Introduction to psycholinguistics
Babarczy Anna
babarczy@cogsci.bme.hu
www.cogsci.bme.hu/~ktkuser/KURZUSOK/BMETE47MC36/2014_2015_1/
What is psycholingusitics?
• Study of the processes behind the
– Production
– Comprehension
– Acquisition
of language
What is language?
• Language is a communication system that is
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Rule-driven
Symbolic
Hierarchically structured
Creative
Species-specific
• Speech ≠ Language (sign languages)
Language
• A system of symbols and rules that makes communication
possible?
• Is communication the most important function?
• Is there a separate system of rules?
• Language in apes? Bee dance?
• Focussing on specific areas makes answering questions
simpler:
– Semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology, pragmatics
Another view of language
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFD01r6ersw&fe
ature=related
• A Bit of Fry and Laurie...Tricky Linguistics
(1989)
Requirements for language
(comprehension and production)
1. Biological apparatus
2. Abilities for acquisition
3. Knowledge of words and rules
4. Knowledge of social context and rules
5. Knowledge about others’ knowledge and beliefs
Topics in psycholinguistics
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The organisation of language in the brain/mind
Speech and language processing
Speech and language production
Language Acquisition:
Language evolution: How did human language emerge?
Human language vs. Animal communication
Human language and other human cognitive skills
Psycholinguistics
• Comprehension and production of language involves
several sub-tasks:
1. The ability to produce and recognize sounds of the message
2. Recognition and production of words in the message
(segmentation), and the pairing of word forms with their
meanings.
3. Processing and production of the grammatical structure of the
message.
4. Evaluation of the message in the given context, or fitting the
message to a given context.
1. The ability to produce and recognize
sounds of the message
• Relies on phonetic and phonological knowledge
• Knowledge of the phoneme inventory of the language, the
identification and differentiation of different phonemes.
– (ˈsɪŋ ər) vs. (ˈsɪn ər) vs. (ˈlɪŋɡə)
– Hungarian: enged
• Successful use of a language also depends on knowledge of its
phonotactics, or the ability to combine sounds into words
• Which one is a better candidate for an English word?
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blicket or lbnuxst
Sounds -> signs
• Speech processing through auditory channel
• Sign processing through visual channel
– Similar processes: segmentation, recognition,
production
2. Word recognition and associating word
forms with meanings
• The lexicon: the mental inventory of words
• Also requires knowledge of morphology, or the
knowledge of word formation
Words
Units of language
Crystal: the smallest unit of language that can form a complete
utterance in itself, and that is separated by space from the rest of the
text in writing.
Smaller units: syllable, sound, morphemes.
tables
table – morpheme corresponding to the concept ‘table’,
-s: plural morpheme
Irregular forms (go-went or sing-sang versus walk-walked): do they still
contain two morphemes?
The mental lexicon
• Words are stored in the mental lexicon
• In many ways, similar to a real lexicon: pronunciation,
meaning, written word form, category, syntactic roles, etc.
• But different principles of organization: e.g. frequency and
meaning. Alphabetical order is not central.
• Cca 70,000 words in the adult lexicon (estimates vary
between 15,000-150,000).
The mental lexicon
One of the central topics in psycholinguistics
• The organization of the lexicon
• What is stored and how
• Lexical retrieval for production and comprehension
• How do we know whether it contains a word or not
• Are there differences between spoken and written word
forms?
3. Processing and production of the
grammatical structure of the message
• The ability to combine words into phrases and
phrases into well-formed sentences relies on syntax.
• Knowledge of syntactic rules (grammar) generates
well-formed (grammatical) sentences, and does not
generate sentences that are not well-formed. (?)
– Rule-based approach
– Statistical (template-based approach)
4. Evaluating the message in context
• Successful expression and comprehension of a message
also relies on pragmatic knowledge
– formulating or decoding the message according to the given
social context (genre, purpose, audience)
– conveying/recovering messages not explicitly encoded in the text
A brief history of psycholinguistics
History psycholinguistics
• Started in the 1950s
• First use of word: conference on Cornell, USA, 1951
• Osgood and Sebeok, 1954: Psycholinguistics: A survey of
theory and research problems
• Before that:
– Sir Francis Galton examined word associations in 1867
– In 1895 Meringer and Mayer analysed speech errors with
surprisingly modern methods in Germany
Early psycholinguistics
• The language processor is a simple device that generates or accepts
sentences by moving from one state to another.
• Two important influences: information theory and behaviorism.
• Information theory
– The role of redundancy and probability in language: at a given point, what is the
most probable continuation of a sentence?
• Behaviourism
– stimulus, response, reinforcement to establish the relationship between them.
– Only relevant topic is behavior; language is one kind of behavior.
– Language acquisition also proceeds following the principles of reinforcement and
conditioning
Modern psycholinguistics
• 1959 Chomsky’s critical review of Skinner’s Verbal
Behavior
• Beginning of 60s: psycholinguistics tries to relate
language processing to transformational grammar
• It has left linguistics since, and became an
autonomous field of study
• Roots both in psychology and in linguistics
The influence of generative grammar
• Chomsky sweeping criticism: rapid change of views
• New kind of language theory: transformational grammar, which
accounts for speakers’ knowledge of language besides the underlying
structure of sentences.
• Part of psycholinguistics’ success is due to the fact that it tried to test
Standard Theory and its consequences
Generative Grammar
• Noam Chomksy, 1950s: Theory of Transformational
Generative Grammar (Standard Theory)
The generative tradition
• The aim of the study of syntax is to describe the set of rules that makes
language production and comprehension possible.
• Distinction between idealized language competence and actual
language performance
• Linguistics: competence--implicit knowledge of rules
The generative tradition
• Grammar contains rewrite rules of phrase structure, which
operate on terminal and nonterminal items
• SNP + VP
• NPDet +N
• VPV+NP
• Ncat, dog, John, plate, etc.
• Vdropped, ate, hates, run etc..
• Deta, the
• John dropped the plate.
The generative tradition
• Standard Theory distinguishes between deep structure and surface
structure.
• The deep structure of the sentence is the idea (together with its logical
structure); the surface structure is the linguistic form which expresses
the underlying thought.
– Mary had waffles for breakfast. – What did Mary have __ for breakfast?
• The surface structure is derived from the deep structure through
transformations (special rewrite rules).
• The same surface structure may have different underlying deep
structures showing the ambiguity of the sentence:
– Visiting relatives can be boring.
Psycholinguistic models: focus on
performance
• Realistic models of human sentence
comprehension must account for:
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Language has structure
Robustness to arbitrary input
Accurate disambiguation of words and sentences
Inference on basis of incomplete input
Processing difficulty is differential and localized
Errors in processing and production
Processing factors
• Besides abstract linguistic representations, other characteristics of
words and sentences are also important
– How often a word is used influences how easily we can retrieve
that word.
– How often a particular sentence type occurs in actual discourse
influences how easily we can process it.
– Practice does make perfect.
• Cognitive capacities relevant for language: memory resources,
attentional resources, etc. These also affect linguistic performance in
any task.
• Factors to consider:
– word frequency, word length, concreteness, age of acquisition,
part of speech, quality of picture, transitional probability of
bigram, typicality or probability of X in Y context, morphological
complexity, speech rate, duration of stimulus, number of words in
a sentence, position on screen, repetition, ambiguity.
Well-formedness
I think when she finally came to the realization that, you know,
no, I can not, I can not take care of myself.
...
I mean, for somebody who is, you know, for most of their life
has, has, uh, not just merely had a farm but had ten
children had a farm, ran everything because her husband
was away in the coal mines. And, you know, facing that
situation, it’s, it’s quite a dilemma.
(The woman is facing being put in a resting home.)
. . . but usually we come to understand it pretty well anyway.
The 70’s
• Psycholinguistics becomes part of mainstream cognitive psychology
• Information processing or computational models
• Flowcharts (before translations into computer programs) with processing
levels. How one level of linguistic representation is translated into
another
• The mind uses rules that transform the input (speech or sight) into
symbols. Cognition is symbol manipulation.
• The cumputational metaphor and experimental techniques made
psycholinguistics a separate branch of science
• Just like in other fields of cognitive psychology, reaction time
measurements became central.
Cognitive science
• A multidisciplinary approach: philosophy, linguistics, anthropology,
neuropsychology and AI.
• AI: get the computer do something that requires intelligence
• Traditional AI research: analysis of human behaviour, goals and plans
• Explicit
• A pro and con at the same time: loss of flexibility, many assumptions
have to be built in
• Early optimism
Eliza (Wizenbaum, 1966)
-- Men are all alike.
IN WHAT WAY?
--They’re always bugging us about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE?
--Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE.
--He says I’m depressed much of the time.
I AM SORRY TO HEAR THAT YOU ARE DEPRESSED.
Eliza (Wizenbaum, 1966)
--It’ true that I’m unhappy.
DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO
BE UNHAPPY?
--I need some help, that much seems certain.
WHAT WOULD IT MEAN IF YOU GOT SOME HELP?
--Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.
TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY.
http://nlp-addiction.com/eliza/
Winograd: SHRDLU
• 1968-70 MIT
• “put the green cone on the red block”
• IBM Watson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJptrlCVDHI