Language Processing

…otherwise known as
Psycholinguistics
What’s the big deal?
 It is actually something of a miracle that we
manage to speak and understand as well as we
do…
 However, It is the work of our brain which could
also access the linguistics storehouse to speak
and understand what is spoken besides acquire
and store the mental grammar (Fromkin & Rodman, 1998:361)
 Understanding the brain and its organization is
useful for assessing the plausibility of language
processing & its production.
 It’s a pretty big deal after all…
Brain & Cerebral Cortex
 Language Centers of the
cere bral cort ex: Brain
 
A one-quarter-inch thick membrane covering the brain consciousness,
thinking, learning, emotions, language

It s M aj or re gio ns :
 frontal lobes 
motor activity, planning & moving, processing of affective info.,
spoken language (Broca' s area_includes morphosyntax, grammatical
morphology) 
 temporal lobes 
language perception (Wernicke' s area_back of the auditory cortex) 
 parietal lobes 
somatosensation, spatial perception 
 occipital lobes 
vision 
Basic Auditory Functionality
Introduction to
Auditory &
Language
Processing
DEFINITIONS

The ability to interpret or attach

meaning to auditorially received
information to then formulate an
expressive response
A Spoken Utterance
 Starts as a message in the brain/mind of the spea ke r
 It is put into linguistics form and interpreted as
articulation commands through motor nerves
 Emerging as an acoustic signal through sound waves
 Those signals are processed by the ear of listener and
sent to the brain/mind through sensory nerves, where it
is interpreted.
 So, comprehension, the process of understanding an
utterance, requires the ability to access the mental
lexicon to match the words in the utterance we are
listening to with their meaning.
 In other words….

 The comprehension of speech shows

perceptual unit occur in different levels into:
 Phonemes _ Phonology

 Morphemes + Words _ Morphology

 Sentence _ Syntax

 Lexically Meaning_Semantics

 Intended Meaning_Pragmatic

 Text_Discourse
 PROCESSING MODELS

Top - Down

Bottom - Up
Language Processing /Top
Down
 Language info in mind of listener, not auditory

signal
 listener uses knowledge of language and
world to interpret speaker’s message
 Process acoustic signal using
lexical/semantic knowledge
 familiar processed quicker
 discriminate significant features
Auditory
Processing/Bottom Up
 Acoustic signal must be processed before

being influenced by higher order knowledge

 Process acoustic info before linguistic info
 Sound identification necessary prerequisite to
speech-language development
 Tallal research: children with LD have deficits
in rapid transition of both linguistic and non-
linguistic signals
TOP DOWN BOTTOM UP
Language Processing Auditory Processing

Knowledge of language Acoustic Information

& world to interpret before linguistic interp

Semantic knowledge Acoustic knowledge

Stress comprehension Stress production

and intake and output

SLP viewpoint Aud viewpoint

 Depth of Processing Model
Top Down

Effect of context on coding

Amount of processing item receives determines

retention / forgetting

Shallow Analysis of incoming

Processing sensory information

Deep Semantic and abstract

Processing analysis
Continuum of Processing

Auditory Processing Language Processing

Transition Area
Both Auditory & Language Processing
Frequency effect
 The more frequently a word is used, the more easily
we can access it.
 This frequency effect is as effect when the
psychologists examine the individual process
language
 The more easily we can access a word, the shorter
language processing occurs in the brain/mind,
 and vice versa…
heckling
hospital
Written Language
processing
 Written language may work in a fairly similar
way, only using the primary visual cortex as an
input pathway instead of the auditory cortex.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_processing on 10 January 2009, at 09:40 P.M.)
 Ambiguity
 Definition:
A word or a sentence is ambiguous when it
can be interpreted in more then one ways
 Levels of ambiguity:
1) Lexical ambiguity
2) Surface structure ambiguity
3) Deep structure ambiguity
 Lexical ambiguity
 Sometimes, we have miss interpretation
when hearing some words with same
pronunciation but different spelling
 It belongs to homophones that leads to
lexical ambiguity
 For instance:
the words to, too and two
are all pronunced /tu/ but they refer to
different meaning
 Surface structure
 Definition:
ambiguity
Sentence which are ambiguous in surface level of
syntactic relationship

 For instance:
“old men and women are advised to apply for their
benefits”
a) The old men and the old women ……
b) The old men and women …..
 Deep structure ambiguity
 Definition:
Sentence which are ambiguous on deep structure level
of logical relationship

 For instance:
“Cheating students will not be tolerated”
a) Some one who is cheating students ……
b) Students who are cheating …..