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Development and Language > Sentences and Meaning > Flashcards

Sentences and Meaning Flashcards

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1
Q

What is lexical access?

A

The process of finding and retrieving all the stored knowledge we have about a word (semantic representation)

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2
Q

What is the gating task?

A

When you play bits of a word in gradually increasing chunks and ask people to guess what the word might be, context influences the recognition point.

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3
Q

What is cross-modal priming?

A

Briefly activate numerous meanings of potential candidates so there’s no hard decision between word recognition and meaning activation so we must be doing some lexical access before word recognition.

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4
Q

What is a homophone?

A

Different meanings, same sound

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5
Q

What is a homograph?

A

Different meanings, same written form

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6
Q

What is a homonym?

A

Different meanings, same written and spoken form

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7
Q

What is a heterographic homophone?

A

Different meanings and written forms, same sounds

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8
Q

What is a heterographic homograph?

A

Different meanings and sounds, same written form

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9
Q

What are polysemous words?

A

Often used interchangeably with homonym - stricter definition is multiple senses within same dictionary definition (e.g. Twist)

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10
Q

What increases the speed of word recognition?

A

Many senses and fewer meanings

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11
Q

How is word recognition involved with semantic processing?

A

It can be explained in terms of semantic feature models od lexical representation and word recognition involves a meaning resolution process

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12
Q

How do sentence models differ in terms of the influence of sentence context?

A
  • when (early/late)
  • how (interactive/autonomous)
  • role of meaning frequency
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13
Q

Explain the Multiple Access Model.

A

When an ambiguous word is encountered, all meanings are accessed in a context-independent way - the contextually appropriate meaning is then selected.

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14
Q

Explain context-guided single-reading lexical access

A

Context is used to restrict access to only the appropriate meanings and so inappropriate meanings are never accessed.

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15
Q

Explain the Multiple Access Model is terms of its components

A

Autonomous
Late contextual access
Low frequency influence

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16
Q

What are reminder-priming studies?

A

Spoken prime word is followed by a semantically related target and this leads to a fast lexical judgement whereas unrelated words are slower. This provides a measure of meaning activation.

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17
Q

What is syntactic ambiguity?

A

E.g. noun/verb ambiguity

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18
Q

How is noun/verb ambiguity solved? e.g. WATCH

A

Sentences can be verb-biased or noun-biased

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19
Q

What is meaning frequency?

A

Ambiguous words vary in the relative frequency of meanings.

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20
Q

What are balanced ambiguous words?

A

Both meanings are equally common

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21
Q

What are unbalanced ambiguous words?

A

One meaning is dominant

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22
Q

What do weaker interactive models suggest about sentential context effects?

A

That sentential contexts will not always rule out the inappropriate meanings immediately, they may just bias activations

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23
Q

What is suprisal?

A

processing difficulty is a reflection of whether a sentence’s continuation is highly predictable and whether the unfolding sentence ends up conforming to the most likely outcome

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24
Q

When is suprisal lowest?

A

When the probability that a sentence will continue is a particular way is very high, and the sentence does in fact continue that way

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25
When is suprisal highest (leading to greatest processing difficulty)
When the sentence actually continues in a way that was extremely improbable.
26
Why are object relative clauses harder to process than subject relative clauses?
Because sentences involve holding some parts of the sentence in memory until they can be related to other parts of the sentence. As the distance between these related parts get biggers, so do the demands on memory and the prospects of processing failure.
27
What is the framing effect?
A phenomenon in which decisions of preferences regarding two identical outcomes are observed to be a dramatically different, depending on the wording of the outcomes.
28
What is the reading span test?
A behavioural test intended to measure an individual's verbal working memory - individual reads a sequence of sentences while holding the last word of each sentence in memory. The no. of words successfully remembered corresponds to that individual's memory span.
29
What is grammar?
A mutually agreed convention about sentence structure to allow multiple concepts to be piped through a linear system
30
What is the goal of sentence processing?
To assign thematic roles to words by determining the syntactic structure of the sentence (parsing)
31
What is parsing?
The act of interpreting a sentence syntactically
32
How is parsing different to word recognition?
- It's a constructive not recognition process. | - It allows us to deal with novel sentences in a meaningful way (unlike most novel words)
33
What is a sentential compliment? (S')
something that can be part of a sentence but also makes sense alone
34
What is local ambiguity?
Ambiguity is resolved at the end of the sentence so it is temporary
35
What is global ambiguity?
Ambiguity is unresolved
36
What is incremental parsing?
As you listen to a sentence from the start, you begin to build an incomplete tree structure. Each word is assigned a role in the sentence as it is recognised.
37
What is serial parsing?
Only one possibility is considered at any one time
38
What is autonomous parsing?
The parser doesn't make use of plausibility of sentence context
39
What is innate parsing?
Strategies for choosing most likely parse are generic across all languages
40
What is the garden path theory?
when a sentence has a phrase or word with an ambiguous meaning that the reader interprets in a certain way and, when they read the whole sentence, there is a difference in what has been read and what was expected
41
What is minimal attachment in the garden path theory?
Reader adopts the analysis that requires the fewest nodes
42
What is late closure in the garden path theory?
Reader attaches material into the most recently constructed phrase marker
43
Why is garden path theory simple?
It says that parsing just focusses on its own task and doesn't worry about anything else
44
How can we test the garden path theory?
Eye-tracking studies provide detailed information to the processing speed of each word, perfect for testing predictions of models of parsing
45
What is the probability of regressions?
The likelihood of the eyes going back in the text and reading again
46
What is the first pass time?
the duration of fixation in a particular area of text
47
What is the second pass time?
the duration of fixation the second time after a regression
48
What evidence is there for the garden path theory?
Eyetracking study - Frazier & Rayner, 1982.
49
What is incremental parallel processing?
Alternative parses generated in parallel each time a new word is encountered
50
Other than linguistic context, what else affects sentence parsing?
Visual context
51
Give an example of a semantic variable that might influence parsing.
Animacy
52
How does animacy affect the garden path effect?
The garden path effect is rduced when the subject is animate. This is evidence against a fully autonomous parser.
53
What is an alternative explanation to the garden path theory?
Constraint-based Frameworks - all possible interpretations of sentences are activated with the most appropriate being selected, arguing the absence of reanalysis
54
What is direct speech?
Literal meaning is intended
55
How common is direct speech?
Less than 10%
56
What is indirect speech?
Need to move beyond the literal meaning to understand
57
How common is indirect speech?
More than 90%
58
How does Searle suggest we understand indirect speech?
Two-stage mechanism where we understand the literal meaning first and then see if the phrase has any other meaning.
59
How does Gibbs suggest we understand indirect speech?
We understand in one stage where we identify the literal meaning but at the same time are searching to see what else can be done with that sentence.
60
Explain scalar implicature
Sentences has a semantic/literal meaning and a pragmatic/non-literal meaning. Most people opt for the pragmatic interpretation but is there competition between the two meanings?
61
What did De Neys & Schaeken find about scalar implicature?
Difficult load led to fewer pragmatic responses.
62
What were the 4 maxims Paul Grice described?
- Quantity - Quality - Relation - Manner
63
Evaluate Grice and his 4 maxims of conversation.
- Linguistic contribution | - Psychological contribution
64
Why is linguistic contribution an evaluation of Grice?
It is useful for the description of conversation.
65
Why is psychological contribution an evaluation of Grice?
Work has been very influential - the idea that a conversation is a collaboration between two people's common ground.
66
What is Grice's idea of notion ground?
The idea that the speaker might need to be kind of reading the mind of the listener in order to tailor their conversation appropriately, and he listener might need to be reading the mind of the speaker in order to understand the speaker's point of view.
67
What did Ferreira et al find out about whether speakers can avoid ambiguity?
Speakers are good at avoiding nonlinguistic ambiguity but less good at avoiding linguistic ambiguity as they are unaware of the problem.
68
What dd Keysar et al find out about whether listeners read speakers' minds?
- Addressees generally picked the appropriate objects, suggesting a representation of common ground. However, their initial response was often egocentric.
69
Are there cultural differences in perspective taking?
Chinese (collectivists) listeners showed better ability to determine speaker's point of view, even in initial eye-movements.
70
What is the N400 ERP effect?
Negativity of ERPs peaks about 400ms after a crucial word, because we do not understand/expect the sentence outcome.
71
What is the social N400 effect?
When someone should not experience the N400 effect because they understand the context of a sentence, but they do experience it because they are reading the mind of a fellow listener who does not understand.
72
What does the social N400 effect involve?
It involved tracking common ground in terms of multiple participants.
73
How do ASD individuals struggle with mindreading?
It is a lot of process for someone who does not deal well with pragmatic inference - fits with the theory of mind deficit
74
How did ASD adults compare to control adults in scalar implicature?
The groups were well matched on performance so the interpretation in this case may not rely on mindreading skills but may be more of an automatised process
75
What is the Simon Effect?
The longer time needed to respond in the incongruent presentation compared to the congruent one is the Simon Effect.
76
How does the Simon Effect work?
Larger Simon effects imply greater difficulty in suppressing the irrelevant spatial infroamtion.
77
What advantages does billingualism show?
- Enhanced executive control in nonverbal tasks - 4 year later onset of dementia - Better at interpreting ambiguous figures - Made less mistakes in flanker tasks
78
Why do billinguals appear to be disadvantaged compared to monolinguals?
- Lower language proficidency e.g. smaller vocab - Slower and comit more errors in picture naming even in their dominant language - Lower verbal fluency - More interference in lexical decision - Generate fewer words on the semantic-fluency task
79
What are the weaknesses of experiments into bilingual individuals?
- Tendancy to conduct multiple, small-sample studies that are underpowered, increasing the likelihood of false positives - They have not defined bilingualism and so there is no control of fluency levels
80
What is publication bias?
The evidence for the phenomenon seems stronger than it actually is.
81
Why may publication bias occur?
- People publish work with exciting findings aka significant differences so people end up tweaking the experiments to allow for the findings they want - Most studies don't publish their raw data (could be removing anomalies)
82
What methods can we use to compensate for or avoid publication bias?
- Pre registration (deciding on hypotheses and methods before conducting so no tweaking can happen) - Meta-analyses can use sophisticated stats to identify publication bias and predict the effect without it
83
How might asking a moral question in a foreign language alter the answer and why?
- In a foreign language, people seem to take more psychological distance when assessing risks so they have less emotional impact and engage in a more analytical mind process

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