Psycholinguistics

Or what I did in my MSc

Natasha Dare

This talk

What is psycholinguistics?
The origins of language
Some of the major areas of research

Famous experiments
Terminology
State of the art

Particularly what is being done at Edinburgh

When language goes wrong

Not controversial

What is psycholinguistics?

Psychological processing of language

Part of cognitive science

Input from neuroscience, informatics
and linguistics

Why is this interesting/important?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every

man is a piece of the continent, a part of
the main.
John Donne, Meditation XVII

Origins of language - Child

language

Infants very quickly learn about language

3-day old neonates prefer the sound of their mothers

voice (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980)
4-day old neonates prefer listening to their parents
language (Mehler & Dupoux, 1994)
1-month old babies can distinguish between speech
sounds (Eimas, Miller, & Jusczyk, 1987)

6 weeks: cooing
6-9 months: babbling
12 months: initial word use
18 months: vocabulary explosion of 40 new words
per week
24 months: short sentences
36 months: 90% intelligible

Origins of language - Animal

communication

Many animals have complex communication systems

But is this true language?

Vervet monkeys: leopard vs snake vs eagle

Chaffinches: combined territorial and mating calls an initial
trill to deter males, and a final flourish to attract females
Animal communication is holistic
Human language is compositional

Can see origins of human language in animals

e.g. teeth baring ritual = threat -> symbolic acts

courtship gift = attention to third entity -> reference

It is nothing other than words which has made us

human
Pavlov

How did human language

develop?

Robotic agents to simulate evolution,

front
especially emergence of regularities

high

5 vowels most common (Latin)

low
Maximal acoustic distance
De Boer (1997) - regularities emerge
spontaneously after 3,000 games

Pidgins -> creoles

Pidgins are formed when communities are

deliberately mixed e.g. Ruso-Norsk
Creoles develop from pidgins but have full
syntax and native speakers

Tok Pisin: sapos = if, bilong = possessive

back
u
o

The problem

Bilingualis
m
Production

Spoken word
production
Written word
production
Dialogue

lexico
n

Comprehensi
on
Spoken word
comprehensio
n
Written word
comprehensio
/Discourse
n

Some linguistics terms

Semantics

Syntax

Sounds of language e.g. thin = [In]

Phonology

Specialised term for grammar word order

Phonetics

Meaning

Language-specific phonetics e.g. rhotic [r] in party in USA

Morphology

Words and word formations

Sometimes change the underlying meaning (re-)

Sometimes dont (-s)

Pragmatics

Language use

Auditory word recognition

What are the sound representations used to

access the lexicon (mental dictionary)?
Very difficult task

We understand 20 phonemes per second

We can recognise words in context 200 ms after
onset (Marslen-Wilson, 1984)
Miller and Jusczyk (1989): invariance (phonemes
sound different in different contexts) and
segmentation (speech slurs words together)
Assimilation of sound properties from other words
Co-articulation of words

Auditory word recognition

cont.

Two cues: uniqueness point and context

/t/ /tr/ /tre/ /tres/ /tresp/ /trespass/
uniqueness point

Cohort model (Marslen-Wilson, 1989)

Bottom-up: Access a cohort of possible words,

select one, integrate its properties into current
task

TRACE model (McClelland & Elman, 1986)

Interactive: Context (top-down) and acoustic

signal (bottom-up) both cause one candidate to
be selected

Visual word recognition

How do we know if a letter string is a lexical item?

What factors affect the ease of recognition?

Two levels of checks: phonetic constraints on impossible

non-words (mxbt), phonological/semantic constraints on
possible non-words (kstreem/glub)
Frequency: have easier than jade
Neighbourhood: mine easier than much
Length: bank easier than discriminate

Lexical ambiguity

Homophones: knight/night
Homographs: lead
Meanings versus senses: bank versus film

Visual word recognition

cont.

Connectionist modelling of orthography (letters)

-> phonology (sounds) e.g. split-fovea model
(Shillcock, Ellison, & Monaghan, 2001)/a//o/ /l/ /g/ /d/
output

Neurally inspired
Distributed network of layers of nodes
input
Words are represented by patterns of
o d a
activation between associated words and sounds
Models are trained with word-pronunciation pairs
They learn by reducing the error between the
actual and desired outcome

l g

Dyslexias developmental (necisary), surface

(mint), phonological (kint), deep (sympathy ->
orchestra)

Sentence comprehension

How do we parse sentences (build up

syntactic representations) given the
meanings of words?
Phrase structure rules -> tree diagrams
S of
sentences
NP
S -> NP VP
-> V NP
NP -> Det N
How
do we VP
access
this
seemingly effortless task?

Ambiguity two or more possible

structures

NP
Det

The dog bit the

enraged cow injures farmer with axe man

Reassessment using garden-path

sentences (Frazier, 1987)

Det

VP

The horse raced past the barn fell

reduced relative clause

Sentence processing cont.

Eye-tracking and self-paced reading: longer time

spent looking at a word = greater processing difficulty

Does semantics help with parsing i.e. are we garden-pathed

when there are strong semantic pointers to one
interpretation?
Ferreira and Clifton (1986): The defendant/evidence examined
by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable

Although evidence disambiguates examined, eye-movements

showed that semantic information did not stop people from being
garden-pathed

But how much do we actually parse at all?

Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell & Ferreira (2001): While

Bill hunted the deer ran into the woods

Participants thought that the deer ran into the woods and that
Bill hunted the deer

Discourse

One night there flew over the city a little Swallow. His friends had gone away to
Egypt six weeks before, but he had stayed behind, for he was in love with the most
beautiful Reed. He had met her early in the spring as he was flying down the river
after a big yellow moth, and had been so attracted by her slender waist that he had
stopped to talk to her.
"Shall I love you?" said the Swallow, who liked to come to the point at once, and
the Reed made him a low bow. So he flew round and round her, touching the water
with his wings, and making silver ripples. This was his courtship, and it lasted all
through the summer.
Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince

How do we maintain coherence across longer texts?

Inferences

Logical: Toby is a bachelor Toby is a man

Bridging: integrating new with previously given
information. Uses anaphor e.g. John gave Bob the book.
He liked it very much who do it and he refer to?
Elaborative: extending what is in the text to world
knowledge

Tend to only remember gist/important points e.g.

passages with personal significance

Language production

3 parts: conceptualisation, formulation,

articulation

Pre-verbal message
Concept -> linguistic form
Articulatory planning
Motor execution

Although we are very good at this (1/1000

words is an error), errors are very revealing

Spoonerisms: exchange of initial consonants

The Lord is a shoving leopard to his flock

Id rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy

Freudian slips

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother

Language production cont.

Tip of the tongue states

To formally renounce the throne

Temporary inability to retrieve word despite feeling of

knowing
Can retrieve partial information e.g. gender, initial
phoneme, number of syllables
Blockers/pop-ups
begins with a, like abduct

Suggests that there is a separation between

syntax/semantics (lemma) and morphology/
phonology (lexeme)

Levelt (1992)
Dell (1986)

The lexicon

How do we know what words mean?

Different methods proposed
Defining attributes (ISA links)
breathes/ski
animaln/skeleton
superordinate
wings/flie
gills/swi
bird
fish
s/feather
ms/fins
scanary
robin
salmon
subordinate
Exemplars/typicality effects

Concepts partly based on perception e.g.

brown, sticky
But not the whole story e.g. the, him

The lexicon cont.

Semantically similar words are

interchangeable in sentences
The child slept on the bed
The dog walked on the carpet

Semantic networks (e.g., Burgess & Lunds

HAL)

Meanings come from other words (like a dictionary)

Distances between words in network show
relatedness, with 140,000 dimensional space
kitte
oyste
n
lion tooth r

car

face
eye

leg
foot

Dialogue

Two or more people turn-taking, feedback

Difficult to study as fewer paradigms, noisier data, harder

to control
Commonly use tasks or games to elicit controlled language

Audience design: do speakers tailor their

utterances to the listeners?
Common ground: do listeners use information
known only to themselves?
Perspective-taking: do speakers and listeners
take each other into account?

Schober and Clark (1989) tangram matching task

Matchers 99% accurate, overhearers 78%

Dialogue cont.

Alignment (Pickering & Garrod, 2004)

Linguistics representations used by interlocutors become

aligned at multiple levels via priming

Lexical: use the same referring expressions

Syntactic: At what time do you close? At 9
Accent and speech rate

Alignment permeates throughout levels

All happens automatically

Prosody, disfluency

What information do they give the listener?

When Roger leaves the house is dark/its dark

Kjelgaard and Speer (1999): when syntactic and prosodic
cues matched, listeners comprehension was facilitated

Does it follow that they are produced intentionally by the

speaker?

Bilingualism

Do we have separate language systems for

each language?

semanti
One system semantic priming
cs
produces facilitation between languages
Two systems aphasia can affect one
L1
L2
language only
Does age/proficiency explain these contradictions?

Problem: no standard, widely-used proficiency test

Hard to generalise across results
Country/community/family/colleagues all have effects

Most likely is one semantic store, two lexicons

Final facts

6,912 known living languages in the

world
896,190 words in English (correct as of
yesterday)
Mandarin has 1,075,000,000 speakers
Most popular word is ok
When ideas fail, words come in very handy
Goethe