ComprehensionComprehension

Language and Psychology

• The comprehension of sounds• The comprehension of words• The comprehension of sentences

THE NATURE OF COMPREHENSIONTHE NATURE OF COMPREHENSION

• It was found that the _eel was on the axle.• It was found that the _eel was on the shoe.• It was found that the _eel was on the orange.• It was found that the _eel was on the table.

• It was found that the wheel was on the axle.• It was found that the heel was on the shoe.• It was found that the peel was on the orange.• It was found that the meel was on the table.

• Listeners do not accurately record what they hear.

• They report what they expected to hear from the context.

• Comprehension is not the passive recording of what is heard or seen. We do not necessarily hear all words spoken to us.

• Comprehension is strongly susceptible to the slightest of change in discourse which the listener is attending to.

• Comprehension is not processed in a linear sequence. We process chunks of information, not individual words and not meaning in isolation.

THE COMPREHENSION OF SOUNDSTHE COMPREHENSION OF SOUNDS

Who are you referring to?Who are you referring to?

Penny

Benny

• Voice onset timing (VOT)– The brief burst of air which precedes the

articulation of all stop consonants.– Provides phonetic information listeners use to

distinguish between sounds like [p] and [b]• [p] is 50 millisecond (1/20 second) later than [b].

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1999-05027-010

• We are born with the ability to perceive subtle phonetic differences.

• Categorical perception– We perceive the phonetic differences in binary

either-or fashion.

Q2: Is the ability to categorically perceive Q2: Is the ability to categorically perceive phonetic differences influenced by the linguistic phonetic differences influenced by the linguistic

environment? environment?

THE COMPREHENSION OF WORDSTHE COMPREHENSION OF WORDS

The psychological mechanisms that affect lexical The psychological mechanisms that affect lexical processing: Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP)processing: Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP)

• the representation of information is distributed (not local)

• memory and knowledge are stored in the connections between units.

• learning can occur with gradual changes in connection strength by experience. http://web.lemoyne.edu/~hevern/psy101_11F/

psy101lectures/12memory2_outline.html

• The logogen model (Morton, 1969, 1970)

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Lexical_Access

• The high frequency words have low threshold of activation.

• The low frequency words have high threshold of activation.

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Lexical_Access

• The Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon• The bathtub effect• Spreading activation network

• We try to retrieve a word we think we know, but we just cannot recall the word at that moment.

http://www.reference.com/browse/tip_of_the_tongue

• We tend to remember the beginning and the end of a word better than the middle part.

• concepts are connected via nodes and the strength of the connection is represented by the distance between the nodes

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Semantics_in_the_Brain

• Activation begins at a single node and then spread in parallel form throughout the network.

• The force of activation is reduced over distance, thus ensuring that closely related concepts are more likely to be activated than distant concept.

THE COMPREHENSION OF THE COMPREHENSION OF SENTENCESSENTENCES

• Transformational complexity– Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC)

• Ambiguity

Derivational Theory of ComplexityDerivational Theory of Complexity

Difficulty in comprehension was derived from the number of transformations that were added on to the original phrase structure of the sentence.

• Unexplainable exceptions• Passive sentence takes less time to recall than

negative sentences. – John was hit > Tom did not hit John.

• It takes less time for semantically plausible sentences. – The struggling swimmer was rescued by the

lifeguard.– The struggling swimmer rescued the lifeguard.

• Negation is grammatically simple, but semantically difficult to comprehend. – The struggling swimmer was rescued by the

lifeguard.– The struggling swimmer was not rescued by the

lifeguard.

• The phoneme monitoring task– Subjects listen to paired sentences and are asked

to react as soon as they hear a target phoneme. – Sentences containing more complex information

in the clause before the target phoneme will create a greater lag in reaction time.

Sentences containing more complex information in the clause before the target phoneme will create a greater lag in

reaction time.

• The men started to drill before they were ordered to do so.

• The men stared to march before they were ordered to do so.

• The linear left-to-right unfolding of sentence structure helps the listener/reader anticipate the next word or words which will follow.– Without her contributions failed to appear.– Since she always jogs a mile seems a short

distance.

Without her contributions failed to appear

http://www.ling.sinica.edu.tw/eip/FILES/journal/2007.6.21.11349123.6028631.pdf

我們在別墅下面向海洋

Questions? Questions?