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WORD RECOGNTION (Sereno, 2/06)
I. Introduction to psycholinguistics
II. Basic units of language
III. Word recognition
IV. Word frequency & lexical ambiguity
I. Introduction to Psycholinguistics
A. Properties of language
B. What does it mean to study language?
C. Competence / Performance
examples of language use
I. Introduction to Psycholinguistics
A. Properties of language
Human Language = flexible, symbol-based and
rule-based mode of communication that permits
conveyance of any kind of information. Its
properties include:
Creative – a limitless # of thoughts can be expressed
in a limitless # of ways.
Structured – sounds are combined into words, and words
into sentences according to rules (i.e., grammar).
vhierarchical
I. Introduction to Psycholinguistics
A. Properties of language
Meaningful – ideas are conveyed by individual words
and how they are organised into sentences.
v Ex:
The cat ate the dog.
The dog ate the cat.
Referential – it refers to and describes things and events
in the world.
Interpersonal / Communicative – it has a social function.
I. Introduction to Psycholinguistics
B. What does it mean to study language?
Linguistics = structure of language
phonetics, syntax, semantics, cross-language
comparisons, language universals
Psycholinguistics = processing of language
understanding the mechanisms of language behavior
e.g., normal adult comprehension and production of
language; neurolinguistics; language acquisition;
language in non-humans
I. Introduction to Psycholinguistics
B. What does it mean to study language?
Socio-linguistics = social aspects of language
Linguistic factors, such as ...
voice pitch, pronunciation (dialect),
word choice, intonation
... influence our judgements about the speaker’s:
age, gender, geographical identity,
socio-economic class, intelligence,
personality, mood
Examples: R’s in New York (Labov, 1966)
Disney
I. Introduction to Psycholinguistics
C. Competence / Performance
Competence = what one knows
Implicit knowledge - knowing what’s “right”
Explicit knowledge - explain in terms of formal rules
Performance = what one does; how knowledge is used
-----------------------------------------
Examples of language use:
(1) wordness
(2) grammaticality judgements
(3) tag questions
Wordness: For each row of 3 possible new words,
which one will probably never make it : (
blick
splunge
rlight
sbarm
wumple
turl
mancer
nserht
crelurious
inther
iwhucr
neen
shace
fring
ngout
Grammaticality Judgements
John is difficult to love.
It is difficult to love John.
John is anxious to go.
It is anxious to go John.
What he did was climb a tree.
What he thought was want a sports car.
What are you drinking and go home?
Mary was near the stream, was it?
Tag Question = element attached at end of utterance;
not a true question nor a full declarative statement;
a way of asking for confirmation
That was a horrible movie, wasn’t it?
She’s been swimming,
Jeremy wants to go dancing,
You haven’t had any sleep,
The man who was smoking died,
Those friends of Maria’s that we don’t
particularly like didn’t know,
______________?
______________?
______________?
______________?
______________?
Tag Question formation rules...
But first, background information about
the (dreaded) VERB AUXILIARY
Declarative
Jo has eaten well.
Jo was bad again.
Jo ran yesterday.
Verb Aux.
HAVE
BE
DO
GRAMMATICAL
TRANSFORMATION
Question
Has Jo eaten well?
Was Jo bad again?
Did Jo run yesterday?
Negation
Verb Aux.
Jo hasn’t eaten well.
HAVE
Jo wasn’t bad again.
BE
Jo didn’t run yesterday. DO
Tag question formation rules:
1. Copy the auxiliary of the main verb to the
right of the sentence.
2. Make it negative if the original is positive
or positive if the original is negative.
3. Add the pronoun that corresponds to the
subject in person, number, and gender.
Bob and Betty were laughing loudly, _____________?
That famous surgeon quit,
_____________?
She’s not leaving already,
_____________?
II. Basic Units of Language
A. ~5,000 languages
phonemes  morphemes  sentences  conversations
(sounds)
& words
B. Phonemes = elementary sounds of speech
• phonemes are not letters...
to, too, two, through, threw, shoe, clue, view
• vowel & consonant phonemes
• 11-144 phonemes in any given language
English has ~ 40; Hawaiian has ~16
• combining phonemes is rule-governed
II. Basic Units of Language
C. Morphemes = smallest meaningful unit of lang.
• can be a word, word stem, or affix (prefix, suffix)
help, love
“free” { word:
word stem:
spir, ceive, duce
“bound” prefix/suffix: re-, dis-, un- / -less, -ful, -er
• derivational & inflectional morphemes
derivational – change the grammatical class
V + -able = Adj (adorable, believable)
V + -er
= N (singer, runner)
inflectional – grammatical markers
V + -ed = past tense (walked)
N + -s
= plural (cows)
{
II. Basic Units of Language
C. Words
• Content vs. function (open- vs. closed-class) words
Content words = carry the main meaning
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs
Function words = grammatical words
articles (a, the, this), conjunctions (and,
but), prepositions (in, above)
Psychological reality of the content-function
word distinction in aphasia  selective
impairment of content (Wernicke’s) or
function words (Broca’s aphasia)
• Cattell (1886) & Stroop (1935)
Word superiority effect (Cattell, 1886)
– Reicher (1969); Wheeler (1970)
– tachistoscopic presentation
word

---
d

d
k
d
k
– more accurate identification of the letter
when stimulus is a word
– pseudoword superiorty effect
NAME THE COLOUR OF THE INK
GREEN
RED
BLUE
BLACK
BLUE
RED
GREEN
BLACK
RED
BLUE
RED
BLUE
GREEN
BLACK
GREEN
BLUE
BLACK
RED
BLUE
GREEN
II. Basic Units of Language
C. Words
• Ambiguity
1 word form, but 2 (or more) word meanings
Ex: bank (N-N, “money” vs. “river”)
watch (N-V, “clock” vs. “look”)
bass (N-N, “guitar” vs. “fish”)
2 word forms, but 1 pronunciation
Ex: sail/sale, right/write
Generally unaware of ambiguity...
even though it is quite pervasive
even though it affects behaviour (RT, etc)
II. Basic Units of Language
D. Sentences
• Syntax = the rule-governed system for grouping
words together into phrases and sentences
• Sentences introduce a concept that they are about,
the subject (or noun phrase), and then propose
something about that concept, the predicate
(or verb phrase).
Ex: “The boy hit the ball.”
doer act done-to (thematic roles)
subject
predicate
II. Basic Units of Language
D. Sentences
• Same deep structure, different surface structure
“The boy hit the ball.”
(active)
“The ball was hit by the ball.” (passive)
• Same surface structure, different deep structure
[The French bottle]NP [smells.]VP
“The French bottle smells.”
[The French]NP [bottle smells.]VP
THEY are boring.
“Visiting relatives can be boring.”
VISITING THEM is boring.
cf. ambig. figures in perception: 1 form, 2 interpretations
Necker cube
Headlines
New obesity study looks for larger test group
Reagan wins on budget, but more lies ahead
Man struck by lightening faces battery charge
Enraged Cow Injures Farmer with Axe
Milk Drinkers Are Turning to Powder
Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
British Left Waffles on Falklands
Dealers Will Hear Car Talk at Noon
Miners Refuse to Work after Death
Beating Witness Provides Names
Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim
Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
Headlines
Stolen Painting Found by Tree
Prostitutes Appeal to Pope
Red Tape Holds up Bridge
Deer Kill 17,000
Teenage Prostitution Problem is Mounting
Child Stool Great for Use in Garden
Shouting Match Ends Teacher’s Hearing
Man Robs then Kills Himself
Lung Cancer in Women Mushrooms
Mondale’s Offensive Looks Hard to Beat
Tuna Biting off Washington Coast
Chinese Apeman Dated
II. Basic Units of Language
D. Sentences
• Syntactic ambiguities
“She hit the boy with the big stick.”
“She hit the boy with the runny nose.”
Interpretation depends on structural preferences
(certain constructions used more often, favoured),
as well as the prior discourse context.
III. Word Recognition
How long does it take to recognise a visual word?
– What is meant by “recognition” or “lexical access”?
– Can lexical access be accurately measured?
– What factors affect lexical access and when?
The “magic moment” (Balota, 1990) of lexical access:
“At this moment, presumably there is recognition that
the stimulus is a word, and access of other information
(such as the meaning of the word, its syntactic class,
its sound, and its spelling) would be rapid if not
immediate.” (Pollatsek & Rayner, 1990)
III. Word Recognition
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Measures
Components
Models
Eye movements (EMs)
Event-related potentials (ERPs)
Measures
• Standard behavioural techniques
– lexical decision, naming, categorisation;
also RSVP, self-paced reading
– priming, masking, lateralised presentation
– Donders (1868): subtractive method
• assumes strictly serial stages of processing
• additive vs. interactive effects
– automatic vs.
unconscious
exogenous
bottom-up
benefit
strategic (Posner & Snyder, 1975)
controlled
endogenous
top-down
cost & benefit
Measures
• Eye movements (EMs)
• Neuroimaging
– “Electrical”: EEG, MEG, (TMS)
– “Blood flow”: PET, fMRI
TASK
MEASURE
TIME RES.
various word tasks
“electrical” imaging: EEG, MEG
ms-by-ms
Normal reading
fixation duration (as well as
location and sequence of EMs)
~250 ms
GOOD
Standard word recognition paradigms (± priming, ± masking):
naming
lexical decision
categorisation
various word tasks
RT
~500 ms
~600 ms
~800 ms
“blood flow” imaging: fMRI, PET seconds
POOR
Components
• Orthography of language
– English vs. Hebrew or Japanese
• Language skill
– beginning (novice) vs. skilled (expert) reader
– easy vs. difficult text
Components
• Intraword variables
– word-initial bi/tri-grams
– spelling-to-sound regularity
– neighborhood consistency
– morphemes
• prefix vs. pseudoprefix
• compound vs. pseudocompound
clown vs. dwarf
hint vs. pint
made vs. gave
remind vs. relish
cowboy vs. carpet
Components
• Word variables
– word length
– word frequency
– AoA
– ambiguity
– syntactic class
– concreteness
– affective tone
– etc.
duke vs. fisherman
student vs. steward
dinosaur vs. university
bank vs. edge, brim
open vs. closed; A,N,V
tree vs. idea
love vs. farm vs. fire
Components
• Extraword variables
– contextual predictability
The person saw the...
moustache.
The barber trimmed the...
– syntactic complexity
Mary took the book.
*Mary took the book was good.
Mary knew the book.
Mary knew the book was good.
*Mary hoped the book. Mary hoped the book was good.
– discourse factors (anaphora, elaborative inferences)
He assaulted her with his weapon.... ...knife...
stabbed
Models
• Dual-route account (Coltheart, 1978)
semantics
phonology
Indirect route
(assembled)
Direct route
(addressed)
orthography
Models
• Dual-route account (Coltheart, 1978)
Deep dyslexia
- visual/semantic errors
(sympathy -> orchestra)
- can’t read nonwords
semantics
phonology
Indirect route
(assembled)
Direct route
(addressed)
orthography
Models
• Dual-route account (Coltheart, 1978)
Surface dyslexia
- regularization errors
(broad -> brode)
- Reg wds,NWs are OK
(GPC rules intact)
phonology
Indirect route
(assembled)
semantics
Direct route
(addressed)
orthography
Models
• Interactive (Morton, 1969; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989)
context
meaning
orthography
MAKE
phonology
/m A k/
Models
• Modular (Forster, 1979; Fodor, 1983)
Message
processor
Syntactic
processor
General
Problem
Solver
Lexical
processor
input features
decision output
Models
• Hybrid
– 2-stage: generate candidate set  selection
– (Becker & Killion; Norris; Potter)