PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

1. PSY 369: Psycholinguistics Representing language

3. How do we turn our thoughts into a spoken or written output? Some of the big questions Production “the horse raced past the barn”

4. How do we understand language that we hear/see? Some of the big questions Comprehension “the horse raced past the barn”

5. Conceptualizer Thought Semantic Analysis Formulator Grammatical Encoding Syntactic Analysis Lexicon Phonological Encoding Word Recognition Letter/phoneme Recognition Articulator Some of the big questions • Comprehension • Production • Representation • How do we store linguistic information? • How do we retrieve that information?

6. Semantic Analysis Syntactic Analysis Conceptualizer Thought Articulator Word Recognition Formulator Grammatical Encoding Letter/phoneme Recognition Lexicon Phonological Encoding weeks 9&10 weeks 6-8 This week

7. Storing linguistic information • Tale of the tape: • High capacity: 40,000 – 60,000 words • Fast: Recognition in as little as 200ms (often before word ends) • How do we search that many, that fast!? – suggests that there is a high amount of organization • Or something much more complex • “The world’s largest data bank of examples in context is dwarfed by the collection we all carry around subconsciously in our heads.” • E. Lenneberg (1967) Excellent reading: Words in the Mind, Aitchison (1987, 2003)

8. Storing linguistic information • Interesting questions: • How are words stored? • What are they made up of? • How are words related to each other? • How do we use them? • Some vocabulary • Mental lexicon The representation of words in long term memory • Lexical Access: How do we activate (retrieve) words and their the meanings (and other properties)?

9. Theoretical Metaphors: Access vs. retrieval • Retrieval - getting information from the representation • Often used interchangeably, but sometimes a distinction is made • Activate - finding the representation Here it is

10. Theoretical Metaphors: Access vs. retrieval • Retrieval - getting information from the representation • Often used interchangeably, but sometimes a distinction is made • Activate - finding the representation Open it up and see what’s inside

11. horse horses barn barns horse -s barn Lexical primitives • Word primitives • Need a lot of representations • Fast retrieval • Morpheme primitives • Economical - fewer representations • Slow retrieval - some assembly required • Decomposition during comprehension • Composition during production

12. Lexical primitives • Lexical Decision task (e.g., Taft, 1981) • See a string of letters • As fast as you can determine if it is a real English word or not • “yes” if it is • “no” if it isn’t • Typically speed and accuracy are the dependent measures

13. table

14. vanue

15. daughter

16. tasp

17. cofef

18. hunter

19. Lexical primitives • Lexical Decision task table Yes vanue No daughter Yes tasp No cofef No hunter Yes

20. Lexical primitives • Lexical Decision task daughter hunter

21. Lexical primitives • Lexical Decision task • This evidence supports the morphemes as primitives view daughter Pseudo-suffixed daught -er hunter Multimorphemic Takes longer hunt -er

22. Lexical primitives • May depend on other factors • What kind of morpheme • Inflectional (e.g., singular/plural, past/present tense) • Derivational (e.g., drink --> drinkable, infect --> disinfect) • Frequency of usage • High frequency multimorphemic (in particular if derivational morphology) may get represented as a single unit • e.g., impossible vs. imperceptible • Compound words • Semantically transparent • Buttonhole • Semantically opaque • butterfly

23. Lexical organization • How are the lexical representations organized? • Alphabetically? • Initial phoneme? • Semantic categories? • Grammatical class? • Something more flexible, depending on your needs?

24. Lexical organization • Factors that affect organization • Phonology • Frequency • Imageability, concreteness, abstractness • Grammatical class • Semantics

25. Lexical organization • Phonology • Words that sound alike may be stored “close together” • Brown and McNeill (1966) Tip of the tongue phenomenon (TOT) What word means to formally renounce the throne? abdicate Look at what words they think of but aren’t right e.g, “abstract,” “abide,” “truncate”

26. Lexical organization • Phonology • Words that sound alike may be stored “close together” • Brown and McNeill (1966) Tip of the tongue phenomenon (TOT) Similar-sounding words 50 % of matches Similar-meaning words 40 30 20 10 2 1 2 3 1 3 • More likely to approximate target words with similar sounding words than similar meanings • The “Bathtub Effect” - Sounds at the beginnings and ends of words are remembered best (Aitchison, 2003) Letters at Word end Word beginning

27. Lexical organization • Frequency • Typically the more common a word, the faster (and more accurately) it is named and recognized • Typical interpretation: easier to retrieve (or activate) • However, Balota and Chumbley (1984) • Frequency effects depend on task • Lexcial decision - big effect • Naming - small effect • Category verifcation - no effect • A canary is a bird. T/F

28. Lexical organization • Imageability, concreteness, abstractness Try to imagine each word Umbrella Lantern Freedom Apple Knowledge Evil

29. How do you imagine these? Lexical organization • Imageability, concreteness, abstractness Try to imagine each word Umbrella Lantern Freedom Apple Knowledge Evil

30. Lexical organization • Imageability, concreteness, abstractness Umbrella Lantern Freedom Apple Knowledge Evil • More easily remembered • More easily accessed

31. Lexical organization • Grammatical class • Grammatical class constraint on substitution errors “she was my strongest propeller” (proponent) “the nation’s dictator has been exposed” (deposed) • Word association tasks • Associate is typically of same grammatical class

32. Lexical organization • Grammatical class • Open class words • Content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) • Closed class words • Function words (determiners, prepositions, …)

33. Lexical organization • Semantics • Free associations (see the “cat” demo in earlier lecture) • Most associates are semantically related (rather than phonologically for example) • Semantic Priming task • For the following letter strings, decide whether it is or is not an English word

34. tasp

35. nurse

36. doctor

37. fract

38. slithest

39. shoes

40. doctor

41. doctor doctor Lexical organization • Semantic Priming task Related nurse Responded to faster Unrelated shoes “Priming effect”

42. Lexical organization • Semantics • Words that are related in meaning are linked together • Semantic networks

43. Meaning based representations Grammatical based representations Sound based representations Lexical organization • Another possibility is that there are multiple levels of representation, with different organizations at each level

44. Semantic Networks • Semantic Networks • Words can be represented as an interconnected network of sense relations • Each word is a particular node • Connections among nodes represent semantic relationships

45. has skin Animal can move around breathes Collins and Quillian (1969) Semantic Features • Collins and Quillian Hierarchical Network model • Lexical entries stored in a hierarchy Lexical entry • Semantic features attached to the lexical entries

46. has fins has feathers can swim Fish can fly Bird has gills has wings Collins and Quillian (1969) • Representation permits cognitive economy • Reduce redundancy of semantic features has skin Animal can move around breathes

47. Local level features may contradict higher level features has long legs Canary can sing Ostrich is fast can’t fly is yellow Collins and Quillian (1969) has skin Animal can move around breathes has fins has feathers can swim Fish can fly Bird has gills has wings

48. Collins and Quillian (1969) • Testing the model • Semantic verification task • An A is a B True/False • An apple is a fruit

49. Collins and Quillian (1969) • Testing the model • Semantic verification task • An A is a B True/False • An robin has wings

50. Collins and Quillian (1969) • Testing the model • Semantic verification task • An A is a B True/False • A robin is a bird