Language production Flashcards
Semantic substitution
the correct word is replaced by a word of similar meaning, e.g., “Where is my tennis bat?” instead of “Where is my tennis racquet?” Verbs are much less likely than nouns, adjectives, or adverbs to undergo semantic substitution (Hotopf, 1980).
spoonerism
One of the best known speech errors is the spoonerism, in which the initial letter or letters of two or more words are switched. The Rev. William Archibald Spooner, after whom the spoonerism is named, is credited with several memorable examples, including “You have hissed all my mystery lectures” and “The Lord is a shoving leopard to his flock”
morpheme-exchange errors
Morpheme-exchange errors involve inflections or suffixes remaining in place but attached to the wrong words (e.g., “He has already trunked two packs”)
Spreading-activation theory of speech production
Dell (1986) and Dell and O’Seaghdha (1991):
• Semantic level: the meaning of what is to be said; this level is not considered in detail within the theory.
• Syntactic level: the grammatical structure of the words in the planned utterance.
• Morphological level: the morphemes (basic units of meaning or word forms) in the planned sentence.
• Phonological level: the phonemes or basic units of sound within the sentence.
• A representation is formed at each level.
• Processing during speech planning occurs the same at all four levels, and is both parallel and interactive; however, it is typically more advanced at higher levels (e.g., semantic) than at lower levels (e.g., phonological).
According to spreading-activation theory, there are categorical rules at each level. These rules are constraints on the categories of items and on the combinations of categories that are acceptable.
In addition to the categorical rules, there is a lexicon (dictionary) in the form of a constructionist network. It contains nodes for concepts, words, morphemes, and phonemes.
Finally, insertion rules select the items for inclusion in the representation at each level according to the following criterion: the most highly activated node belonging to the appropriate category is chosen.
The lexical bias effect
Speech errors should tend to consist of actual words or morphemes - Baars, Motley, and MacKay (1975):
Word pairs were presented briefly, and participants had to say both words as rapidly as possible. The error rate was twice as great when the word pair could be re-formed to create two new words (e.g., “lewd rip” can be turned into “rude lip”) than when it could not (e.g. “Luke risk” turns into “ruke lisk”).
Anticipation and perseveration errors:
Dell et al. (1997) developed and extended the spreading-activation theory. The starting point was the notion that most speech errors belong to the following two categories:
- Anticipatory: sounds or words are spoken ahead of their time (e.g., “cuff of coffee” instead of “cup of coffee”).
- Perseverated: sounds or words are spoken later than they should have been (e.g., “beef needle” instead of “beef noodle”).
Levelt’s theoretical approach and WEAVER++
Word-form Encoding by Activation and VERification. Assumptions:
• There is a feed-forward activation-spreading network, meaning that activation proceeds forwards through the network but not backwards.
• There are three main levels within the network: at the highest level are nodes representing lexical concepts; at the second level are nodes representing lemmas or abstract words from the mental lexicon; at the lowest level are nodes representing word forms in terms of morphemes (basic units of meaning) and their phonemic segments.
• The network does not contain any inhibitory links.
• Speech production involves a series of processing stages which follow each other in a strictly serial way.
• Speech errors are avoided by means of a checking mechanism: “Each node has a procedure attached to it that checks whether the node, when active, links up to the appropriate active node one level up”
anomia
an impaired ability to name objects
agrammatism/non-fluent aphasia/Broca’s aphasia
Seen in brain-damaged patients who can find the appropriate words, but cannot order them grammatically.Patients with agrammatism also tend to produce short sentences lacking function words and word endings.
jargon aphasia/fluent aphasia/Wernicke’s aphasia
This is a condition in which the word-finding problems are so great that patients often produce neologisms, which are made-up words.
A b-boy is swi’ing (SWINGING) on the bank with his hand (FEET) in the stringt (STREAM). A table with orstrum (SAUCE-PAN?) and…I don’t know…and a three-legged stroe (STOOL) and a strane (PAIL)-table, table…near the water.
Brain damage in non-fluent/Broca’s aphasia
Willmes and Poeck (1993) found that only 59% of patients with non-fluent aphasia had lesions or damage in Broca’s area, and only 35% of patients with lesions involving Broca’s area had non-fluent aphasia. Dronkers (1996) reported that only 10 out of 22 patients with lesions in Broca’s area were suffering from non-fluent aphasia. In addition, he found that all of the patients with non-fluent aphasia had damage to the insular cortex, which does not form part of Broca’s area.
Wernicke’s aphasia vs damage in Wernicke’s area
Willmes and Poeck (1993) used CT scans. They found that 90% of patients with fluent aphasia had lesions in Wernicke’s area. However, only 48% of patients with damage in Wernicke’s area had fluent aphasia.
Quality of text as a function of topic knowledge and cognitive effort.
(good knowledge - a lot less effort, about the same quality) - Kellogg (1987) asked his participants to write a persuasive essay on why the United Nations should remain in New York. Those with much relevant knowledge did not write better essays than those with less knowledge. However, Kellogg (1987) also obtained a measure of cognitive effort by measuring time to respond to an occasional stimulus during the
writing process. Participants with more knowledge devoted less effort to writing.
The length of an average sentence of experts vs average writers
11.2 vs. 7.3 words - Kaufer et al. (1986)
Types of revisions made by average and expert writers.
Faigley and Witte (1983) compared the revisions made by writers at different levels of skill. They discovered that 34% of the revisions by experienced adult writers involved a change of meaning, against only 12% of the revisions of inexperienced college writers. This difference probably occurred because
experienced writers are more concerned with coherence and meaning.
