Reading pages 3-29
Introduction to psycholinguistics
- the study of the psychological processes involved in language
- language is used for communication
History
- Galton 1879: how people form associations between words
- Meringer and Mayer 1895: analyzed slips of the tongue in a modern way
- Freud 1901: explaining the origin of speech errors in terms of his psychodynamic
theory
- Modern psycholinguistics since around the 1960s when Chomsky reviewed Skinner’s
book
- Chomsky 1957: distinction between optional and obligatory transformations
- Miller and Mckean 1964: the more transformations there are in a sentence, the more
difficult it is to process
- Savin and Perchonock 1965: sentences with more transformations took up more
memory space
- Mehler 1963: when participants made errors in remembering sentences, they did it in
the direction of forgetting transformational tags instead of adding them
Information processing
- Marr’s 1982 box-and-arrow diagram -> boxes refer to processing levels, arrows are
the means of getting from one box to another (boxology)
Cognitive science
- interdisciplinary
- big influence of AI on psycholinguistics (peak around 1970s)
- connectionism: approach that involves computer simulations with simple processing
units, and where knowledge comes from leaninr statistical regularities rather than
presented rules
- activation: varying quantity -> the amount of energy possessed; the higher the level
of activation, more likely that will be the output
Methods
- priming: if two things are similar to each other and involved together in processing,
they will either assist with or interfere with each other, but if they are unrelated they
will have no effect
- semantic priming: its easier to recognize a word if you have just seen a word
that is related in meaning
- priming causes processing to speed up -> facilitation vs. if priming causes
processing to slow down -> inhibition
- brain imaging
- lesion studies (damage to the brain)
- double association is concept (not a method)
- EEGs, ERPs, MEG, CAT, PET, fMRI, TMS
Modularity of the language system
- module= self-contained set of processes: it converts an input to an output
- processes inside the module are independent of processes outside the module
- processing is interactive
, - discrete stage model: level of processing can only begin if the previous has
finished
- cascade model: information can flow from one level to the next without it
having been finished
- direction of processing: top-down or bottom-up/data-driven
- non-interactive model of word recognition would be bottom-up
non-interactive model of word production would be top-down
- Fodor
- working memory
Reading 395-402
Language production
Levelt’s model of speech production
- three stages: conceptualization, formulation, articulation/execution
- conceptualization is deciding what to say: microplanning and macroplanning
conceptualization processes
- formulation has two components: lexicalization and syntactic planning
- articulation/execution: phonological encoding
Slips of the tongue
- speech errors
- spoonerisms
- Freudian slips: speech errors reveal our repressed thoughts
- many different types
- simulating speech errors experimentally by using the SLIP technique (Baars
1975)
- sometimes we correct speech errors → inner monitor
- WEAVER++ model of speech production
- Griffin 2004: eye movement experiment
- Garrett’s model of speech production:
- processing is serial
- different processing levels that don’t interact with each other
- two stages of syntactic planning
- functional level; word order isn’t explicitly represented,
semantic content is specifies and assigned to syntactic roles
→ content words
- positional level: words are explicitly ordered → function words
- conceptualization: message level -> formulation
- formulation: functional level -> positional level -> sound level -> articulation
- articulation: articulatory instructions
- dissociation between specifying the sounds of content words and specifying
the grammatical elements is important
Reading 402-426
Syntactic planning
- Bock 1982: word order in speech is determined by a number of factors that interact
- grammatical role assignment component of syntactic planning is controlled by
semantic-conceptual factors rather than by properties of words, e.g. length
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