hofmeister slides

8/19/2019 Hofmeister Slides

1/60

PHILIP HOFMEISTER UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX


2/60

Average speech rate is around 150 wpm; reading rate tendsto be higher 180-200 wpm


3/60

COMPUTATIONALPROBLEM

In any given sentence, the listener may need to

identify words, e.g. dictionary-style look-up

identify lexical categories (noun, verb, etc.)

resolve syntactic ambiguities

combine words with previous words (potentially over longspans)

integrate visual information

take into account speaker’s social status

remember prior sentences & topic

plan next utterance


4/60

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Computational problem: howcan humans complete thecognitive tasks necessary tocommunicate with one anothergiven rapid, incremental natureof language?


5/60

BASIC FACTS

Language processing is incremental

You don’t wait to process a word or sentence


6/60


Computational problem is compounded by incrementality& uncertainty

That desert trains . . .


7/60


Computational problem is compounded by incrementalityThat desert trains . . .

[ NP That desert] trains young people to be tough.

[ S That desert trains come irregularly] is well-known.


8/60

WORDPROCESSING


9/60

How do weperceive sounds &words?

How do weperceive soundaccurately given anoisy input?


10/60

PHONEMERESTORATION

EFFECT

Context plays an early role in perceptualprocesses


11/60

PHONEMICRESTORATION

The state governors met with the respectivelegislatures convening in the capital city


12/60

PHONEMERESTORATION

Even when people know the phoneme is missing,they still hear it

Seems to be a very fast-acting & strong effect ofcontext


13/60

PHONEMERESTORATION

Or is it?

maybe you just think you heard it after the factto make sense of the input


14/60

PHONEMERESTORATION

It was found that the *eal was on the TABLEIt was found that the *eel was on SHOE

Participants restored a phoneme based onevidence that came later!


15/60

PHONEMERESTORATION

What to make of these conflicting results?Sentence contexts may have post-lexicaleffects

Word contexts may have earlier, even pre-lexical effects


16/60

WORDPROCESSING

How are words stored & accessed in the brain?


17/60

WORDPROCESSING

All words are not processed the sameSome take a long time to process; others ashort time

If the mind just has a dictionary, why would ittake longer to look up any word?


18/60

VISUAL WORDRECOGNITION

Several factors have been identified as being

critical in the speed of word recognitionfrequency: how often has the word beenexperienced?

age of acquisition: when was the word firstlearned?


19/60

FREQUENCYEFFECTS

Whaley (1978): frequency is the most important

factor in word recognitione.g. “abhor” named & recognized slower than“sleep”

effects are measurable for very frequent vs.very infrequent, frequent vs. infrequent


20/60

FREQUENCYEFFECTS

predictability of frequency breaks down withextremely infrequent words

individuals differ in their experience

what’s common for me may be uncommon foryou


21/60

AGE OFACQUISITION

frequency is highly correlated with age of

acquisitionmore frequent words are typically learnedearlier, e.g. “go”, “see”, not “abhor”

words learned earlier named more quickly andaccurately


22/60

EXPERIENCE

In short, both factors suggest that personalexperience plays a huge role in how we processwords

much of our experience is shared

both AOA & frequency likely have independenteffects (Morrison & Ellis, 2000)

AOA particularly effects reading rate


23/60

SENTENCEPROCESSING


24/60

AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION

Many strings contain some ambiguity ofinterpretation (although we typically don’texperience confusion)

The boy saw the girl with the telescope

I heard Liam say he saw the movie yesterday


25/60

AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION

Syntactic category ambiguityThat . . .

That is weird. = [deictic noun]

That show is weird. [=determiner]

That people like pole-vaulting is weird.[=complementizer]


26/60

AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION

Why is ambiguity so important?

you don’t know how to interpret “that” immediately,and may have to wait a fairly long time before receivingdisambiguating info

ambiguity makes the computational problem harder


27/60

AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION

How do people deal with ambiguity?

Option #1: Select a default analysis based onsyntactic principles and go with that


28/60

AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION

. . . that . . .Analyze as determiner

Sets expectations for upcoming noun phrase

Upside: parser always knows what to do

Downside: it may be wrong!


29/60

MINIMALATTACHMENT

The man the woman

NP NP

NP

The man

the woman

NP S

NP

NP

Choose the simpler analysis


30/60

AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION


Option #2: The short-sightedness of thelanguage processing system determines howambiguity is dealt with


31/60

BACK TO THE DATA

Tom said that Bill had taken the cleaning out yesterday


32/60

John said that he heard Karen wrecked her car yesterday.

Sentences get harder to process as the dependenciesbetween arguments increase in length (Gibson 1998)

memory representations decay

discourse processing interferes with past discourse

processing


33/60

AMBIGUITYRESOLUTION


Option #3: The language system strategicallyuses multiple constraints, including context &probabilistic information to quickly resolveambiguity


34/60

Brown corpus of English77.5% of “that” are complementizers

11.1% are determiners

11.5% are demonstrative pronouns

= context-independent lexical frequencies

GIBSON (2006)


35/60

Sentence-initially, however, that is more likely to be adeterminer than a complementizer

In other words, your analysis of the ambiguous wordthat depends on where you see it

GIBSON (2006)


36/60

CONSTRAINT-BASED THEORIES

On constraint-based views of language processing, humanssolve the computational problem of language by utilizinga number of sources of information to make sense of theinput


37/60

PRODUCTION


38/60

SPEECHERRORS

Errors @ different levels of language processing

phonological, syntactic, and semantic

Slips of the tongue


39/60

SPEECHERRORS

anticipations: substitutions of upcoming units

sidewalk➜ widewalk

table of contents➜

cable of contentsperseverations: repetition of preceding unit

walk the beach ➜ walk the beak

addition

spic and splan; TARGET: spic and span

deletion

his immoral soul; TARGET: his immortal soul


40/60

SPEECHERRORS

metathesis (aka exchanges / spoonerisms)fill the pool➜ fool the pill

chimichangas➜ chichimangas

slippery crags ➜ crippery slags

Are my keys in the door➜ Are my doors in the key?


41/60

SPEECHERRORS

evidence for the psychological reality of phones,morphemes, and syntactic units

substitution of words & phrases tells us aboutthe organization of meaning

substituted words tend to be semanticallyrelated

turn the lights off ➜ turn the lights on


42/60

SPEECHERRORS

exchanges only seem to involve elements at thesame level of processing

sounds and words don’t exchange

sounds and morphemes don’t exchange

fill the bucket➜ bill the fucket

# fill the bucket ➜ buckill the fet


43/60

SPEECHERRORS

exchanges only seem to involve elements at thesame level of processing

sound exchanges rarely (if ever) happen acrossdifferent word position

hit the ball➜ bit the hall

# hit the ball➜ hib the tall

phonemes in onsets exchange with other onsetphonemes, nuclei exchange with other nuclei,etc.


44/60

How selfish are we as speakers?


45/60

COMMONGROUND

Wardlow Lane &Ferreira (2008)

Q: Would speakersonly use modifierslike big or smallwhen listenercould see both abig and smallobject?


46/60

COMMONGROUND

Wardlow Lane &

Ferreira (2008)some informationwas privileged

e.g. only speakercould see twohearts mentioned


47/60

COMMONGROUND


RESULTS: Even iflistener couldn’tsee one elementin the contrastset, speaker wasmore likely to usea modifier


48/60

COMMONGROUND


LOW SALIENCECONDITION:experiment pointsto the relevantobject to name

HIGH SALIENCE:reference tocontrasting item


49/60

COMMONGROUND


Speakers morelikely to usemodifyingdescriptions whenit’s highly salientto them, but notto listener


50/60

COMMONGROUND

Speaker needs and sense of salience outweighdemands for communicative success

speakers were using terms such as “big heart”when listener only saw one heart


51/60

EGOCENTRICLANGUAGE

At least in some circumstances, speakers ignoretheir listener(s) perspective


52/60

LANGUAGE &

MIND


53/60

In many western cultures, we talk of spatialrelations with words like “to the left of”, “to theright of”, etc.

frame of reference: speaker or listener biased

In other languages, spatial relations can be basedon absolute (i.e. unchanging) features

Object-centered coordinates: frame of referencebased on items’ “perspective”


54/60


55/60

Bowerman, Levinson, and colleagues argue thatmany speakers not only don’t use relative framesof reference, they don’t think in terms of relativeframes of reference

Guguu Yimithirr


56/60

g(Australia): onlyuse Absoluteframe ofreference

“There’s anant on your

south leg”

Tzeltal(Mexico):absolute frameof referencebased ongeographical

landmarks


57/60


58/60

Halligan (2003): all individuals have anegocentric view of space

Alternative: individuals recruit different framesof reference and language capitalizes uponthese different available systems


59/60

Experiment showed participant a path a man traveled on Table 1

Participant turned around and asked to show how the man traveledout of a maze

Again, Tzeltal overwhelmingly Absolute FoR

LANGUAGE &


60/60

LANGUAGE &MIND

Answering how language influences cognitionturns out to be a very tricky question

Very difficult to separate culture & experiencefrom language

hofmeister slides

Documents