Psycholinguistics

• Language processing


  Comprehension including Word processing, Syntactic processing, and Production
• Comprehension


  The ability to understand completely and be familiar with a situation, facts, etc.
• Average speech rate is around 150 words per minute
• Reading rate tends to be higher: 180-200 words per minute
• Language processing


  Incremental: happen fast
• Psycholinguistics


  Studies the linguistic performance in speech comprehension and production, also called language processing
• Linguistic competence


  The language we have for particular structure
• Linguistic performance


  The ability to access the linguistic storehouse to speak and understand language in real time
• Language processing

  is a highly complex but also very rapid process
• Processing stages/levels


  1. Phonetic processing

  2. Lexical processing

  3. Morphological processing

  4. Syntactic processing

  5. Semantic processing

  6. Pragmatic processing
• Processing is parallel in that all processes occur quasi-simultaneously
• Word frequency


  More commonly used words are responded to more quickly than rarely encountered words
• Semantic priming


  Word recognition is faster when the meaning of the word maps with the form
• Syntactic processing


  Figuring out the syntactic and semantic relations among the words and phrases in a sentence
• Ambiguity


  Many strings contain some ambiguity of interpretation
• Garden path sentences


  Sentences that initially seem to have one structure but then turn out to have a different one
• Speech errors


  Errors at different levels of language processing: phonological, syntactic, semantic
• Speech errors provide evidence for the psychological reality of phones, morphemes, and syntactic units
• Linguistic Relativity: Different languages offer people different ways of expressing the world around them, they think and speak differently
• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis


  The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts
• The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is that language determines thought and linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories
• The weak version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions
• Eskimo languages have an unusually large number of words for snow, while English has a single word 'snow'
• language processing

  includes :

  1. speech input,
  2. processing mechanisms + linguistic knowledge,
  3. other sources of information (the contexts in which the speech situation is taking place and knowledge about the world we live in (pragmatics) ,information about what has been said so far (discourse)(top-down information))
  4. final outcome: the meaning of the speech wave
• syntactic problem

  includes ambiguity, garden path sentences
• Ambiguity e.g "That" can be a

  1. deictic noun
  2. determiner
  3. complementizer
• Why people have ambiguity

  1. memory representations decay
  2. discourse processing interferes with past discourse processing
• Speech errors

  1. anticipations: substitutions of upcoming units(sidewalk ➜ widewalk)
  2. perseverations: repetition of preceding unit (walk the beach ➜ walk the beak)
  3. addition (spic and span ➜ spic and splan)
  4. deletion (his immortal soul ➜ his immoral soul)
  5. metathesis / exchanges (fill the pool ➜ fool the pill)