LANGUAGE PERCEPTION MODELS

• Language Processing
• Producing
• Comprehending
• Battery of techniques for working out the stages involved in language processing
• Subjects tested in a laboratory
• evidence obtained from speech/ perception errors
• The results are not easy to interpret
• Comprehension is more complex
• ‘It seems very pretty,’ Alice said, ‘but it’s rather hard to understand.’ You see, she
didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.
‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t know exactly what
they are!’
• Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
• the hearer reconstructs a phonological representation
• The hearer enters the lexicon
• The hearer recover the semantic and structural details of the words in the
message
• Reconstruct the structural organization of the words
• the speech perception system must deal with:
• the signal is continuous,
• it transmits information in parallel, and
• it is highly variable.
• there is variability among speakers
• there is variability within speakers
• There is ambient noise
• The context of the signal
• Isn’t it miraculous that there is accurate recognition of phonemes?
• Using the knowledge of speech production in their perception
• Speech Shadowing
• Consonant sounds were produced before all the relevant cues had been
heard
• shadowers imitate with high fidelity phonetic details of the words they
have just heard
• Shadowers were able to adapt to the deficiencies
• a hearer can adapt to abnormal situations can be affected by many variables
• Monolingual versus bilingual
• Early bilingual versus late bilinguals
• The phonemic inventory and speech perception
• Constructive speech perception and phonological illusions
• the McGurk effect
• phoneme restoration (The state governors met with their respective
legislatures convening in the capital city)
• Bottom-up and top-down processing
• Sound  structure
• Structure  sound
• Both are important for perception
• a. Here’s the fishing gear and the …
• b. Check the time and the …
• c. Paint the fence and the …
• the most plausible continuation for the first carrier phrase is bait, for the
second, date, and for the third, gate

• Suprasegmental information in the signal

• lexical stress serves to distinguish words from each other
• tone is lexically specified in Mandarin
• It can be used to identify the location of word boundaries
• Stress-timed languages emphasize syllables that are stressed (those syllables are
longer, louder, and higher in pitch, relative to other syllables)
• syllable-timed languages use syllable information in segmenting speech
• Lexical Retreival
• locates words using as much acoustic information as is available
• post-access matching
• Slips of the ear or mondegreens
• They hae slain the Earl Amurray, And Lady Mondegreen. (In the original
song, the second line is And laid him on the green.)
• The hearer is distracted
• There is noise in the background
• Signal is ambiguous
• Beatles’ song lyric: the girl with colitis goes by (the original lyric is the girl
with kaleidoscope eyes).
• the lexical decision task
• Time taken to make the decision
• Impossible non-words, like TLAT, ZNER, and MROCK, are rejected very
rapidly
• possible non-words, like SKERN, PLIM, and FLOOP, take longer to reject
• Ambiguous words
• ambiguous words with related senses are retrieved faster than ambiguous
words with unrelated senses
• Lexical priming
• Semantic or associative priming
• Form priming
• morpheme stripping
• Happens if the affixation is productive
• Less productive ones are stored as separate words
• the structural processor, or parser
• it creates basic structures;
• it combines simple sentences into complex ones; and
• it moves elements of sentences from one structural position to another
• Syntactic structures are a psychological reality and have physiological correlates

• click displacement studies confirmed the idea that clauses constitute processing
units
• Ambiguous sentences
• Local ambiguity
• The student told the professor that …
• a. … he wanted a better grade.
• b. … taught the course that he wanted a better grade.
• c. … really unbelievable story.
• Global ambiguity
• The man saw the boy with the binoculars.
• Garden path sentences
• The horse raced past the barn fell.
Syntactic parser
• Have a preference for minimal attachment
• Adopts the strategy called late closure
• Physicists are thrilled to explain what they are doing to people.
• Two Sisters Reunited after 18 Years in Checkout Counter
• Traces in sentences
• Susiei is difficult to please ti
• The subcategorization frames of verbs
• a. John opened the door.
• b. The key opened the door.
• c. The door opened.
• The importance of prosody in the interpretation of the sentence
• They invited Sue and Jim and Amanda got rejected.
• Real world information
• Connectionist models
• It is (a) that a model which resembles the brain potentially provides a more
plausible account than one that does not; and
• (b) that by using this kind of architecture we may gain incidental insights into at
least some of the brain’s functions
Thank You