Lign170 Lecture 1

8/8/2019 Lign170 Lecture 1

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A Brief and Friendly Introduction to

Psycholinguistics

Roger Levy

UC San DiegoDepartment of Linguistics

31 March 2009
http://goforward/http://find/http://goback/


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What is psycholinguistics?

Inherently, linguistic communication involves the resolution

of uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible

signals and meanings.

How can a fixed set of knowledge and resources be

deployed to manage this uncertainty?

This is the study of language processing.

And how can

such knowledge and resources be learned from finite input?

This is the study of language acquisition.

Psycholinguistics studies these problems, through

observational studies, experiments, and computational

modeling.


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And how can





modeling.


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And how can





modeling.


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And how can





modeling.


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And how can





modeling.


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What is language processing?

Language processingis the study of how humans

comprehend and produce language (sentences, words

within sentences, and sequences of sentences, etc.) in

real time. We can divide this into language comprehension

(understanding what is spoken and what is written) and

language production(choosing what to say or write based

on what you want to mean)


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What is language processing?

Language processingis the study of how humans

comprehend and produce language (sentences, words

within sentences, and sequences of sentences, etc.) in

real time. We can divide this into language comprehension

(understanding what is spoken and what is written) and

language production(choosing what to say or write based

on what you want to mean)


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What is language acquisition?

Language acquisitionis the study of how humans acquire

knowledge of their native language (as infants and aschildren)


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Today

In this talk Ill focus on language comprehension, and then

discuss a bit about language production.


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Theoretical Desiderata

Realistic models of human sentence comprehension must

account for:

Language has structure

Robustness to arbitrary input

Accurate disambiguation

Inference on basis of incomplete input (Tanenhaus et al.,

1995; Altmann and Kamide, 1999; Kaiser and Trueswell,

2004)

Processing difficulty is differentialand localized


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The colored word sequences all have something in common:

The girl gave the dog a big sloppy kiss.

I gave the dog a big sloppy kiss.

Every boy on the left side of the room gave the dog a big

sloppy kiss. The teacher of this class gave the dog a big sloppy kiss.

In linguistics, this commonality is that the colored word

sequences are all of the same phrase type.

In this case, the phrase type is called a noun phrase.Languages have many different phrase types, and we can

describe the grammar of a languages in how its phrase types

come together.


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come together.


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come together.

L h


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come together.

L h t t


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In this case, the phrase type is called a noun phrase.

Languages have many different phrase types, and we can


come together.

L h t t


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come together.

L h t t


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come together.



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come together.

Robustness


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Robustness

Real linguistic input is not always totally well-formed. . .I think when she finally came to the realization that,

you know, no, I can not, I can not take care of myself.

. . .

I mean, for somebody who is, you know, for most of

their life has, has, uh, not just merely had a farm buthad ten children had a farm, ran everything because

her husband was away in the coal mines.

And, you know, facing that situation, its, its quite a

dilemma.

. . . but usually we come to understand it pretty well anyway.

Robustness


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Robustness



. . .





dilemma.(The woman is facing being put in a resting home.)


Robustness


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Robustness



. . .





dilemma.(The woman is facing being put in a resting home.)




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Most sentences are ambiguous in ways we do not even notice:Mary forgot the pitcher. . .



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Most sentences are ambiguous in ways we do not even notice:Mary forgot the pitcher. . .



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Most sentences are ambiguous in ways we do not even notice:Mary forgot the pitcher of water sitting near the stove.



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Thats probably not what you were thinking of...

Inference on the basis of incomplete input


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Comprehenders do not wait until the whole sentence has been

heard to make inferences about what it means or will wind up

meaning:

(Altmann and Kamide, 1999)



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meaning:




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meaning:

The boy will eat/movethe cake. . .




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p p



meaning:





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p p



meaning:


That is, comprehension is incremental


Processing difficulty is differential


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g y

Using multiple relative clauses in a sentence can make

processing difficult:

This is the malt that the rat that the cat that the dog

worried killed ate.

Its not the meaning of the sentence, or the use of relative

clauses, that makes it hard:

This is the malt that was eaten by the rat that was

killed by the cat that was worried by the dog.



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g y




worried killed ate.







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worried killed ate.







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Did you believe that this sentence was English?

This is the malt that the rat that the cat that the dogworried killed ate.

Consider this simple example:

This is the cat that the dog worried.

And this one:

This is the rat that the cat killed.

Which cat did the killing? Suppose it was the cat that the

dog worried.

This is the rat thatthe cat that the dog worried

killed.


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And this one:



dog worried.This is the rat thatthe cat that the dog worried

killed.



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And this one:




killed.



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And this one:




killed.



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And this one:




killed.



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And this one:




killed.



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And this one:




killed.

Processing difficulty is localized


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[self-paced reading demo, Example1]

(Grodner and Gibson, 2005)

Processing difficulty is localized


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[self-paced reading demo, Example1]

(Grodner and Gibson, 2005)

Try to guess the next word in the sentence


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Empirically, its been shown that more highly predictablewords are read more quickly (Ehrlich and Rayner, 1981)

Why would this be the case?



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My brother came inside to. . .





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My brother came inside to. . . chat? get warm? talk? eat? rest?





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The children went outside to. . .





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The children went outside to. . . play





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References I


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Altmann, G. T. and Kamide, Y. (1999). Incremental interpretation at

verbs: restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition,73(3):247264.

Ehrlich, S. F. and Rayner, K. (1981). Contextual effects on wordperception and eye movements during reading. Journal of VerbalLearning and Verbal Behavior, 20:641655.

Grodner, D. and Gibson, E. (2005). Some consequences of the serialnature of linguistic input. Cognitive Science, 29(2):261290.

Kaiser, E. and Trueswell, J. C. (2004). The role of discourse contextin the processing of a flexible word-order language. Cognition,94:113147.

Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K., and Sedivy,J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information inspoken language comprehension. Science, 268:16321634.

Lign170 Lecture 1

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