LECTURE 9

LANGUAGE PROCESSING

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 INTRODUCTION

• We might sometimes be aware that we are searching for a

word, composing a sentence, or straining to understand
someone else. Still, we are unaware of the mechanisms and
operations involved in producing and understanding language.

• Psycholinguistics seek to understand how language is done

(O’Grady, 1997).
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 LEVELS OF LANGUAGE
REPRESENTATION

• You are walking through the

streets of London and
encountering the sad sight of a
homeless person in a doorway.
• In an accent which resembles
London Cockney, the person says
to you:

❑“Got any change?” [gɒ(ʔ) ni

ˈʧaɪnʤ]
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 LEVELS OF LANGUAGE REPRESENTATION

• This is a bottom-up account based entirely upon linguistic data.

• So far, we have not considered the possible effects of context (e.g. world
knowledge or previous experience of homeless people).

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 SERIAL VS. PARALLEL PROCESSING

• Evidence suggests that a listener begins to process an utterance about

200 milliseconds after the speaker has begun to speak.

• So, we process an utterance while it is happening.

• Instead, it seems that we process linguistic information in parallel.

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 6

Serial Processing Parallel Processing

 SERIAL VS. PARALLEL PROCESSING

• Let us assume that the listener is operating at the phonological level, attributing
a standard form to [ˈʧaɪnʤ], the last part of the utterance.

• By this point, they might have reached the segmentational level with GOTANY
and inserted possible word boundaries.

• They might have reached the syntactic level with GOT and be working out its
grammatical role.

• So, different parts of the utterance are being processed at different levels – all at7
the same time.
 DEEP PROCESSING VS. SHALLOW
PROCESSING
• Deep Processing: encoding the meaning of a word and relating it to
similar words.
• For example, a teacher explains the word “exhaustion” to her students
by sharing her story about running a 15km marathon.

• Shallow Processing: structural and phonemic recognition and the

processing of sentences and word structures.

• For example, a student memorising the facts about the sultanate of8
Malacca for his upcoming history quiz.
 LANGUAGE PROCESSING

• The different perspectives of language processing (serial, parallel, deep

and shallow) allow us to comprehend the multifaceted meaning
derivations by different individuals for the same input.

• Until now, there is no one ultimate language processing model that has
been acknowledged in the field of psycholinguistics; many models are still
being proposed and the existing models are still being debated about.

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 CLAUSAL HYPOTHESIS

• In language processing, the clausal hypothesis also contributes to

significant input.

• The hypothesis suggests clauses as the basic unit of analysis in

language comprehension, which includes finite and subordinate clauses.

• This hypothesis recommends ‘chunking’, where longer clauses are

divided into smaller chunks for easy comprehension. 10
 CLAUSAL HYPOTHESIS

• Example:

• In the example above, the first sentence is chunked into two parts: “John
wanted” and “to leave work early”. Similarly, in the second, the sentence is
chunked into “The man was very tall” and “who John saw”.

• This chunking of clauses helps the language processing to go faster and11

smoother.
 SPOKEN AND VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION

• Language processing is also aided by spoken and visual word

recognition, which are affected by several factors.

❑Word superiority effect

❑Word length effect
❑Frequency effect
❑Regularity effect
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 WORD SUPERIORITY EFFECT
• The word superiority effect indicates that we do not simply process a
word letter-by-letter but rather that recognizing a word makes the letters
in that word more readily available.

• Thus, the recognition of letters within a string of letters is easier and more
accurate if the string constitutes an existing word.

• For example, the letter ‘d’ is recognised in an existing word like ‘world’
rather than in a non-word ‘wlod’.
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 WORD LENGTH EFFECT

• It has been claimed that longer words take longer to recognize.

• The length of a word affects an individual’s memory for words he/she has
seen.

• It is easier and faster to process the word “cat” compared to the word
“interstratifications”.
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 FREQUENCY EFFECT

• High-frequency words are processed more easily and more reliably than
low-frequency words.

• The frequency is also interconnected with word length since research

noted that high-frequency words tend to be shorter than low-frequency
words.

• The connection between word frequency and its length is known as

‘Zipf’s law’, named after the researcher George Kingsley Zipf, who first
proposed it. 15
 REGULARITY EFFECT
• This effect concerns the relationship between spelling and pronunciation.

• A regular spelling-sound correspondence means that a word follows the general rules
for arriving at a pronunciation based on the spelling, which makes the recognition
process faster.

• For instance, the letters ‘ie’ in English mostly stand for a long /i:/ sound like in “thief” or
“piece” – this is an example of regular spelling-sound correspondence.

• The letters ‘ave’ in English, on the other hand, can vary constantly. For instance, ‘ave’ in
‘save’ and ‘have’ are different – this is an example of irregular spelling-sound
correspondence. 16
 FROM CONCEPT TO EXPRESSION

• After language processing, the next step is to focus on speech

production, which responses towards language processing.

• Speakers will have some notion, concept, or message they wish to

convey (Fodor, 1975).

• Speech Production – the process by which a speaker turns a mental

concept into a spoken utterance.

• Two kinds of data in constructing speech production models – SPEECH17

ERRORS and SPEECH DISFLUENCIES.
 FROM CONCEPT TO EXPRESSION

• These data have provided evidence for the units used in generating
speech and the stages between the message the speaker wishes to
convey and its spoken expression.

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 SPEECH ERRORS

• We have experienced utterances that seem to have been mixed up on

their way out, either as speakers or as hearers.

• For instance, “You have missed all my history lectures” could be

produced as “You have hissed all my mystery lectures”.

• Such errors in production, called speech errors or slips of the tongue,

occur regularly in normal conversation. 19
 SPEECH ERRORS

• Reverend William A. Spooner, the warden of New College, Oxford

University, England, from 1903 – 1924, became “famous” for producing
errors that confuse sounds, often called Spoonerisms.

Rev.William Spooner was well

known for his slips of the
tongue.
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 SPEECH ERRORS

• He suffered from dysgraphia, a form of dyslexia that causes the sufferer

to confuse sounds of words between closely related phonemes.

• This absent-minded figure was liable to mix up the syllables in his spoken
phrases, which produced unintentional comic effects (genuine mistakes).

• The genuine mistakes may be funny to the listener but embarrassing for
the speaker. 21
 DISFLUENCIES

• Many utterances are characterised by hesitations, repetitions, false

starts, and “filler” words such as um, well, or you know (sometimes called
filled pauses).

• Such disfluencies are more common than we think – we tend not to

notice them.

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 DISFLUENCIES

• Such lapses in fluent speech production provide valuable insights into the
units of speech production and permit us to evaluate how much of
speech is mentally planned for its production.

• Pausing phenomena - this strategy is used to pre-plan utterances.

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 TYPES OF ERRORS

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4 kinds of errors at this level

 ANTICIPATION ERRORS

• In anticipation errors, sounds which come later in the utterance

inappropriately appear earlier than intended.

❑Consonant anticipation

❑Vowel anticipation
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 PRESERVATION ERRORS

• In preservation errors, a sound produced early in an utterance reappears

in an incorrect location later.

❑Consonant preservation

❑Vowel preservation
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 PHONEME EXCHANGE

• In phoneme exchange errors, phonemes are reversed.

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 PHONEME DELETION

• In phoneme deletion errors, phonemes are deleted.

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 ANATOMY OF REPAIR

• Repair involves the interruption of an erroneous utterance.

• There are three main phases identified in repair: interruption, editing and
repair (Levelt, 1983)

• A speaker can also use an editing expression (could be the vocalisation

of expressions like ‘uh’).

• The repair is when the speaker makes good the damage of the error from29
the point of restart onwards.
ANATOMY OF REPAIR

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 USE OF GESTURES

• In addition to spoken and written linguistic input, gestures also carry

content that needs to be processed for meaning.

• Among many types of gestures, content-related gestures have been

noted for their prominence in contributing to fluency in speech production.

• Observations revealed that when speakers are prevented from using

content-related gestures, they face reduced fluency and reduced31
vocabulary size (Krauss, 1998).
 GESTURE-RELATED CONTENTS

• There are three types under this category:

❑Symbols
❑Indices
❑icons

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 SYMBOLS

• Sometimes called emblems, gestures as symbols ‘stand for’ something.

• They can be used instead of a complete utterance, though they can also
be used alongside information that is contained in the speech.

• They can be used for interpersonal control (e.g. ‘hello’, ‘be quiet’), to
express personal states (‘I approve’, ‘I don’t know’) and for evaluations of
others (‘he’s crazy). 33
SYMBOLS

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 INDICES
• Indexical or indicative gestures direct the
perceiver’s attention to a particular object.

• These gestures usually involve an instrument,

frequently a body part, as well as a locative action.

• For example, a common instrument for indicating is

the forefinger (the index finger), and a frequent
locative action is to point at something (Schegloff,
1984) 35
 ICONIC GESTURES
• Speakers execute iconic gestures to depict what is being talked about.

• The gestures are a descriptive part of the primary message.

• The gestures can run alongside spoken information, with speech and
gesture concurrent.

• Alternatively, the gesture can be embedded in the utterance, forming a

component of what the speaker is saying in much the same way as
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words do.
ICONIC GESTURES

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ICONIC GESTURES

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