PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

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PSY 369 Psycholinguistics

• Language Production
• Introduction

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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?

Read before
Jack scanned the newspaper. Jack looked through
the newspaper. Jack looked through the movie
ads. Jack looked over some editorials.
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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?

Read before
Jack scanned the newspaper. Jack looked through
the newspaper. Jack looked through the movie
ads. Jack looked over some editorials.
Similar meaning
Evidence for surface form
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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?

Read before
Jack scanned the newspaper. Jack looked through
the newspaper. Jack looked through the movie
ads. Jack looked over some editorials.
Evidence for Strong textbase
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Discourse in memory

• Kintch 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.
inconsistent
Evidence for Strong situation model
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Discourse in memory

• Kintch and colleagues (1990)

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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

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The Producers Problem

• The problem
• Expressing non-ordered conceptual message via
  ordered array of sounds.
• Start with a message (idea) and partition it,
  sequence it, and articulate it
• Which words
• How to order the words
• How to produce them (say or write or sign)
• But under several constraints, in real time.

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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.
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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

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What we do do

• Speakers must produce utterances with
• Appropriate meaningful content
• Appropriate lexical items
• Appropriate syntax - grammatical and appropriate
  word order and structure
• Appropriate pronunciation, intonation, and
  phrasing.
• And they must do this fluently, in real time.

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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.

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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).

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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).

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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

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Doing it in time

• Strongest constraint may be fluency
• have to get form right under time pressure.
• Incrementality
• Work with what youve got
• Flexibility allows speaker to say something
  quickly, also respond to changing environment.
• Modularity
• Work only with what youve got
• Regulate flow of information.

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Methodologies

• Production is intrinsically more difficult
  subject to study than language comprehension
• Not susceptible to experimental study?
• Solutions
• Evidence from other disciplines
• e.g., social psychology, linguistics, neurology,
  AI
• Cognitive psychology
• Historically observational methods
• Recently experimental methods

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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

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Methodologies

• Some research methods
• Observational
• Experimental

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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
• Timecourse
• How quickly do people produce language
• Neurophysiological
• How is language production represented in the
  brain?

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Methodologies Observational

• Naturally occurring speech

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Methodologies Observational

• Naturally occurring speech

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Methodologies Observational

• Naturally occurring speech errors

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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

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Methodologies Picture naming description

• Name these pictures

swan
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Picture naming description

• Name these pictures

swing
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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
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Picture-word interference task

• Name the picture (While ignoring the word)

tiger
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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 timecourse of processing?
• Are different areas/processes/timecourses
  associated with different aspects of production?

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Summary

• Language production requires assembling multiple
  levels of linguistic structure accurately and
  fluently, in real time.
• Language production in some ways harder to study
  than comprehension
• How to control input?
• Many methods
• keep propositional content constant
• create and study variations in processing
  mechanisms, rather than effects of variations in
  message itself.
• Problem remains what is relationship between
  conceptual and linguistic processing?
• New technologies offer new possibilities for
  tracing timecourse and neurophysiological
  underpinnings of language production

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An model of sentence production

• Three broad stages
• Conceptualisation
• deciding on the message ( meaning to express)
• Formulation
• turning the message into linguistic
  representations
• Grammatical encoding (finding words and putting
  them together)
• Phonological encoding (finding sounds and putting
  them together)
• Articulation
• speaking (or writing or signing)