analysis to isolate phonemes, word boundaries, and relate these things to the mental lexicon and semantic interpretation. It happens only piece by piece no forward projection, no prediction.

Bottom-up and Top-down Models

Comparison: Hoggle fell gracelessly to the ground. Top-down processing: prime only for soil Bottom-up processing: prime for soil and grind

A person using very strong top-down processing would only be primed for the meaning which is appropriate, given the syntactic structure. A person using very strong bottom-up processing would be primed for both meanings, despite the fact that only one meaning is appropriate.

Top-down Models

The pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch codnutced at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are tpyed, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit oedrer. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? So yuo raed tihs wuothit mcuh porbelm, tpyos shohlud not be a porbelm aynmroe.

Top-down Models

Some evidence for top-down processing

Better performance in identification task of spoken words in the presence of noise when they occur in sentences than in isolation/ anomalous/ non-sense sentences. Shadowing Phoneme restoration e.g., The state governors met with their respective legi X(cough) latures convening in the capital city. Role of context in segmentation e.g., [g r e d e] --- Grade A [quality of meat /eggs] --- grey day [weather]

Top-down Models

Comprehenders do not wait until the whole sentence has been heard to make inferences about what it means or will wind up meaning:

The onset of saccadic eye movements to the target object (the cake) was significantly later in the move condition than in the eat condition; Saccades to the target were launched after the onset of the spoken word cake in the move condition, but before its onset in the eat condition.

Top-down Models

Try to guess the next word in the sentence My brother came inside to. . . chat? get warm? talk? eat? rest? The children went outside to. . . play Empirically, its been shown that more highly predictable words are read more quickly (Ehrlich and Rayner, 1981)

Phonetics & Phoneme

Features (as associated with bottom-up processing)

Intended to be said Big and fat Is Pat a girl? Cedars of Lebanon Actually said Pig and vat Is bat a curl? Cedars of Lemmanon

Phonemes

Cohort Model :William Marslen-Wilson proposed that

in word comprehension, words are recognized from

beginning to end.

Phonetics & Phoneme

e.g., hearing crystal. = [krIstal]. First, we process the [k], and initially consider all the words that begin with [k]. All the words considered are called the cohort. Then we process the [r], and consider all the words that begin with [kr]. (The cohort is reduced from all the words that begin with [k] to all the words that begin with [kr]).

And so on, until we process all the segments of crystal. Shown with experiments that this is the case. Suggests that the segment is a fundamental unit of auditory perception.

Phonetics & Phoneme

Syllables

Syllables used successfully as primes in lexical decision tasks. Word-blending tasks: subjects unconsciously split words at natural points in the syllable the onset vs. the rhyme. e.g., bark + meow = ? beow (rather than baow) e.g., but + cat = bat (rather than but) Subjects prefer to create word blends according to the syllable structure of their language.

Morphological processing

Morpheme activation

Do individual morphological components of words play a role in processing?

Individual morphemes in compound words are automatically activated during word recognition. Evidence: crowbar primes bird.

Selectional restrictions

Do knowledge of selectional restrictions play a role in processing new words?

e.g., *understand-ize Knowledge of the restrictions of affixes forms part of the wordprocessing system Evidence: (note: birm is a non-sense word) re-birmable vs. re-birmize, vs. re-birmity RT: longer

Morphological processing

Hierarchical structure

Our representation of complex words is organized in terms of hierarchical morphological structure. Please draw the tree structures for refillable and unbearable Evidence: a. PRIME bearable ---- TARGET unbearable b. PRIME fillable ------- TARGET refillable Larger priming for (a)

Syntactic Processing

Some grammatically complex sentences are easy to parse and some grammatically easy sentences are hard to parse.

e.g., (complex sentence but easy parsing) Sarah saw the goblin who displeased Jareth the other day. e.g., (easy sentence but hard parsing) The horse raced past the barn fell. e.g., (which one is easier?) a. This is the malt that the rat that the cat that the dog worried killed ate. b. This is the malt that was eaten by the rat that was killed by the cat that was worried by the dog.

Garden-path sentences: those that lead one down the garden path to the wrong analysis.

The horse raced past the barn fell. The girl told the story cried. Since Jay always walks a mile seems like a short distance to him.

Syntactic parser: a special processing module that makes use of grammatical knowledge but also contains special procedures and principles that guide the order in which elements of a sentence are processed and the manner in which syntactic structure is built up.

These are just tips of the iceberg More to be read, discussed, and explored! Are you ready to take this course?