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Planning Units
Application and Misapplication
of Rules
Lexical Selection
Daniela lIZETH oRTÍZ MARTÍNEZ
28.09.2022
Lexical Access and Word
Recognition
Bottom-up and Top-down
Models
Speech Perception
The Speech Signal
Language Processing and The Human Brain
The Human Mind at Work
Speech Production
Syntactic Processing
Comprehension
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Transcript

Comprehension

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Syntactic Processing

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Speech Production

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The Human Mind at Work

Language Processing and The Human Brain

The Speech Signal

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Speech Perception

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Bottom-up and Top-down Models

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Lexical Access and Word Recognition

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Daniela lIZETH oRTÍZ MARTÍNEZ28.09.2022

Lexical Selection

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Application and Misapplication of Rules

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Planning Units

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Understanding a sentence involves analysis at many levels. =>To understand the individual speech sounds we hear, it can be helpful to have some knowledge of the signal. Speech sounds can be described in physical or acoustic terms:

  • Physically: a sound is produced whenever there is a disturbance of air molecules. There are sounds we cannot hear because our ears are not sensitive to the full range of frequencies.
  • Acoustic phonetics: concerned with speech sounds, all of which can be heard by the normal human ear.
The sounds we produce can be described in terms of how fast the variations of the air pressure occur.
  • Fundamental frequency of the sounds: perceived by the hearer as a pitch.
When the vocals cords vibrate, they produce a series of harmonics.
  • Harmonics: a special frequency that is a multiple of the fundamental frequency.
  • Intensity: determines the loudness of the sound.
  • Quality of the speech sound: determined by the shape of the vocal tract when air is flowing through it.
Computer programs can be used to decompose the speech signal into its frequency components. When fed, an image of the speech signal is displayed. The patterns produced are called spectograms or voiceprints.

Speech is a continuous signal. In natural speech, sounds overlap and influence each other. A central problem of speech perception:

  • Segmentation problem: explain how listeners carve up the continuous speech signal into meaningful units. Words and syntactic units are seldom surrounded by boundaries, such as pauses, and words are units of perception.
Another challenge:
  • Lack of invariance problem: understand how the listener manages to recognize particular speech sounds when they are spoken by different people and when they occur in different contexts.
Listeners are able to understand what they hear because our speech perception mechanisms are designed to overcome the variability and lack of discreteness in the speech signals. Experimental results show that listeners calibrate their perceptions to control for speaker differences and can quickly adapt to foreign-accented or distorted speech. The acoustic cues help listeners identify phonological units in the signal regardless of the speaker, the units we perceive depend on the language we know, especially its phonemic inventory.
  • Categorical perception: speakers perceive physically distinct stimuli as belonging to the same category because their perception are assisted by knowledge of the underlying classificatory system.
The lexical access (word recognition): a process in which listeners use their lexical knowledge to identify words in the signal.

Language comprehension is very fast and automatic. We can process spoken language at a rate of around twenty phonemes per second.

  • Parallel processing: successful language comprehension that requires a lot of operation taking place at once.
Psycholinguists suggest that perception and comprehension must involve both:
  • Bottom-up processing: moves step-by-step from the incoming acoustic signal, to phonemes, morphemes, words and phrases, and to semantic interpretation.
  • Top-down processing: the listener relies on higher-level semantic, syntactic, and contextual information to analyze the acoustic signal.
Psycholinguists try to determine the extent to which comprehension is based solely on the acoustic signal (bottom up) and how much help comes from contextual (sentence or discourse) information (top down).

Semantically related words are activated or primed during lexical retrieval. Word substitutions: are seldom random, they show that in our attempt to express our thoughts, we may make an incorrect lexical selection based on partial similarity or relatedness of meanings. Blends: in which we produce part of one word and part of another, illustrate how we may select two or more words to express our thoughts and instead of deciding between them, we produce them as "portmanteaus".

  • In comprehension: lexical retrieval is affected by the number of words that are phonologically related to the target.
  • In production: speakers often make speech errors involving the substitution of a word that is phonologically related to the target but unrelated in meaning.
Many of the same factors that influence the listener in comprehension also affect the speaker in production-semantic and phonological relatedness of words, and word frequency.

Spontaneous errors show that the rules of morphology and syntax are also applied (or misapplied) when we speak. Errors may also involve inflectional rules. We also see evidence of the order of application of morphophonemic rules in production. Consider the a/an alteration rule.

Sounds within words and words within sentences are linearly ordered, speech errors, or slips of the tongue show that the prearticulation stages involve units larger than the single phonemic segment or even the word.

  • Spoonerism:
Speech errors show that features, segments, words, and phrases may be conceptualized well before they are uttered.
  • Syntactic structures: exist independently of the words that occupy them.
  • Intonation contours: can be mapped without being associated with particular words.
Phonological errors involving segments or features, primarily occur in content words, showing the distinction between these lexical classes. In addition, free morphemes may be interchanged, bound morphemes may not be. When we speak, words are chosen and sequenced ahead of when they are articulated, planning also goes on at the sentence level. More planning goes into sentences that have a less common word order than into sentences with subject-verb-object word order. Interestingly, speakers are more likely to produce a passive sentence after hearing a passive. Researchers believe that once a particular structure has been built, it remains "active" in memory and facilitates the subsequent building of a similar structure. Speakers must also combine simple sentences into complex structures. Studies of speakers' hesitations show that planning for complex structures happens at the beginning of clauses.

Understanding a sentence involves recognizing its individual words. The listener must determine the syntactic relations among the words and phrases. This mental process (parsing), is governed by the rules of the grammar and influenced by the sequential nature of language. Listeners build a structural representation of a sentence as they hear it. They must decide for each incoming word what is grammatical category is and how it fits into the structure. Often sentences present "temporary ambiguities" such as a word or words that belong to more than one syntactic category. Sophisticated laboratory procedures that track the reader's eye movements can pinpoint difficult regions of the sentence and can see when the reader regresses to an earlier part of the sentence. Sentences that induce this backtracking effect are called garden path sentences. The initial structural choices that lead people astray may reflect general principles that are used by the mental parser to deal with syntactic ambiguity. Principles:

  • Minimal attachment: build the simplest structure consistent with the grammar of the language.
  • Late closure: attach incoming material to the phrase that is being processed.
The syntactic parsing of sentences depends on different sources of information. The parser depends on the grammar to inform it as to how the incoming words can be grouped together. Memory constraints: a form of structure juggling that is difficult to perform, we don't have enough of the right kind of memory capacity to keep track of all the necessary items. The ability to comprehend what is said to us is a complex psychological process.

Psycholinguists have conducted a great deal of research on lexical access or word recognition, the process by which we obtain information about the meaning and syntactic properties of a word from our mental lexicon. Different techniques in studies of lexical access:

  • Ask whether a string of letters or sounds is or isn't a word. Subjects must respond by pressing one button if the stimulus is an actual word, and a different button if it isn't, so they are making a lexical decision.
During these experiments , measurements of response time (RT) is taken. This measurements show that lexical access depends to some extent on the word's frequency of usage. Lexical decision tasks provide information about how we use our phonological knowledge in lexical access. The speed with which a listener can retrive a particular word depends on the size of the word's phonological "neighborhood".
  • Neighborhood: compromised of all the words that are phonologically similar to the target word.
Psycholinguists believe that each word in the mental lexicon is associated with a "resting level of activation". Effects:
  • Semantic priming: words can be activated by hearing semantically related words.
  • Morphological priming: a morpheme of a multimorphemic sword primes a related word.
Lexical ambiguities also provide important insights into how listeners access the mental lexicon, ambiguous words require more processing resources.

  • The listener's job: decode the intended meaning of a message from the speech signal produced by a speaker.
  • The speaker's job: encode an idea into an utterance using speech sounds and words, organized according to the grammatical structures of the language.

The different kinds of breakdowns in performance, such as tip of the tongue phenomena, speech errors, and failure to comprehend tricky sentences, can tell us a great deal about the processes people normally use in speaking and understanding language.

Psycholinguistics: the area of linguistics that is concerned with linguistic performance in speech production and comprehension. The human brain:

  • Acquires and stores the mental lexicon and grammar.
  • Access that linguistic storehouse to speak and understand language in real time.
When we speak:
  • We access our lexicon to find the words.
  • We use the rules of grammar to construct novel sentences and to produce the sounds that express them.
When we listen to speech:
  • We also access the lexicon and grammar to assign a structure and meaning to the sequence of words we hear.
The grammar relates sounds and meanings, and contains the units and rules of the language that make speech production and comprehension possible. Various mechanisms enable us to break the continuous stream of speech sounds into linguistic units in order to comprehend, and to compose sounds into words in order to produce meaningful speech. Other determine how we pull words from the mental lexicon and still others explain how we assamble these words into a structural representation. We have no difficulty understanding or producing sentences, however, we have experience of making a speech error, of having a word on the “tip of our tongue,” or of failing to understand a perfectly grammatical sentence The mismatch between grammaticality and interpretability tells us that language processing involves more than grammar.

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