LING/PSYCH371 Language and the Mind
Poster Presentation Topics
1
Your poster presentation is a group work. Form a group of 3-4 people (but no more
than 4 people in one group), and choose a research question from below. In your poster,
state your research question, your argument, and evidence (cited from textbooks, journal
article etc.).
1. The central issue in speech perception is how listeners recover from acoustic
information the linguistic information intended by the speaker. Many of the attempts
to address this question have focused on the units of speech perception. Some
proposed units included phonetic features, phonemes, syllables, and words. Choose
two of these units and discuss the pros and cons of each one being the primary unit of
speech perception. You can use empirical evidence, logical argument, or a
combination in giving pros and cons.
2. An intuitive model of how we understand words is that we find phonetic features in
the acoustic signal, combine these features into phonemes, and access the words in
our mental lexicon as strings of phonemes, Using the following (admittedly silly)
sample sentence, discuss the difficulties inherent in this account and, where possible,
the various approaches to dealing with them. Note that “conceal” is a word, that
“seal” is a homophone, and “red pandas” would probably be pronounced
[rεbpændәz].
There are a variety of animals at the zoo, including falcon, seal, and red pandas.
3. When readers/listeners come to a point of structural ambiguity in sentence processing
(e.g relative clause vs. complement clause), many theories assume that they use a
variety of information to pick one structure over the other, thus avoiding parallel
processing. There is a debate about what types of information they use at different
points in processing such local ambiguities. On what dimensions do models differ?
Compare the positions in this debate taken by Frazier et al. vs. McRae et al.
4. One of the main goals of psycholinguistic research is to determine the psychological
reality of linguistic units and processes. However, as in any form of empirical science
the data we obtain and the conclusions we draw are only as good as the data
collection methods we use. The following is a (partial) list of methods found in the
articles we’ve read this semester. Chose your most favorite and least favorite method,
say what it is typically used to measure, and say why you think it’s good measure (in
the case of your most favorite) or why it’s a bad measure (in the case of your least
favorite).
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phoneme monitoring
error detection
syllable monitoring
shadowing
lexical decision
word naming
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choose the right sentence completion
natural slips of the tongue
experimentally induced slips of the tongue
picture naming
word by word reading time
eye tracked reading time
LING/PSYCH371 Language and the Mind
Poster Presentation Topics
2
5. In formal linguistic theories, frequency of occurrence has no place in our mental
representation of language. For example, we are able to comprehend and produce
sentence that we have never encountered before (i.e., sentences whose frequency of
occurrence is 0). Nevertheless, we have discussed a number of studies this semester
in which frequency appears to play a role in language perception, comprehension, or
production. How should we reconcile the generativity of language (we can always
create a new word, sentence, etc.) with frequency effects? You can either draw on the
literature or discuss your own thoughts on the matter.
6. One of the key debates in the psychology of language concerns whether language
processing is modular vs. interactive. Choose a particular domain of language
processing and discuss what is meant by these two terms and some of the types of
evidence that are taken to bear on the debate.
7. Discuss the claim that content words and grammatical elements are processed
separately in sentence production. You should use examples from speech errors and
may include data from aphasic speech if you wish.
8. Pick a psycholinguistics journal article on a topic that interests you, and present the
article as if you are the author(s) of the article. Some of the psycholinguistics articles
are listed below, and will be updated:
Lexical Access
Forster, K. I. (1981). Priming and the effects of sentence and lexical contexts on naming
time: Evidence for autonomous lexical processing. Quarterly Journal of
Experimental Psychology, 33A, 465-495.
Glucksberg, S., Kreuz, R.L, & Rho, S. (1986). Context can constrain lexical access:
implications for models of language comprehension. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: learning, memory, and cognition, 12, 323-335.
Kintsch, walter, and Ernest F. Mross (1985). Context effects in word identification.
Journal of Memory and Language 24(3): 336-349
Onifer, Williams; Swinnye, David A.(1981). Accessing lexical ambiguities during
sentence comprehension: Effects of frequency of meaning and contextual bias.
Memory & Cognition 9(3) 225-236.
Tanenhaus, M.K., Leiman, J.M. & Seidenberg, M.S. (1979). Syntactic context and lexical
access. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 36A, 649 – 661.
Sentence Processing
Ferreira, F. & Clifton, C. (1986). Independence of syntactic processing. Journal of
Memory ad Language, 25, 348-368.
Marslen-Wilson, W.D., Tyler, L.K., Warren, P., Grenier, P., & Lee, C.S. (1992).
Prosodic Effects in Minimal Attachment. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Section A, 45A(1), 73-88.
LING/PSYCH371 Language and the Mind
Poster Presentation Topics
3
McRae, K., Spivey-Knowlton, M., & Tanenhaus, M. (1998). Modeling the influence of
thematic fit (and other constraints) in on-line sentence comprehension. Journal of
Memory and Language, 38, 283-312.
Critical periods
Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., & Plunkett, K. (1996).
Rethinking innateness: Aconnectionist perspective on development. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books. (Chap. 4)
Flege, J.E., Yeni-Komshian, G.H., & Liu, S. (1999). Age constraints on second-language
acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 41(1), 78-104.
Johnson, J. & Newport, E. (1989). Critical period effects in second language learning: Ihe
influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language.
Cognitive Psychology, 21, 60-99.
Speech Perception
Cutler, A., Norris, J., & Norris, D. (1986). The syllable’s differing role in the
segmentation of French and English. Journal of Memory and Language, 1986,
pp.385-400.