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Psycholinguistics --- Lec.2
COMPREHENSION
COMPREHENSION OF SENTENCES
What are the processes people go
through in comprehending a sentence?
 How do they come to the right\wrong
interpretation.
 What sort of knowledge does the
process demand?

What is comprehension?
Two senses
 In its narrow sense it denotes the mental
processes by which listeners take in the
sounds uttered by a speaker and use
them to construct an interpretation of
what they think the speaker intended to
convey—the building of meanings from
sounds.

Ex.
The old man met his daughter’s husband.
 1. the sequence of words—their order—
what words denote in nature. What
constitute a unit.
 SURFACE STRUCTURE
 The words, their temporal order, their
grouping
 They have to build an interpretation.
 Ex. X met Y

The sound end of the process
 The meaning end of the process
 To build an interpretation that resembles
the underlying presentation of a sentence.
 A set of propositions plus their
interrrelations.

Comprehension in its broader sense.
 How listeners put the interpretation they
have built into work.
 An assertion
 A question
 An order
 So they have additional mental processes
that make use of the interpretation they
have constructed so far.

The two processes
The construction process
 The utilization process


They are linked
The construction process

Underlying presentation
Simple sentence
Sentence with
variables
John walks X walks
John hit Bill
Propositional
function
Walk (x)
X hit y
Hit (x,y)
Propositions
Arguments and predicates
 Agents-instruments-patients-objects

Constructing interpretations
Listeners take a linear sting of words and
construct a hierarchy or arrangement of
propositions.
 The old man met his daughter’s husband

Constituents
Immediate constituents
 Ultimate constituents
 Units—phrases or clauses
 Ex.
 The old man met his daughter’s husband

Constructing underlying
propositions
Constituent
 old man
 the old man

underlying proposition
man old
known
Preliminary outline
1. phonological representation
 2. they
organize the phonological
representation into constituents-content
and function
 3.They use constituents to construct
propositions.
 4. Retain them in working memory

Surface constituents
Studies from various viewpoints suggest
that listeners→
 1. Feel constituents to be conceptually
unified.
 2. use them in the organization of speech.
 3. store them in working memory.
 4. purge them from memory when a
sentence has ended.

The conceptual unity of
constituents
Constituents are replaceable.
 Constituents must have a conceptual
coherence.
 Ex.The boy has lost a dollar.

Constituents as aids in perception
Differences between native and second
language speakers.
 Does isolating constituents really help in
perception.
 Graf and Torrey (1966)

Form A
Form B
Studies
from various viewpoints
suggest that
listeners feel constituents
to be conceptually
unified.
Studies from various
viewpoints suggest that
listeners feel constituents
to be conceptually
unified.
Constituents in Working Memory

Once listeners have isolated constituents,
they should hold them verbatim as
constituents in working memory until
they have no more need for them—used
them
in
constructing
underlying
propositions
Ammon (1968)
The polite actor thanked the old woman
who carried the black umbrella
 PROBE-RESPONSE
 ((The (polite actor)) (thanked ((the (old
woman)) (who (carried (the (black
umbrella)))))))

Constituents in the Construction of
Propositions
How early in the listening process do
constituents normally become relevant?
 “the
unit of speech perception
corresponds to the constituents” (Fodor
and Bever (1965))
 In perception, units resist interruption to
preserve their integrity.
 Fodor and Bever’s experiment.
 (Click displacement)

Real-time Processing
Listeners have a limited capacity for
processing what they hear in the time
available.
 Ex. The Army officer met the young
troops.
 Foss (1969)
 The travelling bassoon player found
himself without funds in a strange town.
 The itinerant bassoon player found
himself without funds in a strange town.

Approaches to the Construction
Process
The constituents and their classifications
are something listeners infer about the
speech they hear.
 On what basis do they draw these
inferences?
 The syntactic approach
 The semantic approach

Syntactic Approaches to the Construction
Process—building up constituents.
Bever (1970)
 Fodor and Garrett (1967)
 Listeners have a command of mental
strategies by which they segment
sentences into constituents, classify the
constituents and construct semantic
representations.
 Ex.The old man met his friend

Varieties of Strategy I
Det. and quantifiers
 Prep.
 Pro.
 Aux.
 Relative pro.
 Comp.
 Subordinating conjunctions
 Coordinating conjunctions

Use of Function Words
 S1.
whenever you find a function
word, begin a new constituent larger
than one word.
 Ex.
 The man was leaving
 The problem with “that”
Anticipating content words
 S2. after
identifying the beginning of a
constituent, look for content words
appropriate to that type of
constituent.
 Ex.The dirty old man
 [[the]Det [dirty]Adj [old]Adj [man]
N ] NP
USE OF AFFIXES
 S3:
use affixes to help decide
whether a content word is a noun,
verb, adjective, or adverb.
 Ex. –ly, -ity, -er, -ness..etc
Use of verbs
S4: after encountering a verb, look for the
number and kind of arguments
appropriate to that verb.
 Ex.
 John hit Bill
 John believed …..[N] [S]

MEMORY CAPACITY
S5: try to attach each new word to the
constituent that came just before.
 Ex.
 The dog that was rabid came from New
York
 The dog came from New York that was
rabid
 The dog bit the fox that was rabid

CLAUSES
 S6:
use the first word or major
constituent of a clause to identify the
function of that clause in the current
sentence. Halliday (1970)
 S7:
assume the first clause to be a
main clause unless it is marked at or
prior to the main verb as something
other than a main clause.
VARIETIES OF STRATEGY 6
Adverbial clauses
 Relative clauses
 Complements
 Wh- questions
 Yes/no questions
 Imperatives
 Exclamations
 Assertions

EVAUATION OF THE SYNTACTIC
APPROACH
 It
accounts for certain difficulties that
arise from syntactic sources ( selfembedding, missing relative pronouns
..etc)
 Problems
 Listeners are assumed to make heavy
use of function words. But to be used
these must be identified from their
sounds alone.
SEMANTIC APPROCHES TO THE
CONSTRUCTION PROCESS
THE REALITY AND COOPERATIVE
PRINCIPLES
 MAKING SENSE OF SENTENCES
 ANTICIPATING CONSTITUENTS
 TYING SENTENCES TO CONTEXT
 USE OF WORD ORDER

THE REALITY AND COOPERATIVE
PRINCIPLES
The reality principle: is concerned with
the substance of a sentence, the ideas
being talked about.
 The cooperative principle: is concerned
with the way these ideas are expressed.

MAKING SENSE OF SENTENCES
S8: using content words alone, build
propositions that make sense and parse
the
sentence
into
constituents
accordingly.
 1. the vase that the maid that the agency
hired dropped broke on the floor.
 2. the dog that the cat that the girl fought
scolded approached the colt.

ANTICIPATING CONSTITUENTS
Listeners have special strategies for
searching for constituents and anticipating
ones to come.
 Ex.
 John put …..
 put (John, X,Y)
 Ex.
 Quickly
 Son
 In

S9

S9: Look for constituents that fit the
semantic
requirement
of
the
propositional function that underlies each
verb, noun, adjective, adverb and
preposition.
TYING SENTENCES TO CONTEST
S10: look for definite noun phrases that
refer to entities you know and replace
the interpretation of each noun phrase by
a reference to that entity directly.
 Ex.
 Sara and John climbed Mt. McKinley last
summer.
 She photograph the peak and he surveyed
it.

S11: on finding a definite noun phrase,
search memory for the entity it was
meant to refer to and replace the
interpretation of the noun phrase by a
reference to the entity directly.
 Ex.
 John said that Bill hit him
 John said that Mary hit him

Use of word order
S12: look for the first n-v-n sequence to
be an agent, action, and object, unless the
sequence is marked otherwise.
 **Passive clauses
 S13: look for the first two clauses to
describe the first of two events , and the
second clause to the second event, unless
they are marked otherwise.
 Given X new information

EVALUATION OF THE SEMANTIC
APPROACH
Advantages: The semantic approach
exploits content words and their
meaning.
 Disadvantages:
 EX.The girl picked the red flower
 Listeners need to find constituents that
reflect propositions.

Ambiguity
Ex.
 The farmer put the straw on a pile beside
his threshing machine.
