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Linguistics as part of Cognitive Science

What do native speakers know about their languages?
How is knowledge of language acquired (primarily by children)?
How is this knowledge used to produce and comprehend language?

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Linguistics as part of Cognitive Science

What do native speakers know about their languages?
How is knowledge of language acquired (primarily by children)?
How is this knowledge used to produce and comprehend language?

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Competence vs Performance

What we know about language

How we use that knowledge to process language

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Competence vs Performance

What we know about language

How we use that knowledge to process language

...produce language.

...comprehend language.

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Competence vs Performance

How does your knowledge of the lexicon allow you to comprehend or produce words?
How do you use your phrase structure rules to assign syntactic structure to sentences?
How are literal meanings and implicatures computed by discourse participants?

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Lexical knowledge

What types of information does does the Mental Lexicon contain?

Form (pronunciation, spelling)
Syntactic category (part-of-speech)
Syntactic subcategorization
Lexical semantics

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Lexical processing

What is the organization of mental knowledge of lexical items?
How is information in the mental lexicon accessed during listening/speaking?
What are some processing steps required to recognize or produce a spoken word?
Is lexical access an all-or-none process?

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When is processing hard (or easy). Why?

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When is processing slow (or fast). Why?

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How Fast is Processing (on average)?

Average rate of speech production is ~125 wpm

Comprehension must be able to keep up!

In reading, gaze durations of 200 – 250 ms, interrupted by saccades of 25 – 60 ms
Word naming times average ~500 ms

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Experimental Methods

Reading
Word Naming: Given a prompt, name the corresponding word
Lexical decision: Decide whether a sequence of letters is a word or nonword
Semantic categorization: Place a word in one of two categories (e.g., vegetable vs. tool)

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What do we find?

Speed is influenced by...

Frequency (rain vs. puddle vs. precipitation)
Repetition

Stronger effect for low frequency words
Can persist over several hours or longer

Age-of-acquisition (AOA)
Word length
stimulus quality, etc.

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What do we find?

Semantic (or associate) priming

Lexical decision to a word is faster when it is preceded by a word related in meaning.

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PRIME

(150 ms)

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target

Is this a word of English?

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What do we find?

Semantic (or associate) priming

NURSE ➙ doctor

BREAD ➙ doctor

Faster

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Automaticity in Processing

BLUE

Name the COLOR of the word

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Automaticity in Processing

RED

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Automaticity in Processing

GREEN

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Automaticity in Processing

PURPLE

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Automaticity in Processing: Stroop Effect

BLUE

PURPLE

Faster

We can’t “turn off” lexical processing!

Stroop 1935, Jaensch 1929

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Processing Polysemy

“Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems.They were not surprised when they found several bugs…”

Swinney 1979

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Processing Polysemy

ANT

Swinney 1979

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Processing Polysemy

SPY

Swinney 1979

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Processing Polysemy

SEW

Swinney 1979

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Processing Polysemy

“Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems.They were not surprised when they found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of the room.”

Swinney 1979

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Processing Polysemy

“Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems.They were not surprised when they found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of the room.”

Swinney 1979

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Processing Polysemy

Bug

insect

listening device

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Processing Polysemy

Bug

insect

listening device

ANT

SPY

SEW

Semantic Priming!

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Processing Polysemy

SPY ANT SEW

Faster than

Semantic priming effect for the meanings that are not part of the final interpretation!

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Processing Polysemy

Access ALL meanings for a word (creating priming effects for all entries)

THEN select the meaning that fits contextual information (resulting in a single accessed meaning).

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Competence vs Performance

Frequency, repetition, semantic priming, etc. affect the processing (use) of knowledge about words, not word knowledge.

But why does the mind/brain exhibit these effects?

Why are frequent or recently seen words recognized more quickly?

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Production?

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Tip-of-the-Tongue State

“A navigational instrument used in measuring angular distances, especially the altitude of the sun, moon, and stars at sea.”

(Brown & McNeill 1966, Bock & Levelt 1994, Aitchison 2003)

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Tip-of-the-tongue State

Sextant

Participants often guess semantically or phonologically words

compass, protractor, dividers,

secant, sextet, sexton

(Brown & McNeill 1966, Bock & Levelt 1994, Aitchison 2003)

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Tip-of-the-tongue State

Brown & McNeill 1966

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Lexical processing

What is the organization of mental knowledge of lexical items?
How is information in the mental lexicon accessed during listening/speaking?
What are some processing steps required to recognize or produce a spoken word?
Is lexical access an all-or-none process?

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Sentence processing

A Mental grammar allows listeners/speakers to comprehend/produce an unbounded set of sentences

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Sentence Processing

How do listeners process sequences of words that are

structurally ambiguous?

initially consider all grammatical parses?
initially consider only one grammatical parse?
are parsing decisions subject to reanalysis?

How do listeners interpret displaced phrases, such as wh-phrases moved to the beginning of the sentence?

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Task: assign an abstract syntactic structure to a string of words

How does the parser choose a structure?

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Parsing: Hypothesis 1

The robot attacked the aliens from Mars

The parser waits until all information is available before interpreting

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Parsing: Hypothesis 2

VP V

The robot attacked the aliens…

The parser begins interpreting as soon as it can…

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Parsing: Hypothesis 2

The robot attacked the aliens from Mars

… and must reanalyze when it makes a mistake.

Incremental Parsing

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Parsing: Global Ambiguities

The robot attacked the aliens from Mars

NP PP

“The robot attacked the aliens from Mars.”

The robot attacked the aliens from Mars

NP PP

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Garden-path sentences

_VPVP

???

NP _PPNP

(e.g., Tanenhaus et al 1995; Trueswell et al. 1999)

Put the frog on the napkin in the box

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Garden-path sentences

_VPVP

???

NP _PPNP

(e.g., Tanenhaus et al 1995; Trueswell et al. 1999)

Put the frog on the napkin in the box

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Garden-path sentences

_VPVP

???

NP _PPNP

(e.g., Tanenhaus et al 1995; Trueswell et al. 1999)

Put the frog on the napkin in the box

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Garden-path sentences

_VPVP

???

NP _PPNP

(e.g., Tanenhaus et al 1995; Trueswell et al. 1999)

Put the frog on the napkin in the box

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Garden-path sentences

_VPVP

???

NP _PPNP

(e.g., Tanenhaus et al 1995; Trueswell et al. 1999)

Put the frog on the napkin in the box

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Garden-path sentences

_VPVP

???

NP _PPNP

(e.g., Tanenhaus et al 1995; Trueswell et al. 1999)

Put the frog on the napkin in the box

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Visual world eye-tracking

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(Tanenhaus et al 1995)

A B C D

A’ B’

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Hypothesis 1:

Hypothesis 2:

The parser begins interpreting as soon as it can.

The parser waits until all information is available before interpreting

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Long Distance Dependencies

Lee washed the dishes with the soap.

🠊 What did Lee wash ___ with the soap?

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Long Distance Dependencies