February 20 2024 Language Understand the relationship between cognitive control and sentence processing you should be very familiar with the apple and the towel experiment Define the various forms of inference Describe what is meant by situation model Provide an example of the brain s sensitivity to a semantic violation Understand the factors that influence inter individual communication the Given New contract speaker context common ground Recap The Four Pillars of Psycholinguistics Comprehension How do we understand spoken and written language Representation How is language represented in the mind Production How do people produce language This includes the physical processes of speech production and the mental processes that occur as a person creates speech Acquisition How do we learn language Acquisition Saffran et al 1996 Learners babies adults exposed to a continuous stream of nonsense syllables containing peaks and dips in transition probabilities likelihood of hearing syllable y given syllable x After listening period experimenters tested whether learners preferred syllable triplets with high transition probabilities Processing sentences Parsing is the process that occurs when a person hears or reads a string of words and groups these words into phrases The way the words are grouped in this example indicates that the person has interpreted the sentence Chunk it up in phrases that make sense to us Comprehension Some sentences are easier to do than others Not all sentences are easily parsed Sometimes you must revise your initial interpretation We call these garden path Does this sound wrong to you After the musician played the piano was wheeled off the stage Does this help After the musician played the piano was wheeled off the stage sentences Word meaning interacts with sentence processing Which of these two sentences is easier to figure out as you re reading along Why A The defendant examined by the lawyer was unclear B The evidence examined by the lawyer was unclear A is a garden path sentence B is not because there is only 1 way to go evidence can only BE examined Processing sentences Story context can be essential Sounds ungrammatical The horse raced past the barn fell What about now There were two jockeys who decided to race their horses One raced his horse along the path that went past the garden The other raced his horse along the path that went past the barn The horse raced past the barn fell Processing sentences Scene context can also be essential The Visual World Paradigm pioneered by Tanenhaus et al Ambiguous Put the apple on the towel in the box a lot of eye movement Unambiguous Put the apple that is on the towel in the box no eye movement or little to none 2 apples Ambiguous put the apple on the towel in the box Unambiguous Put the apple that is on the towel in the box Apple on the towel is what we are worried about not the one on the napkin Sees the one apple not on the towel on a towel Fixations to the wrong location decreases 2 Why is the two apple condition easier Processing sentences Not all sentences are easily parsed Sometimes you must revise your initial interpretation We call these garden path sentences How do we revise our initial interpretations Cognitive control Definition according to nature com Cognitive control is the process by which goals or plans influence behavior Also called executive control this process can inhibit automatic responses and influence working memory Cognitive control typically associated with prefrontal cortex Novick et al 2010 This region of the brain is under developed in children Children show a decreased ability to revise initial interpretations In a Visual World study of actions not eye fixations Novick et al 2005 showed that adding another referent helped the adults do better on the task but not the children This result was attributed to their hypofrontal brains The ambiguous Bad at og referent and 2 referents The second frog does help adults bit does not help the kids They cannot revise their interpretations Their cognitive control isn t as strong Unambiguous 3 Processing sentences Our brains are always making predictions Looking patterns for The boy will eat the cake Vs The boy will move the cake Altmann Kamide 1999 the boy will MOVE the cake Participants will look at all objects the same Hears the word eats looks at the cake The cake is the only thing in the picture you can eat Move can apply to any objects on the scene Prediction machines Processing text and stories Bransford Johnson 1973 inference experiments Participants read this John was trying to fix the birdhouse He was pounding the nail when his father came out to watch him and help him do the work But then they report having read this John was using a hammer to fix the birdhouse when his father came out to watch him and help him do the work Why The have inferred that John was using a hammer to pound a nail You read john was trying to fix the birdhouse said something about pounding a nail we assume using a hammer or infer he used that although it was not said in the text 4 Processing text and stories Anaphoric inference gone wrong we really love to go down to our ranch I take the kids out and we fish And then of course we grill them Stevens 2002 Them can refer to the kids or the fish them is broad Correctly matching a given pronoun to a given noun in the sentence Other forms of inference from your text Causal Sharon took an aspirin Her headache went away The reader infers that the aspirin took her headache away even though that wasn t explicitly stated Instrument William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet while he was sitting at his desk The reader infers that he was writing with something like a quill not a computer or typewriter Situation Model a simulation of the perceptual and motor characteristics of the objects and actions in a story He hammered the nail into the wall vs he hammered the nail into the floor the angle of the nail infers or activated the scene horizontal rather than vertical Say the eagle in the sky eagle flying eagle in the nest harder to envision the process Reminder EEG Electroencephalograph Measures electrical activity across the scalp Great temporal not special Processing text and stories N400 ERP signature of sematic violation 5 wont bake Cats can t bake sematic violation Theres an N400 when reading cats Why is the guitar effect smaller than barn The band was very popular and Joe was sure the concert would be sold out Amazingly he was able to