PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

1
PSY 369 Psycholinguistics

• Language Production Comprehension
• Conversation Dialog

2
Dialog is the key

• Why so little research on dialog?
• Most linguistic theories were developed to
  account for sentences in de-contextualized
  isolation
• Dialog doesnt fit the competence/performance
  distinction well
• Hard to do experimentally
• Conversations are interactive and largely
  unplanned
• Pickering and Garrod (2004)
• Proposed that processing theories of language
  comprehension and production may be flawed
  because of a focus on monologues

3
Processing models of dialog

• Pickering and Garrod (2004)

• Interactive alignment model
• Alignment of situation models is central to
  successful dialogue
• Alignment at other levels is achieved via priming
• Alignment at one level can lead to alignment at
  another
• Model assumes parity of representations for
  production and comprehension

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Assumptions of the model

• 1. Alignment of situation models comes about via
  an automatic, resource-free priming mechanism
• 2. Representational parity between comprehension
  and production
• 3. Alignment at one level leads to alignment at
  other (interconnected) levels
• 4. There is no need for explicit
  perspective-taking in routine language processing

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Assumptions of the model

• 1. Alignment of situation models comes about via
  an automatic, resource-free priming mechanism

Garrod Anderson (1987) The maze game

• Pairs played a co-operative computer game
• Move position markers through a maze of boxes
  connected by paths
• Each player can only see his/her own start, goal
  and current positions
• Some paths blocked by gates (obstacles) which are
  opened by switches
• Gates and switches distributed differently for
  each player
• Players must help their partner to move to switch
  positions, to change the configuration of the maze

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Assumptions of the model

• 1. Alignment of situation models comes about via
  an automatic, resource-free priming mechanism

Garrod Anderson (1987) The maze game
1-----B .... Tell me where you are? 2-----A Ehm
Oh God (laughs) 3-----B (laughs) 4-----A
Right two along from the bottom one
up 5-----B Two along from the bottom, which
side? 6-----A The left going from left to
right in the second box. 7-----B You're in the
second box. 8-----A One up (1 sec.) I take it
we've got identical mazes? 9-----B Yeah well
right, starting from the left, you're one
along 10----A Uh-huh 11----B and one
up? 12----A Yeah, and I'm trying to get to ...
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Assumptions of the model

• 1. Alignment of situation models comes about via
  an automatic, resource-free priming mechanism

Garrod Anderson (1987) The maze game
41----B You are starting from the left, you're
one along, one up? (2 sec.) 42----A Two along
I'm not in the first box, I'm in the second
box 43----B You're two along 44----A Two up
(1 sec.) counting the if you take the first
box as being one up 45----B (2 sec.) Uh-huh
46----A Well I'm two along, two up (1.5
sec.) 47----B Two up ? 48----A Yeah (1
sec.) so I can move down one 49----B Yeah I
see where you are
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Assumptions of the model

• 1. Alignment of situation models comes about via
  an automatic, resource-free priming mechanism

Garrod Anderson (1987) The maze game

• Path descriptions (36.8)
• See the bottom right, go two along and two up
• Co-ordinate descriptions (23.4)
• Im at C4
• Line descriptions (22.5)
• Im one up on the diagonal from bottom left to
  top right
• Figural descriptions (17.3)
• See the rectangle at the bottom right, Im in the
  top left corner of that

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Assumptions of the model

• 1. Alignment of situation models comes about via
  an automatic, resource-free priming mechanism

Garrod Anderson (1987) The maze game

• Pairs converge on different ways of describing
  spatial locations
• Entrainment on a particular conceptualization of
  the maze
• But little explicit negotiation
• Entrainment increases over the course of a game
• Description schemes as local languages
• Rules for mapping particular expressions onto
  interpretations with respect to a common
  discourse model
• Once the meaning of a particular expression is
  fixed, players try to avoid an ambiguous use of
  that expression

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Assumptions of the model

• 1. Alignment of situation models comes about via
  an automatic, resource-free priming mechanism

Garrod Anderson (1987) The maze game

• Entrainment emerges from a simple heuristic
• Formulate your output using the same rules of
  interpretation as those needed to understand the
  most recent input
• Representations used to comprehend an utterance
  are recycled during subsequent production
• Leads to local consistency
• Helps to establish a mutually satisfactory
  description scheme with least collaborative effort

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Assumptions of the model

• 2. Representational parity between comprehension
  and production

• Parity important for interactive alignment
• We dont go around repeating other peoples
  utterances!
• Comprehension-to-production priming (BPC, 2000)
• Priming from sentences which were only heard
• Suggests that representations shared across
  modalities
• Equivalent to production-to-production effects?
• E.g. Bock (1986), syntactic priming in language
  production tasks

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Assumptions of the model

• 3. Alignment at one level leads to alignment at
  other (interconnected) levels

Bigger priming effect when the prime noun is
semantically related to the noun in the target

• Cleland Pickering (2003)
• Semantic boost
• Primes either pre (the red sheep) or post
  nominally (the sheep that is red) modified NPs
• Same (sheep to sheep), semantically related (goat
  to sheep), unrelated (knife to sheep)

• Branigan, Pickering, Cleland (2000)
• Lexical boost similar effect with same verb

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Assumptions of the model

• 4. There is no need for explicit
  perspective-taking in routine language processing

• If communication is successful, interlocutors
  situation models come to overlap
• Implicit common ground
• Overlap may be small to begin with
• But via alignment, it increases over the course
  of a conversation
• What looks like audience design is simply a
  by-product of good alignment
• Full common ground only consulted when there are
  sufficient processing resources available

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Summary

• People use language for doing things with each
  other, and their use of language is itself a
  joint action. Clark (1996, pg387)
• Conversation is structured
• But, that structure depends on more than one
  individual
• Models of language use (production and
  comprehension) need to be developed within this
  perspective
• Interactive Alignment model is a new theory
  attempting to do just this

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Review for Exam 4

• Chapters 13, 14, 15 (read 16 for interest, but I
  wont test on it)
• Same format as the last 3 exams
• General topics
• Language Production
• Conversation dialog
• I have fixed the link to the review sheet

16
Review for Exam 4

• Language production
• Paradox form over meaning is preserved
• Speech errors - observational experimental
• Tip-of-the-tongue
• Lexical bias
• Grammaticality constraint
• Models of speech production
• Levelts model
• Dells model
• Lexical bias effect, mixed errors