PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

1
PSY 369 Psycholinguistics

• Language Production
• Introduction

2
Homework 3 (Due in 1 week)

• Try to be vigilant for four or five days in
  noting speech errors made by yourself and others.
  Write each slip down (carry a small notebook and
  pencil with you). Then, when you have accumulated
  a reasonably size sample (aim for 20 to 30, but
  don't panic if you don't get that many), try to
  classify each slip in terms of
• the unit(s) involved
• the type of error
• Remember that each error may be interpreted in
  different ways. For some of them, see if you can
  come up with more than one possibility.

3
Discourse in memory

• Kintsch and colleagues (1990)

It was Friday night and Jack and Melissa
were bored, so they decided to catch a movie.
Jack scanned the newspaper. He saw that they
could just make the nine oclock showing of the
hot new romantic comedy. Off they went.

• Did this sentence occur in the paragraph?

Jack scanned the newspaper. Jack looked through
the newspaper. Jack looked through the movie
ads. Jack looked over some editorials.
4
Some of the big questions
the horse raced past the barn

• Production forms half of language ability
• Input to comprehension
• More difficult problem than comprehension?
• Developmental lag
• Learning a second language

5
What we dont do
Dr. C How much money is there in my current
account and in my deposit account? ltSILENCEgt Dr.
C Hello? ltSILENCEgt Computer Colourless green
ideas sleeeeeep furiously. Dr. C How much money
is there in my current account and in my deposit
account? ltSILENCEgt Computer Your current
a-ccount encompasses two hundred dollars. I
cannot access how..ltSILENCEgt.. in your deposit
account money much is there.
6
Undesirable features

• Meaningless and irrelevant content.
• Long silences, strange pausing.
• Infelicities of vocabulary and structure
• Your current account encompasses 200
• I cannot access how in your deposit account
  money much is there.
• Strange intonation and pronunciation
• Your current a-ccount
• Sleeeeeep

7
What we do do

• Expressing non-ordered conceptual message via
  ordered array of sounds.
• Start with a message (idea) and partition it,
  sequence it, and articulate it
• Speakers must produce utterances with
• Appropriate meaningful content, lexical items,
  syntax, pronunciation, intonation, and
  phrasing.
• And they must do this fluently, in real time.

8
Getting the form right

• Hearers
• Details of form can sometimes (often?) be ignored
  (e.g. missing words, not paying attention).
• Speakers
• Have to get every aspect of the form right,
  whether or not germane to message.

9
Getting the content wrong

• Paradox Adept at getting form right but content
  wrong
• Subject-verb agreement errors
• The report about the fires are very long
• Less than 5 errors in experiment designed to
  elicit them (Bock Miller 1991).

10
Getting the content wrong

• Paradox Adept at getting form right but content
  wrong
• Serious structural anomalies (unparseable)
• I cannot access how in your deposit account money
  much is there.
• 0.5 utterances (Deese 1984).

11
Getting the content wrong

• Paradox Adept at getting form right but content
  wrong
• Sound/word errors
• Can you put the desk back on my book when youve
  finished with it?
• Itll get fast a lot hotter if you put the burner
  on.
• Garnham et al 1982
• Sound errors 3.2/10,000 words
• Word errors 5.1/10,000 words

12
Methodologies

• Production is intrinsically more difficult
  subject to study than language comprehension
• Not susceptible to experimental study?
• Yes it is, but requires careful and clever
  methods
• Historically observational methods
• Recently experimental methods

13
Whats the problem?

• Comprehension
• Can control input precisely
• Moving from language to conceptual representation
• Production
• How do we control input?
• Moving from (unobservable) conceptual
  representation to language
• BUT end product is observable in production but
  not comprehension

14
Common Measures

• What people say
• Under which circumstances do they produce
  particular words, utterances etc
• May be intended, or may be errors
• How frequently do they do this
• Time course
• How quickly do people produce language
• Neurophysiological
• How is language production represented in the
  brain?

15
Methodologies Observational

• Naturally occurring speech

16
Methodologies Observational

• Naturally occurring speech

17
Methodologies Observational

• Naturally occurring speech errors

18
Experimental approaches

• Not prey to same problems as observational
  studies
• Reduces observer bias
• Isolates phenomenon of interest
• Increases potential for systematic observation
• Different problems!
• How to control input and output?
• Input ecological validity problem (controlling
  thoughts)
• Output controlling responses
• Response specification - artificiality
• Exuberant responding loss of data

19
Picture naming description

• Name these pictures

swan
20
Picture naming description

• Name these pictures

swing
21
Picture naming description
Describe the action in this picture
The girl is throwing a ball to the boy
The girl is throwing the boy a ball
22
Picture-word interference task

• Name the picture (While ignoring the word)

tiger
23
Neurophysiological Measures

• Recent technological developments allow research
  on neurophysiological aspects of production.
• ERPs, fMRI, PET,
• Which areas of the brain are involved?
• What is the time course of processing?
• Are different areas/processes/timecourses
  associated with different aspects of production?

24
The case of Speech Errors

• What errors tell us about correct speech
• Observational and experimental approaches

Recommended reading Um Slips, Stumbles, and
Verbal Blunders, and What they Mean, by Michael
Erard (2007)
25
Speech Errors -Spoonerisms

• Reverend Dr. William Archibald Spooner,
  1844-1930.
• Lecturer, tutor, and dean at Oxford university
  famous for speech errors
• Some famous examples

Nosey little cook
FOR ... Cosy little nook
FOR ... Battle ships and cruisers
Cattle ships and bruisers
..well have the hags flung out
FOR ... ..well have the flags hung out
FOR ... .. youve wasted two terms
youve tasted two worms
FOR ... customary to kiss the bride
kisstomary to cuss the bride.
26
Speech errors

• Shift one segment disappears from its
  appropriate location and appears somewhere else.
  The thing that shifts moves from one element to
  another of the same type

..in case she decide FOR ...in case she
decides to hits it. to hit it
27
Speech errors

• Exchange in effect double shifts, since 2
  linguistic units change places

You have hissed all my mystery lectures FOR ..
You have missed all my history lectures
your model renosed. FOR ..your nose remodelled.
28
Speech errors

• Anticipation in anticipation of a forthcoming
  segment, we replace an earlier segment with the
  later segment

It's a meal mystery FOR .. It's a real mystery
..bake my bike. FOR .. take my bike.
29
Speech errors

• Perseverance an earlier segment replaces a later
  one (while also being articulated in its correct
  location)

• give the goy FOR .. give the boy

..he pulled a pantrum. FOR ..he pulled a tantrum.
30
Speech errors

• Addition something is added to the target
  utterance

• I didnt explain it clarefully enough

FOR I didnt explain it carefully enough.
31
Speech errors

• Blends occur when more than one word is being
  considered, and the two blend into a single item

• didnt bother me FOR didnt bother me
• in the sleast. in the
  least/slightest.

32
Speech errors

• Deletion something is omitted

..mutter intelligibly. FOR ..mutter
unintelligibly.
33
Speech errors

• Substitutions (malapropisms) when one segment is
  replaced by an intruder, but this differs from
  the other types of errors since the intruder may
  not occur at all in the intended sentence

Jack is the president FOR Jack is
the subject of the sentence. of the
sentence. Im stuttering FOR Im
studying psycholinguistics.
psycholinguistics.
34
Speech error regularities

• What can we learn from speech errors?

• Look for regularities in the patterns of errors

35
Speech error regularities

• What can we learn from speech errors?

• If we look at the shift error

a maniac for weekends.
FOR a weekend for maniacs.

• From this we can infer that
• Speech is planned in advance.
• Accommodation to the phonological environment
  takes place (plural pronounced /z/ instead of
  /s/).
• Order of processing is
• Selection of morpheme ? error ? application of
  phonological rule

36
Speech error regularities

• What can we learn from speech errors?

• Stress exchange

econ 'om ists FOR e con omists

• From this we can infer that
• Stress may be independent and may simply move
  from one syllable to another (unlikely
  explanation).
• The exchange may be the result of competing plans
  resulting in a blend of
• e con omists and econ 'omics.

37
Speech error regularities

• What can we learn from speech errors?

• bat a tog FOR pat a dog

• Is this a double substitution (/b/ for /p/ and
  /t/ for /d/)?
• /p/ and /t/ are vocieless plosives and /b/ and
  /d/ voiced plosives
• Better analysed as a shift of the phonetic
  feature voicing.

• From this we can infer that
• Indicates that phonetic features are
  psychologically real - phonetic features must be
  units in speech production.

38
Speech error regularities

• What can we learn from speech errors?

• Consonant-vowel rule consonants never exchange
  for vowels or vice versa
• Suggests that vowels and consonants are separate
  units in the planning of the phonological form of
  an utterance.
• Errors produce legal non-words.
• Suggests that we use phonological rules in
  production.
• Lexical bias effect spontaneous (and
  experimentally induced) speech errors are more
  likely to result in real words than non-words.
• Grammaticality effect elaborate here

39
Speech error regularities

• What can we learn from speech errors?

• That speech is planned in advance - anticipation
  and exchange errors indicate speaker has a
  representation of more than one word.
• Substitutions indicate that the lexicon is
  organised phonologically and semantically.
  Substitutions appear to occur after syntactic
  organisation as substitutions are always from the
  same grammatical class (noun for noun, verb for
  verb etc.).
• External influences - situation and personality
  also influence speech production.