Psycholinguistics

SUMMARY OF CHAPTER I-III

Submitted by:

Dewanti

15202244005

PBI A 2015

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF LANGUAGES AND ARTS

YOGYAKARTA STATE UNIVERSITY

April 2018
 Chapter I

What is language? What is psycholinguistics?

Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is the scientific study of the psychological processes involved in

language. The study of psycholinguists include understanding, producing, and remembering
language.

The Origin of Language

There is unclear evidence yet about the origin of language since there is no fossil
record avaliable for study. Language, on the other hand, could not have arisen in vacuum.
This can be seen from the social set-up of early man. Furthermore, it is also not clearly
known whether the origin of language arose with grammar. Some experts argued that there
was indeed sufficient time for grammar to evolve. There was also another expert who
argued that that the evolution of language was related to the evolution of consciousness
(Jaynes,1977).
Despite of the fact above, there is a shift that many languages are related to each other
as shown in the similarity of many words of some languages. However, the differences
between languages should not be simply be avoided.

Animal Language

There are some reasons to examine the communication systems in animal, since (1) it
will help us to focus on what is language, (2) it might inform language that might have
genetic basis, (3) it might tell us processes which are necessary for language development,
and (4) it draws our attention.
1. Animal communication systems
Communication is the transmission of a signal that conveys information (Pearce,
1987). There are numerous ways how animals convey that information. It is often
believed that dolphins and whales possess a language, but there is no evidence to
suggest that they employ sequences of subunits that convey particular message.
2. Defining language
 Language is defined as human speech; an artificial system of signs and symbols, with
rules for forming intelligible communications for use e.g. in a computer (Chambers
Twentieth Century Dictionary, 1977)· Hocket (1960) listed 16 general properties of
spoken human language, which is emphasized on the physical characteristics of
spoken human language. However, it should be emphasized that language can be used
to communicate about anything. Animals on the other hand, posses a rich of symbolic
communication system, but the communication systems all fall short of the richness of
human languages.
3. Teaching language to apes (and other animals)
Most of research has focused upon apes since they are highly intelligent animals and
the cognitive abilities are not very different from those of very young children.
4. What are the cognitive abilities of other animals?
Animals learn slowly, need careful training, and are inflexible in the test
conditions and their responses (Cohen, 1983).
5. Evaluation of work on teaching apes language
Although apes can learn to associate names with actions and objects, it is useful to
think about the distinction between word meaning and syntax again.

The History and Methods of Psycholinguistics

1. A brief history of psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics has its root in two disciplines, linguistics and psychology. The
primary concern of early linguistics first emphasized upon structuralism, in that a
primary concern was to provide an analysis of the appropriate categories of description
of the units of language. There are two strands in this work, information theory and
behaviorism. Information theory emphasised the role of probability and redundancy in
language. Behaviorism, on the other hands, the only valid subject matter for
psychology was behaviour, and language was a behaviour just like any other.
Despite of that, Chomsky showed that behaviorism was incapable of dealing with
natural language and proposed a new type of linguistic theory called transformational
grammar. Transformational grammar provides both the underlying structure of
language and people’s knowledge of their language.
Along with the development of suitable experimental techniques, psycholinguistics
gained an identity independent of linguistics.
2. The ‘cognitive science’ approach
 The term cognitive science has come to cover the multi-disciplinary approach to the
study of the mind, including adult and developmental psychology, philosophy,
linguistics, anthropology, neuropsychology and particularly artificial intelligence (AI).
3. Cognitive neuropsychology
Cognitive neurology deals with the advance development of psycholinguistics. Its goal
is to relate brain-damaged behaviour to models of normal processing. It is different
from traditional neuropsychology since its concern was primarily about parts of the
brain which control different sorts of behavior and the flow of information through
brain structures. Another differences can be described as the following. First, it has
made a theoretical advance in
relating neuropsychological disorders to cognitive models. Second, it has made a
methodological advance in stressing the importance of single case studies, rather than
group studies of neuropsychological impairment. Third, it has contributed a research
program in that it emphasizes how models of normal processing can be informed by
studying brain-damaged behavior.
 Chapter II
The Speech System and Spoken Word Recognition

Introduction
Speech perception : how we identify or perceive the sounds of language
Spoken word recognition : higher-level process of how we recognise the words which
they make up.
The Lexicon Concept
Word : the smallest self-contained unit of language that has some meaning. A word can be
analysed at a number of levels:
a. Sound and their components
Cat : three sounds and one syllable
b. Meaning
Morphemic analysis
Ghosts : Ghost (free) + s (bound)

The anatomy of speech and representing sounds

Two approaches to study sound
a. Phonetics : phonetics looks at sounds more absolutely (lower). Example:
differentiate the sounds of p in pin and spin.
b. Phonology : phonology studies sound in the context of a particular language
(higher)

Sounds do not always correspond in languages such as English to individual letters. The letter
"o" represents a number of different sounds (such as in the words "mock", "moon", and
''mow''). It would be better to have a system of representing individual sounds with specific
symbols. Such a system is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

Consonants
a. Bilabial : /p/, /b/
b. Alveolars : /d/, /t/
c. Dentals : /q/ and /ð/
d. Labiodentals : /f/ and /v/
 e. Alveo-palatal : / /, / /
f. Palatal : /y/
g. Velars : /k/, /g/
h. Liquids : /l/, /r/
Aspects:
Voiced/ voiceless
Fricatives/ Affricate
Aspirated/ non-aspirated

Vowels
Vowels are made with a relatively free flow of air, and are determined by the way in which
the shape of the tongue modifies the airflow. There are combined vowel sounds that contain
two sounds which is called diphthongs (e.g. in the word cow, my, boy).

Further phonetic considerations

Minimum pairs :
dog-cog
pat-bat
fog-cog

Higher level structure

Speech perception
Preliminary findings and problems in speech perception
a. Acoustic signals and phonetic segments
b. Categorical perception
 c. The pre-lexical representation
d. The pre-lexical code: Evidence from infant perception

The role of context in speech recognition

The role of context on speech recognition is of central importance, and has been hotly
debated. Put simply, the issue is "is speech recognition a purely bottom-up process, or can
top-down information influence its outcome?" If we can show that the word which a sound is
in, or indeed the meaning of the whole sentence, can influence the recognition of a particular
sound, we have shown a top-down influence on sound perception.

Models of speech perception

a. Template-matching
b. Analysis by synthesis
c. Motor theory

Spoken word recognition

The stages of spoken word recognition
a. initial contact phase
b. selection phase
c. word recognition
d. integration

Context effects in speech recognition

Tanenhaus and Lucas (1987) argued that most of the currently used experimental tasks that
are on-line that is, that attempt to investigate speech recognition as it happens rather than
afterwards by say, examining memory do not distinguish between perceptual processes
(which can be equated with the access and selection phases) and post-perceptual processes
(which can be equated with the integration phase). There is some argument that only the tasks
described above used by Samuel (1990) and Connine (1990) escape this criticism (although
we saw that even this is debatable). If these tasks are giving the correct answer, then the data
suggest that the role of sentential context is very limited. After some years when the
interactionists held the roost, there seems to be a shift in opinion happening at the moment to
a more autonomous position whereby structural context can only have post-access effects.
Trace
This is a highly interactive model of spoken word recognition (McClelland & Elman, 1986),
derived from the McClelland and Rumelhart (1981) interactive activation model of letter and
visual word identification. The most important characteristic of TRACE is that it emphasises
the role of top-down processing (context) on word recognition.

The cohort model of word recognition

a. access stage
b. selection stage
c. integration stage

The neuropsychology of spoken word recognition

Some difficulty in speech recognition is quite common in adults with a disturbance of
language functions caused by brain damage. There are many cases of patients who have
difficulty in constructing in the pre-lexical code. These are reviewed by Caplan (1992). For
example, disturbances can affect the earliest stages of acoustic-phonetic processing of
features such as VOT. Patients with pure word deafness can speak, read, and write quite
normally, but cannot understand speech, even though their hearing is otherwise normal (see
Saffran, Marin, & Yeni-Komshian, 1976, for a case history).
 Chapter III
Visual Word Recognition

There are six main methods that have been used to explore visual word recognition.
These are brain scanning or imaging techniques, eye movements, tachistoscopic
identification, and measuring naming, lexical decision, and categorisation times. In
tachistoscopic identification, subjects are shown words for very short presentation times. In
the naming task, subjects are given visual presentation of a word which they then have to
name, and then the naming latency is measured. In the lexical decision task the subject must
decide whether a string of letters is a word or nonword. In the more common visual
presentation method the words are displayed visually, on a computer screen or tachistoscope
(auditory versions also exist). Eye movement studies need a specially adapted pair of
spectacles attached to a computer screen and display.

a. Semantic priming
The identification of a word is made easier if a word related in meaning is presented
just before it. They used a lexical decision task, but the effect can be found, with
differing magnitudes of effect. The word priming is best reserved for the methodology
of investigating what happens when one word precedes another. Semantic priming
can be thought of as the consequence of a particular type of context.
b. Frequency and related effects
The frequency of a word is a very important factor in word recognition. Commonly
used words are easier to recognise and are responded to more quickly than less
commonly used words. It was first demonstrated in tachistoscopic recognition but has
since been demonstrated for a wide range of tasks. The effect of frequency is all
pervasive, and as you might expect a number of other variables correlate with it.
Frequency was simulated by giving a lot of exposure to some words (mimicking high
frequency), and less to others (mimicking low frequency). A frequency effect could
arise in two ways. A word could become more accessible because we see (or hear)
frequent words more than we see (or hear) less frequent ones, or because we speak (or
write) frequent words more often.
c. Word-nonword effects
 Words are generally responded to faster than nonwords. Less plausible nonwords are
rejected faster than more plausible nonwords. Nonwords that are plausible that is, that
follow the rules of word formation of the language in that they do not contain illegal
strings of lettersare sometimes called pseudowords.
d. Interfering with identification
We can slow down the process of word identification by making it harder to recognise
the stimulus by degrading its physical appearance. This is called stimulus
degradation. Presenting another stimulus immediately after the target interferes with
the recognition process. This is called backwards masking.
There are two different ways of doing backwards masking. If the masking stimulus is
unstructured for example if it is just a patch of randomly positioned black dots, or just
a burst of light then we call it energy (or brightness, or random noise) masking. If the
masking stimulus is structured (for example, if it comprises letters or random parts of
letters) then we call it pattern masking (or feature masking).
e. Repetition priming
The technique of facilitating recognition by repeating a word is known as repetition
priming. Repetition interacts with frequency. In a lexical decision task, repetition
priming effects are stronger for low frequency words than for high frequency ones.
f. Length effects
Generally word length affects naming but not lexical decision, an instance of the
claim to which we shall return that not all experimental tasks give the same results.

Attentional processes in visual word recognition

Automatic processing is fast, parallel, not prone to interference from other tasks, does not
demand working memory space, cannot be prevented, and is not directly available to
consciousness. Attentional processing is slow, serial, sensitive to interference from
competing tasks, does use working memory space, can be prevented or inhibited, and its
results are often (but not necessarily) directly available to consciousness.

Models of Word Recognition

a. Forster's autonomous serial search model

This is to identify a word by searching through a dictionary; you search through the
entries, which are arranged to facilitate search on the basis of visual characteristics
 (that is, they are in alphabetical order), until you find the right entry. The entry in the
dictionary gives you all the information you need about the word: its meaning,
pronunciation, and syntactic class.
b. The logogen model
A logogen accumulates evidence until its individual threshold level is reached. When
this happens, the word is recognised. Lexical access is direct, occurs simultaneously
and in parallel for all words, and is said to be passive, as unlike words in the cohort
model, logogens just accumulate evidence.
c. Interactive activation models
The model consists of many simple processing units arranged in three levels. There is
an input level of visual feature units, a level where units correspond to individual
letters, and an output level where each unit corresponds to a word. Each unit is
connected to each unit in the level immediately before and after it. Each of these
connections is either excitatory (that is positive, or facilitatory).