Psycholinguistics
August 2009
Instructor: Dr. Julie E. Boland
Co-Teacher: Yaxu Zhang, Psychology Dept.
Lectures will be Mondays – Thursdays, 8:30 – 11:30.
Tutorials will be Fridays 8:30 – 11:30.
Description: 4 credits. This course is designed to introduce students to experimental research on
the cognitive processes that underlie language comprehension and production in normal adults.
Ideally, students will have completed a course in both cognitive psychology and introductory
linguistics. We begin by discussing the properties of human language in the context of evolution,
human development, cognitive neuroscience, and communication systems in other species. This
sets the stage for discussing speech perception, lexical and structural ambiguity resolution,
models of syntactic parsing and sentence understanding, the role of discourse-level information,
the planning and production of sentences, and the role of prosody/intonation. Throughout, we
will focus on how various experimental paradigms can be used to test theoretical hypotheses in
psycholinguistics. We consider both cognitive neuroscience paradigms (e.g., ERP, fMRI) and
reaction time paradigms (e.g., cross-modal naming & lexical decision, eye-tracking during
reading and listening).
The material covered/discussed in class will build upon (but not duplicate) the assigned readings,
which are a collection of classic and recent journal articles. They will be available electronically.
It is critical that students keep current with the assigned reading and take the initiative to
resolve any confusion over the reading material in a timely manner. Each student will
participate in a 20-30 minute team presentation of one of the assigned journal articles.
There will be 16 lectures. Tutorials will be on Fridays, in which the weekly assignments will be
discussed in detail and the main points from the week’s lectures will be reviewed.
Students will be graded on weekly homework assignments 15%, a class presentation 20%, a midterm 25%, and a final exam 40%.
Agenda
Introduction & Background
8/3
Overview & Expectations, Is Language special? Pinker (2003)
8/4
Evolution of Language Fitch (2000); Marcus & Fisher (2003), Fitch & Hauser
(2004)
- Sign up for Presentations
8/5
Linguistics & Cog Science Wilson (2004); Schiff et al. (2005), Ashcraft (1993)
Word Recognition
8/6
Speech Perception
Galantucci et al. (2006); Warren (1970)
8/7
Tutorial: Homework 1 is Due
8/10
Spoken Word Recog
Windmann (2004), Marslen-Wilson (1973)
8/11
Visual Word Recog Balota et al. (2004)
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/index.html
8/12
Bilingual lexical storage & access Rodriguez-Fornells (2002); French &
Jacquet (2004)
8/13
Lexical Ambiguity Resolution
& Boland (2008)
8/14
Tutorial: Homework 2 is Due
Seidenberg et al. (1982), Sereno et al. (2003), Chen
Sentence & Discourse Understanding
8/17
Conceptual Combination & MIDTERM Raffray et al. (2007)
8/18
Sentence Comprehension
press)
Altmann (1998); Hagoort (2008); Hsieh et al. (in
8/19
Sentence Comprehension
Osterhout (2005)
Ferreira & Bailey (2004); Sturt et al. (2004); Kim &
8/20
Discourse Processing
Tanenhaus et al. (1995); Wolf & Gibson (2004)
8/14
Tutorial: Homework 3 is Due
Language Production & Prosody
8/24
8/25
8/26
8/27
8/28
Language Production Levelt (1999); Van Turennout et al. (1998); Bock (1995)
Sentence Planning, Prosody
Bock & Griffin (2000); Arnold et al. (2004)
Conversation Garrod & Pickering (2004); Wilson & Wilson (2005);
Wennerstrom & Siegal (2003)
Catch-up & Review
FINAL EXAM
Students with disabilities.
Please alert me as soon as possible if you have any disabilities that require special attention so
that I can make the necessary accommodations.
Reading List
Readings marked with a * can be used for class presentations. Students who have not
signed up for a presentation by noon on Aug 4th, will be assigned to an article.
Altmann, G. T. M. (1998). Ambiguity & Sentence Processing. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 2, 146-152.
*Αrnold, J. E., Wasow, T., Asudeh, A., & Alrenga, P. (2004). Journal of Memory &
Language, 51, 55-70.
* Ashcraft, M. H. (1993). A personal case history of transient anomia. Brain &
Language, 44, 47-57.
* Balota et al. (2004). Visual word recognition for single syllable words. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 283-316.
Bock, K. (1995). From Mind to Mouth. In J.L. Miller and P.D. Eimas, (Eds). Speech,
Language, and Communication. Academic Press.
*Bock, K. & Griffin, Z. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: Transient
activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177-192.
*Chen, L. & Boland, J. E. (2008). Dominance and context effects on activation of
alternative homophone meanings. Memory & Cognition, 36, 1306-1323.
Feirrera, F. & Bailey, K.G.D. (2004). Disfluencies and human language comprehension.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 231-237.
Fitch, W.T. (2000). The Evolution of Speech: A Comparative Review. Trends in
Cognitive Science, 7, 258-267.
Fitch, W. T. & Hauser, M. (2004). Computational constraints on syntactic processing in a
nonhuman primate. Science, 303, 377-380.
French, R. M. & Jacquet, M. (2004). Understanding bilingual memory: Models and data.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 87-93.
Gallantucci et al. (2006). Motor Theory in Review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13,
361-377.
Garrod, S. & Pickering, M. J. (2004). Why is conversation so easy? Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 8, 8-11.
Hagoort, P. (2008). Should psychology ignore the language of the brain? Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 96-101.
*Hsieh, Y., Boland, J. E. , Zhang, Y., & Yan, M. (2008). Syntactic ambiguity resolution
in Chinese: Semantic cues and Parallel structures. Language and Cognitive Processes.
*Kim, A. & Osterhout, L. (2005). The independence of combinatory semantic
processing: Evidence from event-related potentials. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, 205225.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1999). Models of word production. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3,
223-232.
Marcus, G. F. & Fisher, S. E. (2003) FOXP2 in focus: What can genes tell us about
speech and language? Trends in Cognitive Science, 7, 257-262.
* Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1973). Linguistic structure and speech shadowing at very short
latencies. Nature, 244, 522-523.
Pinker, S. (2003) Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche. In M. Christiansen &
S. Kirby (Eds.), Language evolution: States of the Art. New York: Oxford University Press.
*Raffray, C. N., Pickering, M. J., & Branigan, H. P. (2007). Priming the interpretation of
noun-noun combinations. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 380-395.
* Rodriguez-Fornells, A., Rotte, M., Heinze, H.-J., Nosselt, T. & Munte, T.F. (2002).
Brain potential and functional MRI evidence for how to handle two languages with one brain.
Nature 415, 1026 - 1029.
Schiff, N. D. et al. (2005). fMRI reveals large-scale network activation in minimally
conscious patients. Neurology, 64, 514-523.
Seidenberg et al. (1982). Automatic access of the meanings of ambiguous words in
context: Some limitations of knowledge-based processing. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 489-537.
Sereno, S. et al. (2003). Context effects in word recognition. Psychological Science.
*Sturt, P., Sanford, A. J., Stewart, A. &. Dawydiak, E. (2004). Linguistic focus and
good-enough representations: An application of the change-detection paradigm. Psychonomic
Bulletin and Review, 11, 882-888.
Taboada, M. (2003). Modeling Task-Oriented Dialogue. Computers and the Humanities,
37 (4): 431-454.
*Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M. & Sedivy, J. C. (1995).
Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268,
1632-1634.
* van Turennout et al. (1998). Brain Activity During Speaking: From Syntax to
Phonology in 40 Milliseconds. Science, 280, 572-574.
*Warren, R. (1970). Perceptual restoration of missing speech sounds. Science, 167, 392393.
* Wennerstrom, A. & Siegal, A. F. (2003). Keeping the floor in multiparty conversations:
intonation, syntax, and pause. Discourse Processes, 36, 77-107.
Wilson, D. (2004) Heading in the right direction. APS Observer, 17(4), nonsequential
pages.
* Wilson & Wilson (2005). An oscillator model of turn-taking. Psychonomic Bulletin &
Review, 12, 957-968.
*Windmann, S. (2004). Effects of sentence context and expectation on the McGurk
illusion. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 212-230.
*Wolf, F. & Gibson, E. (2004). Discourse coherence and pronoun resolution. Language
and Cognitive Processes, 19, 665-675.