Transcript Slide 1

Mental Lexicon
Body of knowledge we hold in our minds about words
Includes pronunciation, spelling, meaning syntactic roles
Recognition of words—whether listening or reading
Very Rapid
For example, when listening, recognition is completed within about
275 msec
even though the average word takes about
370 msec to say
How is this accomplished???
One model: Morton’s Direct Access Model
Morton’s Direct Access Model
•Feature of words activate detectors for possible units (logogens)
until one dominates
•Like
Treisman's Attenuation Model of Selective Attention or The Bruce-Young
Model or
The Embedded Processes Model
-- It is based on the concept of thresholds
•The logogen builds up inputs until its individual threshold level
is reached; when it fires, the word is recognized
•Lower thresholds relate to
high frequency (Foss, 1969; Rayner & Duffy, 1986)
recent activation
context– semantic priming (Zola, 1984; Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971)
Lexical Decision Task: Is it a word?
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Lexicalization
The process by which the thought that underlies a word is
turned into the sound of the word
There are 2 stages:
1) A concept activates a lemma, an abstract
representation that includes meaning and syntactic
information
2) The lexeme is accessed—the phonological form of
the word
Tip of the Tongue Phenomenon = lemma without lexeme
Studying Sentence Comprehension
An analysis of parsing
by looking at structural ambiguities
Lexical ambiguity example: “They threw stones at the bank.”
Structural ambiguity example: The professor gave a talk on Mars.”
Garden Path Sentences
People have a strong tendency to construe (parse) the
early portion in a way that the later portion shows to be incorrect
e.g., “I told the woman serving food was too hard for her.”
Immediacy Principle: Make decision about syntactic role of each
word as we hear/read them
SENTENCE PRODUCTION
Garrett’s Model
Message Level
Functional Level
Positional Level
Phonetic Level
Articulation
Level
Message Level
Basic idea is formulated –
NOT in verbal form
Functional Level
Semantic representations and thematic roles for
content words are chosen
e.g., agents, actions, objects
Positional Level
Syntactic form of the sentence is specified and
Phonological forms for function words and bound
morphemes are selected
Phonetic Level
Phonological forms (lexemes) of content words are
specified and
Inserted into the syntactic form already generated
Articulation
Level
Commands are created
and sent to the vocal
apparatus to speak
Using Garrett’s Model to explain
•Slips of the tongue (including “Freudian” slips)
•Pauses
•Clinical Cases
Jane
EST
Paul
Keith
Butterworth (1975) had speakers give an unplanned monologue
He found fluent and hesitant phases with cycles 10-40 sec, M = 18 sec
Pattern: Plan-execute, plan-execute, etc.
What Butterworth found about pauses during speech:
• Idea boundaries tended to fall at the end of a fluent phase,
beginning of a hesitant phase
• words in the hesitant phase were not spoken more slowly;
rather, the amount of time spent NOT talking increased
• pauses (>250 msec) took up 35-67% of the time (in
interviews 4-54%)
• in general, about 40-50% of the total “speaking time” was
soundless
• If pauses are reduced, the repetition of words & phrases
doubled
• For pauses that occur when looking at the listener, more
false starts & repetitions
Sample Monologue with pauses, hesitations, etc.
illustrating the
Plan-execute cycle