PAPER OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Words and Meaning: from Primitive to Complex Organization Sentence

Processing

PUTRI INDAH SARI :

2127101050032
 ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
AN NUR ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY OF LAMPUNG
ACADEMIC YEAR 2023/2024
PREFACE
Praise and gratitude to Allah SWT for all His blessings so that this paper can be compiled to
completion. We do not forget to say thank you for thr help of those who have contributed by
contributing both thoughts and materials.
The author hopes that this paper can add knowledge and experience to readers. In fact, we
hope that this paper can be practiced by readers in their daily lives.
For us as author, we feel that there are still many shorcomings in the preparation of this paper
due to our limited knowledge and experience. For that we really expect contructive criticism
and suggestions from readers for the perfection of this paper.
 TABLE OF CONTENS
PREFACE..............................................................................................................................
TABLE OF CONTENS.........................................................................................................
CHAPTER I...........................................................................................................................
INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................
A. BACKGROUND.......................................................................................................
B. QUESTIONS OF THE PROBLEM...........................................................................
C. OBJECTIVES............................................................................................................
CHAPTER II..........................................................................................................................
DISCUSSION........................................................................................................................
A. WORDS AND MEANING........................................................................................
B. STUDY OF WORDS.................................................................................................
C. SENTENCE PROCESSING......................................................................................
D. SYNTACTIC PROCESSING....................................................................................
E. SENTENCE PARSING AND SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY.....................................
F. MODELS OF SENTENCE PARSING......................................................................
CHAPTER III........................................................................................................................
A. CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................
REFERENCES......................................................................................................................
 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

A. BACKGROUND
Words and meanings have different meanings. The two cannot be separated because
each word has its own meaning. In psycholinguistics, this will be studied in more
depth regarding the processing of the words obtained.

B. QUESTIONS OF THE PROBLEM

What is meant by Words and Meaning : from Primitive to Complex Organization
Sentence Processing?

C. OBJECTIVES
To know and Understand what is Words and Meaning : from Primitive to Complex
Organization Sentence Processing.
 CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION
A. WORDS AND MEANING
Numerous findings, some anecdotal and some empirical, conclude that words and
meanings are related but separate entities. Three line of argument make the point :
1) The translation argument, suggest that any given language includes some words that
not depend meaning for their existence and some meanings for which there are not
single word.
2) Argument for a separation of words and meaning comes from the imperfect mapping
illustration.
3) Argument for treating word and meanings as separate comes from the elasticity
demonstration, which illustrates that a word meaning can change in different contexts

B. STUDY OF WORDS
In this section on words. Psychologist have used a variety of experimental techniques to
the study these issues. Let us first turn to a discussion of the theoretical issues that underlie
this research.
a. Word primitives
Let us begin dissecting the sentence, the impartial judge ruled the defendants guilty.
Although the sentence is composed of only seven words, many of these words are complex
and contain affixes that convey important information.
Evidence about word primitives:

 Each word (even multimorphemic) has its own lexical entry, know as a lexeme.
 Constituents morphemes are individually stored in the lexicon so that words are
decomposed or composed.
 Factors influencing word access and organization

Some of these factors many influence lexical access directly :

 Frequency
 Image ability and concreteness and abstractness
 Grammatical class
  Semantics
 Models of lexical access
 Serial search models
 Parallel access models, which are: Logogen model, Morton (1969,1979),
Connectionist models, Cohort models.
 Separating words and meaning

C. SENTENCE PROCESSING
One reason why can process speech so rapidly is our ability to systematically make use of
structure in natural language. Think for a moment of a system “ sentence” in the abstract, a
sentence following the noun-verb-noun form. Think now of the “sentence” but in form of an
action, the first noun verbed the second noun.
1) Statistical approximation to English . you might as known that increasing the
likelihood of words by increasing contextual constraints, either with the sentences or
with sentences or with statistics approximation to English.
2) Where do people pause when the speak?. Clearly, listener know a great deal about the
structure of their narrative language

D. SYNTATIC PROCESSING
Transformational grammar is to find the difference between surface structure and deep
structure, and different between competence and performance.

 Syntactic resolution is necessary for comprehension

 Surface structure versus deep structure
 Competence versus performance
 Syntactic structure of sentences

E. SENTENCE PARSING AND SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY

Ambiguity or fallacy of ambiguity is a word, phrase, or statement which contains more
than one meaning. Ambiguous words or statements lead to vagueness and confusion, and
shape the basis for instances of unintentional humor. For instance, it is ambiguous to say “I
rode a black horse in red pajamas,” because it may lead us to think the horse was wearing red
pajamas. The sentence becomes clear when it is restructured “Wearing red pajamas, I rode a
black horse.”
According R.C. Dick ambiguity is uncertainty among specific alternatives. A word in
context can mean more than the isolated word; and can also mean less than the isolated word
- more, because in context the word acquires new context and, at the same time, less, because
the word is delimited by that context. Although the words of a document are normally to be
construed in their ordinary and natural meaning, the words should be construed in their
context as part of the document as a whole, rather than in either their strict etymological
sense or their popular meaning apart from that context.
If a sentence is ambiguous, it can have more than one meaning. There are many types of
ambiguity. For example, in the following sentence the word bank could mean the edge of a
river, or a financial institution:
John went to the bank. (This is called lexical ambiguity because it is the result of one of
the words having more than one possible meaning). They are called Garden Path Sentences
because they are easily misunderstood (they lead you down the garden path) even though
they are all grammatical! Don't worry if some of these sentences seem like nonsense at first
(you have been garden pathed); they will be explained below.
1) The prime number few.
2) Fat people eat accumulates.
3) The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississippi.
4) Until the police arrest the drug dealers control the street.
5) The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.
There are two types of ambiguous sentence: either there is a local ambiguity (one that is
cleared up once you have heard the whole sentence) or it is a global ambiguity (one that
remains even after the entire sentence has been heard). Garden Path sentences normally have
local ambiguity.

 Locally ambiguous: The old train.

"Train" could be a noun ("The old train left the station") or a verb ("The old train the
young").

 Globally ambiguous: I know more beautiful women than Julia Roberts.

This could mean "I know women more beautiful than Julia Roberts" or "I know more
beautiful women than Julia Roberts does".

F. MODELS OF SENTENCE PARSING

Parsing is the assignment of the words in a sentence to their appropriate linguistic
categories to allow understanding of what is being conveyed by the speaker. It is not simply
the assignment of words to simple diagrams or categories, but also involves evaluating the
meaning of a sentence according to the rules of syntax drawn by inferences made from each
word in the sentence. This evaluation of meaning is what makes parsing such a complex
process. When speech or text is being parsed, each word in a sentence is examined and
processed to contribute to the overall meaning and understanding of the sentence as a whole.
There are two main theories for parsing of the English language.

 Garden Path Model: Minimal Attachment

  Constraint Satisfaction Models

The Garden Path model is a dominant theory in about how people are able to parse
words together to interpret the meaning of statements. The title of the theory is based on a
metaphor about being lead down the wrong path. In regards to psycholinguistics, a person can
be lead down the wrong path while reading a sentence when they make inaccurate
assumptions about the context of the noun phrases. The reader is not aware that they are
being lead down the wrong path. At the beginning of the sentence, or the path, the reader is
under the impression that they are proceeding in the right direction with the syntactic
structure and making the correct assumptions as they are reading. Then suddenly, new
information presented later on in the sentence causes the reader to fall down the rabbit hole.
This new information causes confusion because, up until that rabbit hole, the reader assumed
they were correct in their perception of the garden path.
The assumption behind this theory is that the reader perceives the sentence as being
set in only one context. There is a failure to perceive that there may be another context or way
to interpret the sentence based on the noun phrases. The reader remains confident in their
perceived judgement and assumes they are right. Garden path sentences create confusion as
the reader's preconceived judgments are shattered (van Gompel et. al., 2006).
There are generally three alternative ways how a person could perceive a sentence:
1) Assemble a structure for just one of the possible interpretations and ignore all
others (like the garden path model)
2) Take into consideration all of the possible interpretations for the noun phrase at
the same time
3) Complete a partial analysis, with minimal commitment to one perception, waiting
to make a final decision until more information is obtained.

 Principles that Guide the Garden Path Model

There are two principles of the Garden Path Model which explain how incorrect assignment
of roles in a sentence can create confusion.
1) Late Closure : This parsing error is when the new words and phrases that are creating
confusion to be attached to the already open phrase (a phrase that is already being
processed). An example of this type of error is: The horse raced past the barn fell.

2) Minimal Attachment : This is when the reader uses the simplest strategy to help
understand the sentence. It is a strategy of parsimony, where the simplest strategy is
seen as being the most accurate, and therefore, the best. Minimal attachment causes
each incoming word to be attached to the already existing structure.

 Challenges To The Garden Path Model

 The Gardent Path Model is not the only model to explain Parsing. Listed below are some
other models to explain how parsing may occur and other challenges to the Garden Path
theory in general.
1) Constraint Satisfaction Model
This model states that the reader uses all of the available information at once when
engaging in parsing of a sentence. This means that all lexical, syntactic, discourse and
contextual information is taken into consideration simultaneously. According to this model,
readers use all the information that they have, all the time. This is considered parallel
processing, due to the multiple structures that are used.
2) Dependency Locality Theory
This theory argues that the reader prefers to attach information to local nodes rather then
long distance nodes. This is based on amount of working memory required to fully
understand a sentence. An increase in the amount of working memory needed to make sense
of a sentence is correlated with an increased tendency for the reader to parse locally rather
then to use long distance nodes. The theory of locality is crucial to this concept, stating that
the cost of integrating two elements together directly depends on the distance between the
two (Gibson, 2000).
3) Competition Model
The majority of theories are based on how people parse English. In different languages,
cues may be weighted differently depending on the language in regards to how much they are
relied on to parse the language in question. For example, speakers of the English language
rely heavily on world order, while Hungarian speakers do not. Language processing is a
series of competitions between lexical items, phonological forms and syntactic patterns.
There may be other important processing items that are not considered in the Garden Path or
any other model specifically because it is not used in the English language. More research has
to be completed to compare other language parsing to determine if one theory can simply
encompass all languages (MacWhinney & Bates, 1993).

G. MEANING : THE GOAL OF SENTENCE PROCESSING

The goal of sentence processing is to arrive at the meaning of the sentence. In formal
terms, this means determining the semantic relationship between the rapidly arriving words.
The goal of sentence processing is to arrive at the meaning of the sentence. This means
determining the semantic relationship between the rapidly arriving words. The recognition
sentences bore four possible relationships to the target sentence:
a) The identical sentence
b) Active/ passive change
c) Formal change
d) Semantic change
 H. IS SYNTAX PROCESSED SEPARATELY FROM MEANING?
At the time when modern psycholinguistic was first developing, psychology as a whole
was largely dominated by “serial” models of mental operations. The possibility of massively
parallel computers and neural network modeling was still beyond the horizontal.
In terms of language processing, it is common to see four-stage model that followed the
distinctions in general linguistics i.e
a) At the level of phonology (the sound patterns of words)
b) Lexical processing ( word identity or activation
c) Syntactic processing ( determination of grammatical structure)
d) Semantic processing (processing of the full utterance for meaning)
e) The principle of syntactic autonomy proposed that syntactic processing must
proceed, and thus the conducted independently from the semantic analysis of a
sentence, where functional relationship are determined and meaning of the utterance
becomes available.

I. THE ROLE OF PROSODY IN SENTENCE PROCESSING

Prosody is a general term form the variety of acoustic features-what we hear-that
ordinarily accompany a spoken sentence. One prosodic feature is the intonation pattern of a
sentence.
The prosodic feature are: the intonation pattern of sentence, word stress, the pauses that
sometimes occur at the ends of sentence or major clauses, the lengthening of final vowels in
words immediately prior to a clauses boundary
Prosody plays numerous important roles in language processing; prosody can indicate the
mood of the speaker, the semantic focus of a sentence, to disambiguate the meaning of an
otherwise ambiguous sentence, and to mark major clauses of the sentence

J. ON-LINE INTERACTIVE OF SENTENCE PROCESSING

 An interactive view of sentence processing begins with bottom-up processing which
refers to the way in which listeners sensory apparatus detect and analysis the acoustic
speech signal and processes it up.
 The term top-down processing refers to the potential use of such knowledge in order
to speed, clarify, or otherwise facilitate the processing of emerging information from
bottom-up sources.
 On-line interactive models believe that all language processing inherently interactive,
even when the signal clarity is good assume that semantic processing co-occurs with
syntactic processing as the speech is being heard
Support from prior context that spoken sentences can be processed so rapidli. Shadowing and
gating student. How on-line is gating?. The process we wish to understand, of course, is the
real-time analysis of the speech input and the automated “core process” involved in language
understanding.

K. COMPREHENSION OF NON LITERAL MEANING

A distinction important to a discussion of sentence processing is the distinction between
the literal meaning of an utterance and cases where sentence also have non literal meaning.
For example: sarcasm, idioms, metaphors, and indirect request
A three stages process is a theory in assuming how non-literal meaning is processed:

 The individual determines the literal meaning of the sentence

 The individual determines whether the literal meaning seems appropriate to the
context and
 Circumstance surrounding the utterance and seeks a non-literal interpretation

L. THE ROLE OF MEMORY IN LANGUAGE PROCESSING

In 1887, Jacobs published a series of studies in which he reported that older children
could repeat longer strings of digits read out to them than younger children. Jacobs also
reported that intelligent children (as assessed by the teacher) could repeat more digits than
less intelligent children. This idea was picked up by Binet and Simon in the early 20th
century when they developed the first valid intelligence test. They found that 3-year old
children could repeat only sequences of two digits, whereas children of 4 years could repeat
sequences of three digits, and most healthy children of 7 years could repeat sequences of five
digits.
Therefore, Binet and Simon included digit repetition in their intelligence test (Binet &
Simon, 1905). Ever since, the digit span task (as it became called) has been part of
intelligence tests, because it correlates reasonably well with the scores of other subtests of
intelligence (such as arithmetic, general information, and the discovery of similarities). The
task received further impetus when Miller (1956) argued it was a good measure of a person’s
short-term memory capacity. An important publication in this respect was the working
memory model of Baddeley and Hitch (1974). This model consisted of three parts:

 Modality-free central executive related to attention

 A phonological loop holding information in a speech-based form, and
 A visuo-spatial sketchpad for the coding of visual and spatial information. A further
milestone was the publication by Daneman and Working Memory and Language.
 M. A PROCESSING MODEL OF SENTENCE
This models proposes that in active speech perception (or in reading), linguistic input in
processed in cycles on a segment-by-segment basis. In active speech perception( in reading)
linguistics input is processed in cycles on segment by segment basis The propositions most
important to the message structure are selected and other propositions connected to them are
selected on basis of shared argumen`ts.

CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION

Words and meaning is numerous findings, some anecdotal and some empirical, conclude that
words and meanings are related but separate entities. And in this sections of words,
Psychologist have used a variety of experimental techniques to the study these issues like
word primitives. And then one reason why can process speech so rapidly is our ability to
systematically make use of structure in natural language.
In sentence, transformational grammar is to fine the difference between surface structure and
deep structure. Ambiguity or fallacy of ambiguity is a word, phrase, or statement which
contains more than one meaning.
 REFERENCE
Gaskell, M. Gareth. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics. Ney York: Oxford
University Press.
R.C. Dick Legal Drafting in Plain Language 3rd edn. Carswell, Thomas Professional
Publishing, Ontario, Canada, 1995,

http://crr.ugent.be/papers/Szmalec%20et%20al%20Working%20Memory%20and%20Second
%20Language%20Processing.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_processing
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Parsing
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01068042
http://literarydevices.net/ambiguity/
http://www.fun-with-words.com/ambiguous_garden_path.html
http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/~almorris/SentenceComprehension.pdf