Lecture 7 - Sentence Processing

Question 1

What is meaning influenced by?

Answer 1

• 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

Question 2

How does sentence processing work?

Answer 2

• 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.

Question 3

What is phoneme restoration?

Answer 3

• Where the mind fills in missing sounds in a sentence retrospectively

Question 4

Why is phoneme restoration limited?

Answer 4

• Only asking people what they heard after they have heard it, does not tell us what happened at the time you heard it

Question 5

How can you use eye movements in sentence comprehension?

Answer 5

• 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

Question 6

Why did the girls eyes move faster than her words?

Answer 6

• 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

Question 7

What is the effect of context on reading time?

Answer 7

• 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)

Question 8

Why do we have the immediacy principle?

Answer 8

• Limited working memory, waiting for the end of the sentence means you have to remember all the sentence
• Faster, evolutionary technique

Question 9

How is lexical ambiguity figured out?

Answer 9

• Dominance of some meanings, and selective access
• Access to all meanings of words and decide which meaning after word

Question 10

What did Swinney do?

Answer 10

• 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.

Question 11

What is meaning dominance?

Answer 11

• Relative frequency of each meaning
• More frequent = dominant
• Equibiased - no dominant sense

Question 12

Study on context and meaning dominance:

Answer 12

• Supporting context either after/before ambig word
• When context came after, long fixation time = multiple access
• vice versa for before

Question 13

What is syntax?

Answer 13

• Break down the sentence into the syntactic components and structure
• e.g agent, theme, recipient

Question 14

How do we break syntax down?

Answer 14

• Word order for english
• Tonal languages
• Phase structure rules: specify how words can be combined, expressed formally, speakers have tacit knowledge

Question 15

Phase structure rules?

Answer 15

• Abstract rules that specify allowable strings of words in language

Question 16

What are the diff ways of breaking the sentence down?

Answer 16

• Multiple syntactic trees (parses)
  
  • Multiple thematic role assignment

Question 17

How does our mind cope with syntactic ambig?

Answer 17

• We have different paths
• Go about the sentence the wrong way, and then you think about it properly.

Question 18

What is the garden path model of parsing?

Answer 18

• Build a simple tree
• via Late closure and minimal attachment.

Question 19

What is Late Closure?

Answer 19

• Keep words together
• Incorporate a word into syntactic phrase currently being processed

Question 20

What is minimal attachment?

Answer 20

• Strategies the processor follows when forming a syntactic trees
• Can be wrong, and are initial parsal preferences that can be contradicted later in the sentence.