TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF COTOPAXI

HUMAN SCIENCES AND EDUCATION PEDAGOGY OF NATIONAL

AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES

NAME:

NATALY ROSERO

SUBJECT:

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

TEACHER:

PhD. RODRIGO TOVAR

PERIOD:

APRIL-AUGUST 2022

LATACUNGA – ECUADOR
 ACTIVITY 2. SPEECH COMPREHENSION: UNDERSTANDING WHAT
WE HEAR AND READ

TASK 1. Read Scovel, T. (2014). “Understanding what we hear and read”, pp. 20- 68.”,
answer the following questions:
What is the stage of the comprehension of sounds?

Understanding spoken language requires a complex series of processing steps to translate

speech sounds into meaning so that sounds and letters reach the ears or eyes quickly
generating words, which in turn are transformed very quickly into phrases, propositions
and sentences, therefore comprehension is basically the recognition of a consecutive
series of linguistic symbols and in this process listeners use a large amount of information
from the language itself that is being produced, to decipher the linguistic symbols they
hear or see. A clear example of this is when a child learns a first language they use their
innate ability to listen categorically to speech sounds to acquire the appropriate settings
where they associate symbols and sounds, thus comprehension allows them to recognize
the fine distinctions between speech sounds that all humans possess, along with the
ability that all humans have to adjust their acoustic categories to the parameters of the
language in which they are immersed.

In the comprehension of sounds, what is the phoneme restoration effect?

In sound comprehension, the phoneme restoration is a term that denotes the extraction of
meaning from the sound where it is produced through the perceptual-cognitive system
and that information flows and proceeds from representations of syntactic, semantic and
pragmatic nature, which have to do with the on-the-fly construction of the meaning of
what is heard. Therefore, this is the phoneme restoration effect, which helps to replace
the missing physical information in the speech signal and to restore the missing phoneme,
so that for the phoneme restoration process to take place, an input material is needed to
perceptually reconstruct the missing phoneme.

In the comprehension of sounds, what is the voice onset timing (VOT)?

The voice onset timing is a primary acoustic cue because when a person aspires to
transmit information a consonant stop occurs. It is worth mentioning that there are three
main types of phonation stops in terms of voice onset timing, which are simple voiceless
stops that have a voice onset time at or near zero, aspirated stops followed by a sonorant
which have an extended voice onset time. Sonorant stops have a voicing onset time less
than zero which means that the vocal cords begin to vibrate before the stop is released.
For example with a partially voiced stop, the voice starts sometime during consonant
closure.

In the comprehension of words, what is the parallel distributed processing (PDP)?

People are sensational beings because they are more intelligent than machines in that they
perceive objects in natural scenes and notice their relationships, to understand language
and retrieve information from memory. In this sense, people also learn much better to do
anything more accurately and fluently through processing experience and related to it,
there is parallel distributed processing which is a theory of learning that proposes an
explanation for the phenomenon of knowledge acquisition based on the neural processes
that take place in the brain. This information processing is carried out through the
interactions of a large number of elements called units, each of which sends signals to
other units, thus generating interconnections and activation of these units to recreate the
knowledge of the object or material.

In this theory, the environment has a great influence, since it is where the learner will
find the data with which he will build his new knowledge, so that learners progressively
build their mastery of the language thanks to their exposure to an enormous amount of
linguistic data.
In the comprehension of words, what are the aspects of the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT)
phenomenon?

The tip of the tongue phenomenon refers to the situation in which someone knows
something perfectly, but is not able to express it at that moment, as if they were stuck.
Therefore, the lack of accessibility to the word and the feeling of imminence regarding
its recovery are two of the key characteristics that represent this phenomenon and this
may be due to factors related to the speaker, such as age and brain damage, modulate the
occurrence of TOT. On the other hand, this may be due to word-related factors such as
frequency of use of a word and date of recent use also having an impact.

TASK 2. According to what you read in Scovel, T. (2014), pp. 20-68.”, list the stages or
aspects involved in the following episodes:

Episodes Stages involved

Comprehension of sentences Comprehension involves not only the decoding of

sounds, letters and lexical meanings, but also the
unraveling of the semantics of sentences. In this
sense, according to Chomsky's model, all sentences
are generated from a skeleton of sentence structure
that is then embodied in everyday utterances through
a series of transformation rules, whereby people use
words in different ways depending on
communicative situations and their intentions. Thus,
some words can be derived and composed to create
new sentences.
Comprehension of texts This task requires the simultaneous integration of
many different types of information, such as
knowledge of letters and their sounds, spelling,
grammar, word meanings, and general knowledge of
the world. Additionally, general cognitive skills such
as attentional control, inference, and memory
retrieval are used to organize this information into a
single meaningful representation.