Slide 1Psychology vs. LinguisticsPutting the Psycho in LinguisticsStructure, representation, and processingMajor QuestionsOther questionsMethodsA little psycholinguistic trick…Slide 9Slide 10Slide 11Slide 12Slide 13Slide 14Slide 15Slide 16Slide 17Slide 18Slide 19Slide 20Slide 21Slide 22Slide 23Slide 24Slide 25Slide 26Slide 27Slide 28Slide 29Slide 30Slide 31Slide 32Slide 33Slide 34Slide 35Slide 36Slide 37Slide 38Slide 39Slide 40Local vs. global ambiguityLocal or global ambiguity?Local or global ambiguity?More locally ambiguous sentencesSlide 45Slide 46A few important conclusionsQ: Mention one example of a sentence that is syntactically ambiguous?If is has two possible interpretations, mentions which ones they are.Psychology vs. LinguisticsPsychology•Mental Processes–Short Term Memory–Long Term Memory–Encoding–Retrieval–Mental RepresentationsLinguistics•Linguistic Theory–Phonology–Morphology–Syntax–Semantics–RulesPutting the Psycho in Linguistics•How speakers engage linguistic knowledge on-line during comprehension and production•Psycholinguistics studies language processes in the brainStructure, representation, and processing•Representation in the mind/brain–Do they exist in our minds?•Language processing–How does the mind/brain process linguistic structures to support actual communication?4Major Questions•How do children acquire language?•How do people comprehend language?•How do people produce language?Other questions•How do humans acquire language?–What does UG mean in brain terms?•How do humans acquire additional languages?•Is being bilingual different from being monolingual?•How does brain damage affect language?•How does brain affect language and how does language affect brain?6Methods•Behavioral–Grammaticality Judgments–Lexical Decision Task–Masked Priming–Eye-movements•Neuropsychological–Event-related potentials–fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging)–Patient dataA little psycholinguistic trick…•The Stop Making Sense Task: Tell me when the sentence that I will display on the screen stops making sense to youBack to structural ambiguity8SinceJayalwaysjogsamileseemslikeashortdistance.Since Jay always jogs a mileseems like a short distance.WhileMarywasmendingthesockfelloffherlapWhile Mary was mending the sock fell off her lap.TheoldmantheboatsThe old man the boats.What sort of ambiguity is this?The old manthe boats. 11•In these sentences, the structural ambiguity is only temporary. •When you get to a certain spot (where it stops making sense), the structure is disambiguated.•So we say that the sentence is locally ambiguous. •Locally ambiguously sentences often mislead listeners to think that the sentence has a different structure than it actually has.What sort of ambiguity is this?9•“The Garden Path Effect”: when people are fooled into thinking a sentence has a different structure than it does •Garden Path sentences: –temporarily (aka: locally) ambiguous sentences–listeners are lead “down a garden path” and have to go back and reanalyze the structureWhat do we call this phenomenon?12•Key question: Is the ambiguity resolved by the end of the sentence?•Locally ambiguous sentences – yes.•Globally ambiguous sentences – no, the whole sentence is ambiguous. Local vs. global ambiguity13Local or global ambiguity?1. The ticket agent admitted the mistake should have been caught earlier.14Local or global ambiguity?http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NgmcD_reebM/R9Ot2ud6m7I/AAAAAAAAAGU/SRqjlIMi_zU/s1600/sherlock_lores.jpg2. Sherlock saw the man with binoculars.15•I convinced her children are noisy.•The man who hunts ducks out on weekends. •When Fred eats food gets thrown.•The man who whistles tunes pianos. •We painted the wall with cracks.•I know the words to that song about the queen don't rhyme.•The dog that I had really loved bones.•The horse raced past the barn fell.More locally ambiguous sentences1617•We don’t wait until the end of the sentence to start building a syntactic tree!•Syntactic parsing takes place as soon as we encounter each word of a sentence.A few important