Psycholinguistics S8

Language Comprehension

Definition

● According to Clark and Clark, (1977): speech comprehension is the mental

processes by which listeners take in sounds uttered by a speaker and use them
to construct an interpretation of what the speaker intended to convey.
● Speech comprehension is in fact an active process not a passive one. Listeners
take the speech they hear as inputs and construct the most likely
interpretation.

The Process of Speech Comprehension

● Speech comprehension follows two main processes:

1. The Construction Process.

● This process follows either a syntactic approach or a semantic approach.

● In the syntactic approach, listeners use the surface structures of a sentence to make
interpretations.They identify sounds, words, and longer constituents and use them
to interpret the sentence. To illustrate, when listeners hear the determiner “The”,
they expect to find a noun after it.
● In the semantic approach, the goal is to determine how each sentence is meant to be
utilised. Sentences should not only be grammatically correct, they must also make
sense.

2. The Utilisation Process.

● Speakers talk for a purpose such as to assert beliefs, requests, help, promise, action,
express congratulations, and ask for information.
○ Speech Acts: It is an utterance that serves a specific function in
communication. E.g: Offering apologies, greetings, requests, complaints, etc.
Speech acts can be either direct commands or indirect commands.

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 ○ Propositional Content: It is a unit of meaning which constitutes the subject
matter of a statement and which is asserted to be true or false. E.g: The
young troops defeated the army. This sentence comprises two propositions.

○ Thematic Structure: They are aspects of the sentence structure that relate a
sentence to the context in which it is uttered. E.g: It is your brother who stole
the money. Here the speaker would expect the listener to know that someone
had stolen the money.

Factors affecting Language Comprehension

1. Language related factors
a. Morphology
● It refers to the rules that govern meaning constrained in the words themselves.
● Comprehending an utterance requires an ability to decipher meaning associated
with certain modifications to words such as affixes.
● The types of morphological complexity that distinguish word structure are:
○ Inflections: a morphological process that does not change word class nor
meaning.
○ Derivations: a morphological process that changes word class, gender, and
meaning.
○ Compounding: word combinations of at least two roots.

b. Phonology
● It is concerned with the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing
of the speech sounds used to convey meaning
● The flow of the info in language comprehension is from sound to meaning. This
difference in language production, a speaker has to decide what to say first, then
construct the phonological presentation of what he wants to say.

2. Social factors
● Pragmatics is the knowledge that influences a speaker's choices regarding use
of language in socially appropriate ways.
● Pragmatic competence is a complex that involves experience, world
knowledge, and certain personality traits. It entails a good listening and
observation skill to comprehend other’s signals of pragmatic meaning.

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 3. Cognitive factors
● Adults’ success in speech recognition is affected by cognitive factors either
from a positive way through support from linguistic context or in a negative
way where performance can be constrained by limitations of working
memory.
● Cognitive processes for language comprehension take three forms:
○ Memory retrieval operations: Using retrieval cues to construct
meaning.
○ Inferencing: using reason to construct meaning and bridge the gaps in
our comprehension.
○ Ambiguity: a linguistic phenomenon where an utterance can have more
than one meaning. Ambiguity can be syntactic, lexical, or Phonological.

The Comprehension of sounds

● In the course of everyday conversation, we do not hear isolated sounds but as
complete words. With the help of machines, we can measure acoustic information
extremely precisely.

Voice Onset Timing V.O.T

● It refers to the duration of the period of time between the release of a plosive and
the beginning of vocal fold vibration.

Categorical Perception
● It refers to the tendency to perceive a sound as a member of a category (e.g: p;b).
Thus the variants of the same phoneme within a category is more likely perceived
as being similar to each other compared to phonemes from other categories.
● Categorical perception is unique to human beings.
● Successful comprehension of speech sounds is a combination of the innate ability
to recognize the distinction between speech sounds and the ability to adjust their
acoustic categories with the parameters of the language.
The Comprehension of Words

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● Comprehending words is much more complex than the processing of sounds.
● Words are made up of several sounds. Those sounds are written in different and
inconsistent ways in different languages in addition to the vast number of words
and vocabulary.

Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP)

● A model of cognition in which people use several separate and parallel processes at
the same time to understand spoken or written language.
● PDP accounts for comprehension of words in different ways including:
○ Spelling: homophones that are words with different spelling but similar
pronunciations.
○ Pronunciation: homographs that are words with the same spelling but
different pronunciations.
○ Grammatical Function: certain words can function both as a verb and a
noun.
○ Meaning: Certain words can evoke different meanings in different contexts.

Common Phenomenons
1. The tip of the tongue phenomenon: it is a feeling of not being able to
remember a word or name that you know you know, but just can't seem to
recall at that moment.
2. The Bathtub effect: the momentarily lost word is not always completely
forgotten; parts of the word are often subject to recall. Most commonly, the
remembered fragments are the first letters or the first syllable.
3. Spreading Activation Network: When you first try to recall a word, it
seems as if your memory is in a complete blank and you have absolutely no
cus about the word in question. Nevertheless, the more you think about the
missing word, the more you contrast it with similar but not identical words

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 and the more pieces of knowledge you activate the more the network of
associations spreads.

The Comprehension of Sentences

Transformational Generative Grammar T.G.G

● Sentences are generated from a phrase structure skeleton which fleshed out into
everyday utterances by a series of transformational rules which create many
varieties on the surface structure of sentences by deleting, rearranging. adding,
substituting.
● Deep Structure: A sentence produced by PS rules only (COMPETENCE).

● Transformations: The necessary changes applied to the deep structure in order to

produce a surface structure.

● Surface Structure : A sentence that has run through one or more transformations
(PERFORMANCE).

Hypothesis 01
● Difficulty in comprehension is derived from the number of transformations that
were added on to the original phrase structure of the kemel sentence. The more
new linguistic information we hear, the less we remember.

Criticism against Hypothesis 01

● The grammatical form has no effect on the number of words recalled, a large
number of transformations in a sentence does not occupy more space in working
memory.

Hypothesis 02

● Semantics, rather than syntax, seemed to be the main determinant of

comprehension difficulty. E.g: The lifeguard rescued the struggling swimmer

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 (ACTIVE SENTENCE) / The struggling swimmer was rescued by the lifeguard
(PASSIVE SENTENCE)

Theories of Language Comprehension

● The fundamental purpose of language comprehension is the understanding of

meaning.
● Parsing is the analysis of the syntactic or grammatical structure of sentences. It is
an important process that readers and listeners use to comprehend the sentences
they read or hear There are several possible relationships between syntactic and
semantic analysis:

Syntactic analysis precedes semantic analysis.

Semantic analysis occurs prior to syntactic analysis.
Syntactic and semantic analysis occur simultaneous
Syntax and semantics are very closely associated.

Modular View
● A modular view of sentence processing assumes that each factor involved in
sentence processing is computed in its own module. Which has limited means of
communication with the other modules.
● Syntactic analysis creation takes place without input from semantic analysis or
context-dependent information, which are processed separately.

Syntactic analysis
Semantic analysis
Context- Dependent information

● In the modular view, information about context and about real-world constraints
comes into play only after the first steps of linguistic processing have taken place,
giving such models a serial quality.
Serial Quality: Humans construct only one of the possible interpretations
at first, and try another only if the first one turns out to be wrong.

● A common assumption of modular accounts is a feed-forward architecture, in

which the output of one processing step is passed onto the next step without
feedback mechanisms that would allow the output of the first module to be
corrected. Syntactic pressing is usually takes to be the most basic analysis step,
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 which feeds into semantic processing and the inclusion of other information.

Interactive View

● All available information is processed at the final analysis And can immediately
influence the computation of the final analysis.
● On an interactive view, knowledge about linguistic context and about the world
plays an immediate role in the comprehension of words and sentences.
● Many types of information are used in parallel, with the different sources of
information working so operatively or competitively to yield an interpretation.

Models of Sentence Processing

The Garden Path Model

● It proposes that a single parse is constructed by a syntactic model. Contextual and

semantic factors influence processing at a later stage and can induce re-analysis of
the syntactic parse
● It supports the modular account, arguing that sentence processing involves the
analysis of each individual unit or module of a sentence, with little or no feedback
thus inhibiting correction.
● When the parser encounters an ambiguity, it is guided by two principles: late
closure and minimal attachment.

Late Closure Minimal Attachment

● It causes new words or phrases to
be attached to the current clause.
● For Example: “John said he
would leave yesterday” would be
● The parser builds the simplest
syntactic structure possible
● Interpreting sentences in terms of
the simplest syntactic structure
consistent with the input that’s

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 parsed as John said (he would known at the moment.
leave yesterday)and not as John
said (he would leave) yesterday.

● The "garden Path model" is a two-staged model, that is ,fixed choice in that it does
not involve probability in decision-making. In the first stage only syntactic material
is required to analyse the sentence but if the sentence turns out to be syntactically
ambiguous in that it is incompatible with further syntactic; semantic, and pragmatic
information, reanalysis in the second stage which costs more time, is necessary.
● Semantic cues are then incorporated in the second stage. Parsing at this stage is
guided by late closure and minimal attachment.

Criticism
● The brain's activity when confronted with ambiguous and unambiguous sentences
through the results of which contradicts the garden-Path model's principle of
two-stages.
● Their results show that the intense cognitive processing is caused by ambiguity and
garden Path resolations is actually supported by multiple areas in the brain rather
than just a single area for each of these sentences.
● Additionally, they also found that there was increased brain activity when the
scales were ambiguous but resolved in favour of the preferred syntactic structure.
● These findings imply that multiple parses are activated simultaneously instead of
analysing syntax then semantics and that the brain does use syntactic structure to
analyse sentences.

The constraint-based model

● The constraint based model was proposed by MacDonald et alL (194).
● It is one staged mode in which all information including the syntactic and semantic
information are used in parallel and interact with one another simultaneously to
analyse ambiguous sentences.
● According to this model, syntactic ambiguity is resolved through competition
between four alternative analyses:
1. All relevant sources of information are available immediately to someone
processing a sentence
2. Grammatical knowledge constraints (inhibits) interpretations.
3. Information associated with a word is typically not independent.
4. Interpretation generally differs in probability on the basis of past experience.

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 ● Within the constraint based theory all possible analyses are activated with most
appropriate being selected, thus meaning reanalysis does not take place.

Example: While Anna dressed the baby that was small and cute spit up on the bed.
People simultaneously maintain the temporarily ambiguous NP “The baby” as both the
patient of the subordinate clause verb “dressed” and the agent of the matrix verb “spit”.

Bruner Theoretical Positions about Language and Thought

Cloak Theory

● A Neo-Classical literary theory.

● language is a cloak conforming to the customary categories of thought of its
speakers" (Bruner et al. 1956, p. 11).
● Language reflects reality: People have thoughts first, then put them into words.
(linguistic idealism).
● The same thought can be expressed in various ways.
● One can say whatever one desires to say in any language, and that whatever one
articulates in one language can always be translated into another.

Mould Theory
● A Romantic theory.
● language as a mould in terms of which thought categories are cast.
(Bruner et al. 1956, p. I1).
● Language moulds thought rather than simply expressing it.
● Language determines our thought: The vocabulary and grammar (structure) of a
language determine the way we view the world.
● In line with this stance, thinking is regarded to be wholly and entirely linguistic;
that is to say, there is no non-verbal thought, and no translation from thought to
language takes place. Parviz and Somayyeh(2012)

● In the 20th Century, Sapir and Whorf published their opinion about the relationship
between language, thought and reality. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is shaped from
Sapir's general approach to linguistics and then it is extended by his student Whorf
to reach the conclusion that, « The language a person uses influences his or her
interpretation of the world and his or her behaviour."
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 The Sapir- Whorf hypothesis

Linguistic determinism Linguistic relativity

Strong Version Weak Version
Language determines thought. Speakers of different languages are said
The linguistic structure determines the to think in different ways.
cognitive structure.

Linguistic determinism

● Linguistic determinism refers to the notion that a language determines certain

non-linguistic cognitive processes. That is, learning a language changes the way a
person thinks (Bloom & Keil, 2001).
● Linguistic determinism is the idea that language and its structures limit and
determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as
categorization, memory, and perception.
● The term implies that people who speak different languages as their mother
tongues have different thought processes.
● Linguistic determinism holds that differences in language cause differences in
thought.
● According to landr (20101, the linguistic determinist view is that language
structure controls thought and cultural norms. Each of us lives not in the midset of
the whole world but only in the part of the world that our language permits us to
know and it is difficult to think outside that framework. Therefore, differences
between languages represent basic differences in the worldwide diverse cultures.

Linguistic relativity

● Linguistic relativity traced to Aristoles speculations on whether doing philosophy

while using Greek as a symbol system would make the knowledge discovered
different if, say, Latin were the symbol system.
● Aristotle's answer was that language in use would not make a substantial difference
in the final result, any thought could be expressed equally well in any language.
● Linguistic relativity refers to the idea that there is no "absolute" or natural way to
label the world.We label the world according to our perception of it and the
perception is relative: it varies from culture to culture.
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 ● Linguistic relativity refers to the claim that the cognitive processes that are
determined are different for different languages. Thus, speakers of different
languages are said to think in different ways.

● There are several notions here:

1. Languages "carve up" reality in different ways.
2. Language differences are covert or unconscious; that is, we are not consciously
aware of the way in which we classify objects.
3. Language differences influence our worldview. These are profound ideas, but not
ones easily amenable to experimental tests.

Moderate Whorfianism
● Whilst few linguists would accept the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its strong,
extreme or deterministic form, many now accept a weak, more moderate, or limited
Whorfianism, namely that the ways in which we see the world may be influenced
by the kind of language we use.
● Moderate Whorfianism differs from extreme Whorfianism in these ways:
1. The emphasis is on the potential for thinking to be influenced rather than
unavoidably 'determined by language,
2. It is a two-way process, so that the kind of language we use is also influenced by
the way we see the world;
3. Any influence is ascribed not to Language as such or to one language compared
with another, but to the use within a language of one variety rather than another.
4. Emphasis is given to the social context of language use rather than to purely
linguistic considerations, such as the social pressure in particular contexts to use
language in one way rather than another.

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