A.
Words and Meaning
Numerous
findings, some anecdotal and some empirical, conclude that words and meanings
are related but separate entities. Three line of argument make the point :
- The translation argument, suggest that any given language includes some words that not depend meaning for their existence and some meanings for which there are not single word.
- Argument for a separation of words and meaning comes from the imperfect mapping illustration.
- Argument for treating word and meanings as separate comes from the elasticity demonstration, which illustrates that a word meaning can change in different contexts
B. Study of Words
In this section on words. Psychologist have used a variety of experimental
techniques to the study these issues. Let us first turn to a discussion of the
theoretical issues that underlie this research.
1.
Word primitives
Let us begin
dissecting the sentence, the impartial judge ruled the defendants guilty.
Although the sentence is composed of only seven words, many of these words are
complex and contain affixes that convey important information.
Evidence about word primitives:
1.
Each word (even multimorphemic)
has its own lexical entry, know as a lexeme.
2.
Constituents morphemes are
individually stored in the lexicon so that words are decomposed or composed.
3.
Factors influencing word access
and organization
Some of these factors many
influence lexical access directly :
1.
Frequency
2.
Image ability and concreteness
and abstractness
3.
Grammatical class
4.
Semantics
5.
Models of lexical access
6.
Serial search models
7.
Parallel access models, which
are: Logogen model, Morton (1969,1979), Connectionist models, Cohort models.
8.
Separating words and meaning
C.
Sentence
Processing
One reason why can process speech so rapidly is our ability to
systematically make use of structure in natural language. Think for a moment of
a system “ sentence” in the abstract, a sentence following the
noun-verb-noun form. Think now of the “sentence” but in form of an
action, the first noun verbed the second noun.
1.
Statistical approximation to
English . you might as known that increasing the likelihood of words by
increasing contextual constraints, either with the sentences or with sentences
or with statistics approximation to English.
2.
Where do people pause when the
speak?. Clearly, listener know a great deal about the structure of their
narrative language
D.
Syntactic
Processing
Transformational
grammar is to find the difference between surface structure and deep structure,
and different between competence and performance.
- Syntactic resolution is necessary for comprehension
- Surface structure versus deep structure
- Competence versus performance
- Syntactic structure of sentences
E. Sentence Parsing and Syntactic
Ambiguity
Ambiguity or fallacy
of ambiguity is a word, phrase, or statement which contains more than one
meaning. Ambiguous words or statements lead to vagueness and confusion, and shape
the basis for instances of unintentional humor. For instance, it is ambiguous
to say “I rode a black horse in red pajamas,” because it may lead us to think
the horse was wearing red pajamas. The sentence becomes clear when it is
restructured “Wearing red pajamas, I rode a black horse.”
According R.C. Dick ambiguity is uncertainty among specific alternatives.
A word in context can mean more than the isolated word; and can also mean less
than the isolated word - more, because in context the word acquires new context
and, at the same time, less, because the word is delimited by that context.
Although the words of a document are normally to be construed in their ordinary
and natural meaning, the words should be construed in their context as part of
the document as a whole, rather than in either their strict etymological sense
or their popular meaning apart from that context.
If a sentence is ambiguous, it can have more than one meaning. There are
many types of ambiguity. For example, in the following sentence the word bank
could mean the edge of a river, or a financial institution:
John went to
the bank. (This is called lexical ambiguity because it is the result of
one of the words having more than one possible meaning)
They are
called Garden Path Sentences because they are easily misunderstood (they
lead you down the garden path) even though they are all grammatical! Don't
worry if some of these sentences seem like nonsense at first (you have been
garden pathed); they will be explained below.
1.
The prime number few.
2.
Fat people eat accumulates.
3.
The cotton clothing is usually made
of grows in Mississippi.
4.
Until the police arrest the drug
dealers control the street.
5.
The man who hunts ducks out on
weekends.
There are
two types of ambiguous sentence: either there is a local ambiguity (one
that is cleared up once you have heard the whole sentence) or it is a global
ambiguity (one that remains even after the entire sentence has been heard).
Garden Path sentences normally have local ambiguity.
1. Locally
ambiguous: The old train.
"Train"
could be a noun ("The old train left the station") or a verb
("The old train the young").
2. Globally
ambiguous: I know more beautiful women than Julia Roberts.
This could mean "I know women more beautiful than Julia Roberts" or "I know more beautiful women than Julia Roberts does".
This could mean "I know women more beautiful than Julia Roberts" or "I know more beautiful women than Julia Roberts does".
F.
Models
of Sentence Parsing
Parsing is the assignment of the
words in a sentence to their appropriate linguistic categories to allow
understanding of what is being conveyed by the speaker. It is not simply the
assignment of words to simple diagrams or categories, but also involves evaluating
the meaning of a sentence according to the rules of syntax drawn by inferences
made from each word in the sentence. This evaluation of meaning is what makes
parsing such a complex process. When speech or text is being parsed, each word
in a sentence is examined and processed to contribute to the overall meaning
and understanding of the sentence as a whole.
There are two
main theories for parsing of the English language.
a.
Garden Path Model: Minimal Attachment
b.
Constraint Satisfaction Models
The Garden
Path model is a dominant theory in about how people are able to parse words
together to interpret the meaning of statements. The title of the theory is
based on a metaphor about being lead down the wrong path. In regards to
psycholinguistics, a person can be lead down the wrong path while reading a
sentence when they make inaccurate assumptions about the context of the noun
phrases. The reader is not aware that they are being lead down the wrong path.
At the beginning of the sentence, or the path, the reader is under the
impression that they are proceeding in the right direction with the syntactic
structure and making the correct assumptions as they are reading. Then
suddenly, new information presented later on in the sentence causes the reader
to fall down the rabbit hole. This new information causes confusion because, up
until that rabbit hole, the reader assumed they were correct in their
perception of the garden path.
The
assumption behind this theory is that the reader perceives the sentence as
being set in only one context. There is a failure to perceive that there may be
another context or way to interpret the sentence based on the noun phrases. The
reader remains confident in their perceived judgement and assumes they are
right. Garden path sentences create confusion as the reader's preconceived
judgments are shattered (van Gompel et. al., 2006).
There are
generally three alternative ways how a person could perceive a sentence:
1.
Assemble a structure for just one of
the possible interpretations and ignore all others (like the garden path model)
2.
Take into consideration all of the
possible interpretations for the noun phrase at the same time
3.
Complete a partial analysis, with
minimal commitment to one perception, waiting to make a final decision until more
information is obtained.
a. Principles that Guide the
Garden Path Model
There are two principles of the Garden Path Model
which explain how incorrect assignment of roles in a sentence can create
confusion.
1.
Late Closure
This parsing error is when the new words and phrases
that are creating confusion to be attached to the already open phrase (a phrase
that is already being processed).
An example of this type of error is: The horse raced
past the barn fell.
2.
Minimal
Attachment
This is when
the reader uses the simplest strategy to help understand the sentence. It is a
strategy of parsimony, where the simplest strategy is seen as being the most
accurate, and therefore, the best. Minimal attachment causes each incoming word
to be attached to the already existing structure.
b. Challenges to the Garden Path Model
The Gardent
Path Model is not the only model to explain Parsing. Listed below are some
other models to explain how parsing may occur and other challenges to the
Garden Path theory in general.
1. Constraint Satisfaction Model
This model states that the reader uses all of the available information at once when engaging in parsing of a sentence. This means that all lexical, syntactic, discourse and contextual information is taken into consideration simultaneously. According to this model, readers use all the information that they have, all the time. This is considered parallel processing, due to the multiple structures that are used.
2. Dependency Locality Theory
This theory argues that the reader prefers to attach information to local nodes rather then long distance nodes. This is based on amount of working memory required to fully understand a sentence. An increase in the amount of working memory needed to make sense of a sentence is correlated with an increased tendency for the reader to parse locally rather then to use long distance nodes. The theory of locality is crucial to this concept, stating that the cost of integrating two elements together directly depends on the distance between the two (Gibson, 2000).
3. Competition Model
The majority of theories are based on how people parse English. In different languages, cues may be weighted differently depending on the language in regards to how much they are relied on to parse the language in question. For example, speakers of the English language rely heavily on world order, while Hungarian speakers do not. Language processing is a series of competitions between lexical items, phonological forms and syntactic patterns. There may be other important processing items that are not considered in the Garden Path or any other model specifically because it is not used in the English language. More research has to be completed to compare other language parsing to determine if one theory can simply encompass all languages (MacWhinney & Bates, 1993).
G. Meaning: The Goal of Sentence Processing
The goal of sentence processing is
to arrive at the meaning of the sentence. In formal terms, this means
determining the semantic relationship between the rapidly arriving words.
The goal of sentence processing is
to arrive at the meaning of the sentence. This means determining the semantic
relationship between the rapidly arriving words. The recognition sentences bore
four possible relationships to the target sentence:
a.
The identical sentence
b.
Active/ passive change
c.
Formal change
d.
Semantic change
H.
Is
Syntax Processed Separately From Meaning?
At the time when modern
psycholinguistic was first developing, psychology as a whole was largely
dominated by “serial” models of mental operations. The possibility of massively
parallel computers and neural network modeling was still beyond the horizontal.
In terms of language processing, it
is common to see four-stage model that followed the distinctions in general
linguistics i.e
a.
At the level of phonology
(the sound patterns of words)
b.
Lexical processing (
word identity or activation
c.
Syntactic processing (
determination of grammatical structure)
d.
Semantic processing
(processing of the full utterance for
meaning)
e.
The principle of
syntactic autonomy proposed that syntactic processing must proceed, and thus
the conducted independently from the semantic analysis of a sentence, where
functional relationship are determined and meaning of the utterance becomes
available.
I.
The
Role of Prosody In Sentence Processing
Prosody
is a general term form the variety of acoustic features-what we hear-that
ordinarily accompany a spoken sentence. One prosodic feature is the intonation
pattern of a sentence.
The prosodic feature are: the
intonation pattern of sentence, word stress, the pauses that sometimes occur at
the ends of sentence or major clauses, the lengthening of final vowels in words
immediately prior to a clauses boundary
Prosody
plays numerous important roles in language processing; prosody can indicate the
mood of the speaker, the semantic focus of a sentence, to disambiguate the
meaning of an otherwise ambiguous sentence, and to mark major clauses of the
sentence
J.
On-Line
Interactive of Sentence Processing
1.
An interactive view of sentence
processing begins with bottom-up processing which refers to the way in which
listeners sensory apparatus detect and analysis the acoustic speech signal and
processes it up.
2.
The term top-down processing refers
to the potential use of such knowledge in order to speed, clarify, or otherwise
facilitate the processing of emerging information from bottom-up sources.
3.
On-line interactive models believe
that all language processing inherently interactive, even when the signal
clarity is good assume that semantic processing co-occurs with syntactic
processing as the speech is being heard
Support from
prior context that spoken sentences can be processed so rapidli.
- Shadowing and gating student.
- How on-line is gating?. The process we wish to understand, of course, is the real-time analysis of the speech input and the automated “core process” involved in language understanding.
K.
Comprehension
of Non Literal Meaning
A distinction
important to a discussion of sentence processing is the distinction between the
literal meaning of an utterance and cases where sentence also have non literal
meaning. For example: sarcasm, idioms, metaphors, and indirect request
A three stages
process is a theory in assuming how non-literal meaning is processed:
a.
The individual
determines the literal meaning of the sentence
b.
The individual
determines whether the literal meaning seems appropriate to the context and
c.
Circumstance
surrounding the utterance and seeks a non-literal interpretation
L.
The
Role of Memory in Language Processing
In 1887, Jacobs published a series of studies in which
he reported that older children could repeat longer strings of digits read out
to them than younger children. Jacobs also reported that intelligent children
(as assessed by the teacher) could repeat more digits than less intelligent
children. This idea was picked up by Binet and Simon in the early 20th century
when they developed the first valid intelligence test. They found that 3-year
old children could repeat only sequences of two digits, whereas children of 4
years could repeat sequences of three digits, and most healthy children of 7
years could repeat sequences of five digits.
Therefore, Binet and Simon included digit repetition
in their intelligence test (Binet & Simon, 1905). Ever since, the digit
span task (as it became called) has been part of intelligence tests, because it
correlates reasonably well with the scores of other subtests of intelligence
(such as arithmetic, general information, and the discovery of similarities).
The task received further impetus when Miller (1956) argued it was a good
measure of a person’s short-term memory capacity. An important publication in
this respect was the working memory model of Baddeley and Hitch (1974). This
model consisted of three parts:
1.
Modality-free central executive
related to attention
2.
A phonological loop holding
information in a speech-based form, and
3.
A visuo-spatial sketchpad for the
coding of visual and spatial information. A further milestone was the
publication by Daneman and Working Memory and Language.
M.
A
Processing Model of Sentence Comprehension
This models proposes that in active speech perception (or in
reading), linguistic input in processed in cycles on a segment-by-segment
basis. In active speech
perception( in reading) linguistics input is processed in cycles on segment by
segment basis The propositions
most important to the message structure are selected and other propositions
connected to them are selected on basis of shared argumen`ts.
REFERENCE
Gaskell, M.
Gareth. 2012. The
Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics. Ney York: Oxford University Press.
R.C. Dick Legal Drafting in Plain Language 3rd edn.
Carswell, Thomas Professional Publishing, Ontario, Canada, 1995,
