Sentence Processing

How words are stored

Word primitives
refers to the smallest form in which a word is stored in the mental lexicon

Whole lexeme hypothesis

words are stored in all its variants (combinations) and represented separately E.g. book, bookish, bookshelf, booked

Decompositional hypothesis
Words are stored in its base form and are accessed together with other morphemes to formed complex words E.g. ail - ail(ment), ail(s)

Factors contribute to the access or retrieval of words

Frequency
People respond readily to word that are frequently used

Imageability, concreteness and abstractness

Words that are easily imagine (concrete) are easily recalled as compared to low imagery words (words that are abstract)

Semantics
Words that carry meaning are easily accessed

 Grammatical class
Words that are in the same grammatical class are used more often (e.g. substituting a noun with another noun and so forth); Words are also divided into open-class (content) words and closed-class (function) words

Phonology
are inherently confusable (i.e., articulated in largely similar ways) may be inserted or missing altogether change with context, which is required to be able to make an unambiguous interpretation

Arguments of link between words and meaning

Translation argument
Some language has more than one words to mean one thing; E.g padi, beras, nasi (Malay) - rice

Imperfect mapping
Words that are ambiguous in meaning and have more than one synonyms;

elasticity
Words have different meaning when use in different contexts; E.g tall tales is not the same as tall man

Structural properties of sentences

Fluent speakers/listeners do not consciously follow the rules of language; A competent speaker/listener will automatically apply the knowledge of their language when he speaks/listen; For fluent speakers, they only pause to breathe while looking for the appropriate linguistic content; A word is more likely to occur (through structure, semantic or syntactic context) if presented visually;

Syntactic processing
Surface structure
sentence structure of a sentence is made up of the words you hear or write to convey meaning of the speaker/writer

Deep structure (meaning)

The deep structure of a sentence is when your listener/reader process the sentence by breaking them down to smaller units

 In some sentences, the SS are different but the DS are the same
E.g. The girl ate the cake The cake was eaten by the girl

While in some sentences, the SS are the same but the DS are the different
E.g. Flying planes can be dangerous

In order to understand the meaning of a sentence, a listener/reader has to:

1. analyse the sentence structure 2. use the information to detect the deep structure, which conveys meaning

 Competence vs performance
When a speaker has the knowledge of rules of grammar, he/she is being competent When a speaker knows how to use the language rules, he/she is able to performed

syntactic structure of sentences

refers to the breaking down of sentences based on its manageable smaller units Hierarchical with several levels:
Sentence level (NP) + (VP) levels (N) + (V= adj + N) levels

 e.g.
S

NP
V Det The N girl ate

VP
NP Det the N cake

 syntactic ambiguity
There are two types of syntactic ambiguity that listeners/readers handle:
Local ambiguity Standing ambiguity

1. Local ambiguity
In parsing a sentence, the syntactic function of a word is temporary ambiguous until more of the sentence is heard.

2. Standing ambiguity
In parsing a sentence, the syntactic function of a word remains ambiguous even after the rest of the sentence is heard

Models of sentence parsing:

1. Garden path model attending to only one meaning of the sentence that is heard. The sentence has to be re-parsed in order to make sense of it. 2. Constraint satisfaction model both meanings of the sentence are processed at the same time and one of the interpretations will be chosen once the whole sentence is heard.

Text and discourse

Discourse and text are made up of sets of sentences about a single topic that are linked together by cohesive devices These cohesive devices give the text sense of coherence and cohesion devices used in connecting a sentence together:
1. 2. 3. 4. reference substitution ellipses conjunctions

When someone reads or hears discourse, they normally remember the important facts about the particular text; Discourse serves as context which affect our interpretation of a text which will help our understanding;