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Important terms/ concepts pertaining to comprehension, discourse and sentence processing Models of sentence parsing Second Language Sentence Comprehension
Sentence processing looks at: - How people understand speech ay the sentence level - The question of how listeners rapidly decipher the structure of sentences and gain access to the meaning of the sentence as a whole.
One of the most striking features of connected speech is the rapid rate at which it ordinarily arrives. Average of daily conversation is 140-180 words per minute; Newsreader with prepared script can easily exceed 210wpm. Besides rapidity of natural speech, listeners also face problem of individual words which run in together.
Eg: (i) John gave Mary the book. (indirect obj) (ii) John gave the book to Mary. (oblique obj) These automatic processes over which we exert little conscious control.
Noun-Verb-Noun In action: First noun verbed second noun. (i) The student read the book. (ii) The teacher graded the test. (iii) The teacher heard the student. Real-world knowledge can supply constraints that operate as part of the structure of our language.
These properties of language give rise to regularities in the language that make possible a degree of statistical prediction whenever we listen to natural speech. Some words are more predictable than others, even out of context. You could thought of the next word, or at least say the part of speech the next word might be. Eg: The train pulled into the ..
Syntactic Processing
Syntactic Resolution is Necessary for Comprehension. Although the statistical properties of language say about the consequences of the speakers and listeners knowledge of lang.structure, they do not themselves explain this structure. In 1960s, some researchers attempted to use transformational grammar to fulfill this goal. Surface structure vs Deep structure; Competence vs Performance.
Eg: A. Diff. surface structures, same deep structure. (i) The boy threw the ball. (ii) The ball was thrown by the boy. B. Same surface structure, diff. deep structures. Flying planes can be dangerous.
Distinction btw. Surface structures and deep structures tells us that sentence processing is conducted in two steps: - Listeners analyze the surface structure; - and use the information to detect the deep structure. The latter steps conveys the meaning of the sentence that is the primary goal of the communicator (Fador, Bever&
Garrette, 1974)
2. Competence Versus Performance The way people produce language is not equivalent to their knowledge of language. Much of what we say consists of incomplete fragments that do not even approach a grammatical sentence (Goldman-Eisler, 1986) Language Competence: what the speakers know about the structure of the language. Performance: Explanation of how we understand speech, however
Syntactic Structure of Sentences In order to understand a sentence, the listener or reader must determine its syntactic structure. Assignment of words in a sentence to their relevant linguistic categories is called: parsing a sentence.
Example: The boy threw the ball. (NP) (VP) The sentence are formed by two major phrases and different units. (Det, Noun, Verb)
Clausal Processing
One way the perceptual system can reduce the processing load is to break up incoming sentences into their constituent clauses. Eg. I was going to take a train to New York, but I decided it would be too heavy. Processing this sentence requires at least three operations: (i) take in and analyze the first clause, and temporary stored in the memory (ii) we analyze the second clause (iii) we retrieve the stored memory of first clause and integrate it with the second one. At this point we realize it is funny.
This sense of processing speech by clauses are not restricted to spoken language only. Readers are also sensitive to boundaries btw. linguistic clauses.
3. Plausibility of the resulting linguistic expression, in the world Unambiguous examples: The dog bit the boy. vs. The boy bit the dog. Ambiguity: (Trueswell, Tanenhaus & Garnsey, 1994) The defendant examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable. The evidence examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable.
4. Context (Crain & Steedman, 1985; Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Tanenhaus et al., 1995) Ambiguity: There were two defendants, one of whom the lawyer ignored entirely, and the other of whom the lawyer interrogated for two hours. The defendant examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable.
5. Intonational Information (prosodic factors) Prosody is a general term for the variety of acoustic featureswhat we hear- that ordinarily accompany a spoken sentence. One prosodic feature is the intonation pattern.
Intonation refers to the pitch changes over time Eg. when a speakers voice rises in pitch at the end of a question, or drops at the end of a sentence.
Prosody plays numerous important roles in language processing. -indicate the mood of a speaker. -mark the semantic focus of a sentence. -disambiguate the meaning of an otherwise ambiguous sentence.
Parsing
The dog bites the man The man bites the dog Dog the bites the man All sentences have the same words, but not all of them are possible manifestations of sentences in English
Because language is productive, we can create new and novel sentences that are never heard before These new utterances are bound by grammatical rules Therefore it is impossible for us to store meanings of all possible sentences in memory
Hence we parse sentences to understand them. Parsing: discovering how words can be combined in a sentence, bound by grammatical rules A parser will parse a sentence to understand its meaning
Sentence parsing may face issues, such as ambiguity, thus there are parsing strategies and models proposed by researchers as to how we process sentences.
AMBIGUITY
LEXICAL AMBIGUITY
SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY
LOCAL AMBIGUITY
STANDING AMBIGUITY
Lexical Ambiguity
when a word has more than one generally accepted meaning. Lexical ambiguity stems from the existence of homophony and polysemy. Homophony occurs when a single word has more than one meaning. Some other examples of homophony are: The word tin This can is made of tin - (a low-melting, metallic element nearly approaching silver in colour; used in plating and making alloys and tinfoil) Put the left-overs in the cookie tin. - (other word for can used in the U.S; an airtight sealed container of thin sheet metal coated with tin; used for preserving and storing food or drink)
Polysemy occurs when a word, or small group of words, has two or more related meanings. This may sound a lot like homophony, and it is true that they are related. However, polysemy involves close relations between meanings of a single word, where homophony may involve completely different meanings. Some example of polysemy are: The verb to glare The sun glared down from the hot desert sky. The angry girl glared at the boy who had pulled her hair.
Syntactic Ambiguity
Refers to cases where clause or sentence may have more than one interpretation given the potential grammatical functions of the individual words.
Local Ambiguity
Refers to cases where the syntactic function of a word, or how to parse a sentence, remains temporarily ambiguous until it is later clarified as we hear more sentence. (Frazier& Rayner,1989) The ambiguity is referred to as local ambiguity because our uncertainty about the structure is only temporary.
Standing Ambiguity
Also known as global ambiguity. A sentence ambiguity that is not resolved, typically, within the sentence, but only through using information from the context. Refers to cases where sentences remain syntactically ambiguous even when all of the lexical information has been received.
Other example
The spy watched the man with the binoculars.
This is a standing ambiguity because without further information it is not clear who holds the binoculars - the spy or the man.
Parsing strategies
Top-down processing Bottom-up processing
Top-down processing
Top-down processing suggests that we form our perceptions starting with a larger object, concept, or idea before working our way toward more detailed information. In other words, topdown processing happens when we work from the general to the specific; the big picture to the tiny details.
Example
Bottom-up processing
Bottom-up processing is also known as 'small chunk' processing. In psycholinguistics, a bottom-up processor is a person who understands concepts and ideas by starting with details, and working their way up to the main idea of overall concept.
Example
DLT
Gibson bases his theory on two key insights Resources are required for storage and integration Structural integration complexity depends on distance and locality between elements being integrated
Integration of h2 to h1 would be affected by the interference of elements between them and the possibility of h1 having already decayed by the time h2 is received as input
Locality effects
Gibson (1998) used object-extracted relative clause and subject-relative clause experiments to determine the effects of locality and reading times He has formed a simplified way to calculate the cost of integrating elements, whereby distance and complexity will increase the cost Integration cost translates to processing power
Nested clauses
Nesting complexity Embedded clauses causes more incomplete dependencies to manifest Target word does not arrive immediately as the next word, thus parser needs to hold on to multiple incomplete dependencies Costs more processing power
The owner disliked the renter The owner [who Mike has argued with] disliked the renter The owner [who Mike(who is friends with Nick) has argued with] disliked the renter Nick is friends with Mike [who argued with the owner (who disliked the renter)]
Null context
Based on the nested pronoun generalization by Bever (1974) and Kac (1981) The reporter who the senator who you met attacked disliked the editor The reported who the senator who John met attacked disliked the editor Based on DLT, John is a new NP, whereas you is a pronoun that already has a referent
This would mean that the sentence with John would require more integration cost and storage cost due to the new noun John being introduced in the sentence Whereas you is a null context
Gaps in DLT
Although it is a convincing theory, not much research has been done to support it Most studies have been conducted by Gibson himself The calculation for energy units needed to process/parse the sentence is simplified and has not much supporting researches as well
According to Peirce (2011), an important research question in the field of second language acquisition is whether it is possible for non-native speakers to acquire native-like processing abilities in their second language, and if not, what types of limitations prevent them from doing so.
In English, the verb obey is a transitive verb. Therefore, it is ambiguous whether the Noun Phrase (NP) the pretty girl is the object of the verb obeyed or the subject of the ensuing clause.
In French, this syntactic ambiguity does not exist because the French equivalent of obey must be interpreted as an intransitive verb. Eye-movement records from both English and French groups failed to show any qualitative differences between the native and second language speakers at the point of disambiguation, indicating that L2 speakers were able to activate the correct lexical representation of the L2 verbs, even when these lexical representations were different in each language.
References
1. Gibson, E. (2000). The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In Miyashita, Y., Marantz, A., & O'Neil, W. (Eds.), Image, language, brain (pp. 95-126), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2. Jackson, C.N. & Dussias, P.E. (2008). Cross-linguistic differences and their impact on L2 sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(1), 65-82. 3. Papadopoulou & Clahsen (2003). Parsing Strategies in L1 and L2 Sentence Processing: A Study of relative clause attachment in Greek. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 501-528. 4. Peirce, G.M. (2011). Sentence Processing by Native and Non-Native Language Speakers. University of Pittsburgh
Questions
Group 1
I put the cat on the table into a basket Explain why the sentence may cause parsing errors to readers using the Garden Path model.
Group 2
Describe the constraint satisfaction model and how it differs from the garden path model. Provide an example of an ambiguous sentence that has not been given throughout the presentation.
Group 4
The top half of the military must be very army. What type of ambiguity does the sentence above contain? How does this affect sentence processing and why would readers parse the sentence differently?