Final Exam Review Guide and Notes

1. What are two empirical observations that indicate that filled pauses might reflect
processes involved in selecting amongst options for upcoming speech?
Empirical observations – what’s the data that indicated that filled pauses reflect something life planning
of speech

Data that indicated that you’re engaged in planning what you’ll say when filled pauses

Predicted of how long you’ll spend before starting to speak again (uh vs. um)

Less accurate to guess next word after filled pause than anywhere else in transcript

Given-new - More likely to produce filled pause if producing new (listeners sensitive to this)

Filled pause is new info while less likely to produce a filled pause while discussing previously mentioned
info

1. What are two empirical observations that indicate that filled pauses might reflect
processes involved in selecting amongst options for upcoming speech?
Syntactic priming

1. When a listener is given instructions for interacting with multiple objects (e.g., click on
the horse, and now click on the window), what might a listener infer if the speaker is
disfluent just prior to mentioning an object?
We know that disfluencies are more likely to introduce something new. A listener has this bias and a
filled pause will direct the listener to look at something that hasn’t been mentioned yet

1. What is the syntactic and positional constraint for errors of lemma selection and
phoneme selection respectively.
Incorrect syntactic class is less likely to be produced so nouns swap with nouns in lemma selection

Onsets will swap with other onsets and codas will swap with other codas (same position) for phoneme
selection

1. Give an example of the type of speech error referred to as “stranding” and a couple of
sentences, indicate what is interesting about these types of errors.
Stranding refers to a situation when words swap but the stranded morpheme stays the same (word
swap but past tense ‘ed’ stays in the same place)

Morphemes are units in planning and utterance

 1. Based on our discussion of disfluencies, what would be two things that speakers could
do to make their speech more fluent?
Speak more slowly

If you use more of the same words, the more likely to be fluent (diversity of words and high vocabulary
leads to more disfluencies)

1. What does the existence of syntactic priming suggest?

Seems like the only way you can increase the probability of using a syntactic structure later (with no
overlap)

1. On the whole, does it seem that language processing is more or less modular in
organization or interactive? Give two examples that support your position (taken from
any portion of the semester)
Language is not modular

Context in syntactic processing: taking into account individual words and then broader context

Modularity in perceptual processing

Contextually will deviate from rigidness of modularity

1. An individual suffers from a brain injury that impairs knowledge and recognition of tools,
but not of other things such as animals. If we do not want to hypothesize the existence
of a ‘tool center of the brain’, what might be an explanation for this type of specific
deficit?
Damage to regions of the brain that affect motor skills, more likely to experience category specific
deficits from categories that rely on motor skills (like tools)

Comprehension

People seem to keep updating representation as progressing through story

Things likely to be mentioned are in a more accessible state than things that are less likely to be
mentioned

In reading, maintain exact working of current sentence, but then lose that verbatim sentence but keep
the basic gist (just retain semantics)

Syntactic priming
If something is able to be primed (increase probability of using something), representation in head that
correspond with that. If no words repeated, only overlap is the same structure so structures are
separable from words that can be used

Dell’s model

Optional complementizer (that (it is optional and not necessary to use))

Constative stress

Words that mean different things but are spelled/sound the same