SEMINAR 3 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Practical part

1. Study the hypotheses below and carry out experiments.

Experiment 1. What is easier to memorise – objects or words? Does the process of memorising an object
involve naming it?

Hypothesis 1: people better memorise objects when they hear their names. Hypothesis 2: people better
memorise objects when they see them. Null hypothesis: people memorise objects at equal rates
regardless of whether they see them of hear their names. Prove or disprove the above hypotheses.

Experiment 2. Run an experiment separately on two groups. In both cases tell them to write down as
many words beginning with, say, “m” as they can think of in two minutes (you can make this harder by
specifying that they must be nouns and/or more than three letters long). Then go through the same
procedure again (using a different letter), but before they start, tell one group that an average score on
this test is 10 words, and tell the other group that it is 35 words. Hypothesis 1: when people feel
pressured into attaining high standards they will perform less well. Hypothesis 2: when people feel
pressured into attaining high standards they will perform better. Null hypothesis: putting pressure onto
people does not signi cantly reduce or increase their ability to access items in the lexicon.

2. Answer the following questions to the best of your ability, using external sources if needed.

1. You are a new theorist in the field of psycholinguistics and are trying to determine which perspective
you are willing to take on how individuals acquire language. Being the great researcher that you are, you
want your opinions to be based on evidence-based knowledge. Analyse and pick a position based on
new evidence from within the field of linguistics defending why a certain perspective or theory better
explains language acquisition. Make sure to contrast your arguments against other theories or models
and clearly support why other theorists should accept your view. If you want to be really ambitious you
can even create your own theory or model to endorse your ideas, but make sure that you have evidence
backing why you think your theory could hold up against any other.

There are literally hundreds of interesting questions related to language that fall under the domain of
psycholinguistics. Why are boys more likely to be “late talkers” than girls? Why does it get much more
difficult to become fluent in a new language after your early childhood years? What differences can we
observe in the ways babies from different ethnic groups try to communicate with the outer world before
they start speaking their mother tongue?

To give a specific example from the intersection of psycholinguistics and computational linguistics, you
are probably aware of the efforts of scientists from various disciplines to design a robot which can
communicate in a human language. While they’ve managed to program the robots to comprehend and
take part in different types of conversations, the task has proven to be much more challenging when
dealing with the conversations that involve cultural connotations or psychological concepts where
knowledge of the language is not sufficient and human interpretation is required. For instance, imagine
trying to teach a robot how to interpret the dialogue below, which consists of two sentences only and
has no advanced grammar or vocabulary:

Man: I’m leaving you.

Woman: Who is she?

I took this example from Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct.

How would you teach it to recognize what “she” is referring to in the second sentence? How would you
give it the specific knowledge required to decipher the underlying assumptions that have their roots in
both psychology and culture?

2. Recently someone you know gave birth to a baby, and with your new found psycholinguistics
knowledge you realise that you may have some advice to help with the baby’s language acquisition
when the time comes. Using what you know about the theories and models of language acquisition,
what tips or guidance could you give this person to help her baby with mastering a language?
Specifically describe with examples if there are certain aspects of the theories or models of language
acquisition that could support the infant in developing language skills.

For infants learning their native language, it starts with imitation. Human babies are actually “hard wired”
to distinguish language sounds from other sounds and they will start out by trying to make the sounds
they hear other humans making.

From there, the infant will start with single words. Since the “m” sound and “p” sounds can both be made
with the lips alone, and the “a” sound is similarly easy to make, you get “mama” and “papa” first. Since
adults usually ape the sounds the baby is making they get the meaning pretty quick.

From there, infants usually go to two word combinations: “mama go”, “no papa” and similar.

Then you get simple sentences. “I want juice”. “Daddy go sleep”. “Kitty come here!” At this point, the
child grasps basic grammar and, in English, the sentence verb object structure.

Prefixes and suffixes come next. Children soon learn there are “rules” for forming these but tend to
overapply them, using constructions like “be’d” instead of “was” and “goed” instead of “went”. To the
annoyance of parents everywhere, they refuse to be corrected at first:

“I goed to sleep”

“You mean you went to sleep?”

‘Yes, I goed to sleep”

By about five, they learn which conjugations and plurals are “irregular”. However, it appears grammar is
also hard wired into humans. When a child is exposed to a language with no grammar, like a pidgin, it
will impose a grammar on it, making it a creole.

Depending on the language, it can take a while for a child to learn all the phonemes in a language. In
English, most five year olds can master all but a few. Unfortunately, two of those are the sounds
represented by “th” in words - it takes another year to master those and that’s why sometimes children
that age develop a lisp when they substitute an “s” sound. Usually, the “j” sound is the last one mastered
by native English speakers.

3. Read carefully the humorous essay about English. Explain the semantics and motivation (if any) of
the words and word combinations in italics. Translate them into Russian. Compare the word
semantics through the languages.

Let’s face it – English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor hamin hamburger; neither
apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren’t invented in England or French fries in France.
Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are meat. We take English for granted.
But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a
guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not
one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for they are verbally
insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by
ship? How can overlook and oversee be opposites? How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold
as hell another? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up
as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm clock goes off by going
on. English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race
(which, of course, isn’t a race at all). That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the
lights are out, they are invisible. And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this
essay, I end it?

Посмотрим правде в глаза - английский - сумасшедший язык. В баклажанах нет яиц и гамбургеров
с хамином; ни яблоко, ни сосна в ананасе.

Английские кексы не изобрели в Англии, а картофель фри - не во Франции. Сладости - это

конфеты, а сладкое печенье, которое несладко, - это мясо. Мы воспринимаем английский как
должное. Но если мы исследуем его парадоксы, мы обнаружим, что зыбучие пески могут работать
медленно, боксерские кольца квадратные, а морская свинка не из Гвинеи и не свинья.

Разве не кажется безумием, что можно исправить, но не одну поправку? Если у вас есть куча
разногласий и вы избавитесь от всех, кроме одного, как вы это называете? Иногда я думаю, что
все англоговорящие должны быть отправлены в приют, потому что они вербально невменяемы.
На каком языке люди читают пьесу и играют на концерте? Доставка грузовиком и отправка груза
кораблем? Как можно игнорировать и контролировать противоположности? Как погода может
быть чертовски жаркой в один день и чертовски холодной в другой?

Вы должны поразиться уникальному безумию языка, на котором ваш дом может гореть, когда он
сгорает, в котором вы заполняете форму, заполняя ее, и в котором будильник срабатывает,
продолжая. Английский язык был изобретен людьми, а не компьютерами, и он отражает
творческие способности человеческой расы (которая, конечно же, не является расой). Вот почему,
когда звезды погашены, они видны, а когда свет погашен, они невидимы. И почему, заводя часы,
я запускаю их, а когда заканчиваю это эссе, я их заканчиваю?