Lecture 7 - Sentence Processing Flashcards
1
Q
What is meaning influenced by?
A
- Semantics - meanings of words, you know what a dog is
- Syntax - themes e.g john kicks bill is diff to bill kicks john
- Pragmatics - influence of context, things like metaphors e.g john kicked the bucket
2
Q
How does sentence processing work?
A
- Immediacy: you understand things in the order you hear them.
- Lexical ambiguity: words that mean multiple things e.g river bank/money
- Syntactic ambiguity: sentence is ambiguous.
3
Q
What is phoneme restoration?
A
- Where the mind fills in missing sounds in a sentence retrospectively
4
Q
Why is phoneme restoration limited?
A
- Only asking people what they heard after they have heard it, does not tell us what happened at the time you heard it
5
Q
How can you use eye movements in sentence comprehension?
A
- Reading - word fixation: look how long eyes dwell in regions, the longer = thinking longer
- Listening - object fixation: look where ppt is looking in a room
6
Q
Why did the girls eyes move faster than her words?
A
- Takes time brain to programme for pronunciation of words, understanding comes before reading aloud
- Not simple sequential process, when we read we jump around words
7
Q
What is the effect of context on reading time?
A
- Ppts were given a sentence with one word different.
- Fixation time on the subject when the word was replaced with a specific one was less
- Words are integrated as they are received (Immediacy of interpretation)
8
Q
Why do we have the immediacy principle?
A
- Limited working memory, waiting for the end of the sentence means you have to remember all the sentence
- Faster, evolutionary technique
9
Q
How is lexical ambiguity figured out?
A
- Dominance of some meanings, and selective access
- Access to all meanings of words and decide which meaning after word
10
Q
What did Swinney do?
A
- Asked if we activate multiple meanings for ambiguous words
- If multiple meanings are activated = quick response to both meanings
- Ppts presented with a sentence with a blank in it, then presented a word to see whether it is a word or not.
- Ambigiuous prime word e.g bugs, spy senses and insect senses
- If both senses were activated, the responses should be quicker to ant and spy to a ir/relevant probe
- Results found unrelated words took the longest time, when relevant probe, they were very quick, but were also quick on irrelevent probe, but not as quick as the relevent one.
- So you access all meanings but then you decide later on.
11
Q
What is meaning dominance?
A
- Relative frequency of each meaning
- More frequent = dominant
- Equibiased - no dominant sense
12
Q
Study on context and meaning dominance:
A
- Supporting context either after/before ambig word
- When context came after, long fixation time = multiple access
- vice versa for before
13
Q
What is syntax?
A
- Break down the sentence into the syntactic components and structure
- e.g agent, theme, recipient
14
Q
How do we break syntax down?
A
- Word order for english
- Tonal languages
- Phase structure rules: specify how words can be combined, expressed formally, speakers have tacit knowledge
15
Q
Phase structure rules?
A
- Abstract rules that specify allowable strings of words in language
