Human
Language
Processing
FATEMEH NEMATI
GENERAL LINGUISTICS, PHD
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE &
LITERATURE
PERSIAN GULF UNIVERSITY
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Psycholinguistics: The Human Mind at Work
A.The horse raced past the barn fell.
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Psycholinguistics: The Human Mind at Work
A.The horse raced past the barn fell.
B. The bus driven past the school stopped.
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Psycholinguistics: The Human Mind at Work
A.The horse raced past the barn fell.
B. The bus driven past the school stopped.
C.The horse that was raced past the barn fell.
D.*The baby seems sleeping.
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Comprehension: Speech Perception
❑ Acoustic phonetics: fundamental frequency; intensity;
spectrogram (voiceprints); formants
❑ Challenges in speech perception
❖ Segmentation problem: how do listeners split the continuous speech signal into
meaningful units?
❖ Lack of invariance problem: how do listeners manage to recognize particular speech
sounds when they are spoken by different people and when they occur in different contexts?
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Comprehension: Speech Perception
❑ How do human beings cope with lack of invariance?
➢ Normalization: listeners adjust their perceptions to control for speaker
differences, and can quickly adapt to foreign-accented or distorted speech
✓ When listening to distorted speech, they need to hear only two to four sentences to adjust, and can then
generalize to words they have never heard before.
✓ They adjust how they interpret timing information in the speech signal due to different speech rate.
➢ Using acoustic cues: the frequency of the first formant for /a/ is high
relative to /i/ and /u/
➢ Characteristic properties: Stops have a brief period of silence followed
by a burst; fricatives produce high frequency noise
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Comprehension: Speech Perception
❑ How do human beings cope with the segmentation problem?
➢ Phonemes: Categorical perception: speakers perceive physically distinct stimuli as
belonging to the same category because their perceptions are assisted by their phonological knowledge
➢ Words & syntactic constituents:
✓ Stress: when English listeners hear a stressed syllable, they are likely to treat it as the onset of a new
word; different meanings due to different stress patterns➔ He lives in the white house. and He lives
in the White House.
✓ Intonation: intonation contours mark boundaries of clauses.
✓ Lexical knowledge
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Comprehension: Lexical Access & Word Recognition
Definition: the process by which listeners obtain
information about the meaning and syntactic properties
of a word from their mental lexicon.
❑ What techniques are used for
studying lexical access?
➢ Lexical decision tasks: whether a string of letters
or sounds is or is not a word➔ reaction time measurement: the
longer it takes to respond to a particular task, the more processing is
involved
➢ Brain studies
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Comprehension: Lexical Access & Word Recognition
❑ Findings from Lexical decision tasks :
✓ the word’s frequency of usage effect➔ “resting level of activation” which is increased each time the listener
accesses the word. Because more frequent words have a higher resting level of activation, listeners show faster
RTs to these words in decision tasks
✓ phonological knowledge effect: listeners respond more slowly to “possible” non-words such as floop and plim
than to “impossible” non-words such as tlat and mrock.
✓ Neighborhood density effect: Words with larger neighborhoods take longer to retrieve than words from
smaller ones because more phonological information is required to single out a word in a denser
neighborhood.➔ cat vs crib
✓ semantic priming effect: Words can also be activated by hearing semantically related words
✓ Morphological priming effect: a morpheme of a multimorphemic word primes a related word: sheepdog primes
wool as a result of sheep; in runner, the free morpheme run primes words like race; summer primes “sum”
similar to painter priming paint ➔ morphological decomposition is taking place automatically based on the
phonetics of the word irrespective of the semantics.
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Comprehension: Lexical Access & Word Recognition
❑ Brain Imaging➔ possible and impossible non-words are processed
differently because different areas are involved.
❑ An evaluation of techniques: In some cases electrical brain activity in
experimental subjects indicates that lexical access is occurring while RT measurements
do not➔ teach may prime the related taught according to brain activity but not
according to RT measurements.
➢ Lexical decision occurs in stages.
✓ RT measurements are insensitive to earlier stages.
✓ The brain measurements are taken continuously and reflect both earlier and
later stages.
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Comprehension: Types of processing
❑ Parallel processing: Successful language comprehension requires that a lot of operations
take place at once including the following sub-operations:
✓ segmenting the continuous speech signal into phonemes, morphemes, words, and phrases
✓ looking up the words and morphemes in the mental lexicon
✓ finding the appropriate meanings of ambiguous words
✓ placing them in a constituent structure
✓ choosing among different possible structures when syntactic ambiguities arise
✓ interpreting the phrases and sentences
✓ making a mental model of the discourse and updating it to reflect the meaning of the new sentence
✓ factoring in the pragmatic context to assist with the other tasks
❑ Bottom-up processing
❑ Top-down processing
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Comprehension: Types of processing
❑ Bottom-up processing: moving step-by-step from the incoming
acoustic (or visual) signal, to phonemes, morphemes, words and phrases,
and ultimately to semantic interpretation. ➔ the speaker waits
until hearing an article followed by a noun and then constructs a noun
phrase ➔ The input is the source of information.
❑ Top-down processing: relying on higher-level semantic, syntactic,
and contextual information to analyze the acoustic signal➔ upon hearing
the determiner the, the speaker expects a noun or adjective to be more likely
than a verb or preposition.➔ the listener’s knowledge of phrase structure
would be the source of information
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Comprehension: Types of processing
❑ Evidence for top-down processing
➢ Spoken word identification in the presence of noise➔ more errors when the words occur in isolation
than when in sentences; more errors if they occur in nonsense sentences, and even more in
ungrammatical sentences.
➢ Shadowing experiments : requiring the participants to repeat each word of a sentence immediately
upon hearing it➔ the subjects often produce words in anticipation of the input.
➢ Phoneme restoration experiments: Subjects hear recorded sentences in which some part of the signal is
removed and a cough or buzz is substituted➔ The state governors met with their respective legislatures
convening in the capital city. ➔ They “hear” the sentence without any phonemes missing, and have
difficulty saying where in the word the noise occurred
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Comprehension: Types of processing
❑ Evidence for bottom-up processing
➢ segmentationː Sometimes an utterance can be divided in more than one way➔ [greɪdeɪ]: Grade A or
grey day.
❖ Sometimes both bottom-up and top-down information may bear on the ultimate decision of what was
spoken. ➔ /naɪtret/ [naɪtr̥et] & [naɪt̚ret]→ aspirated or unreleasedʔ in the context of chemistry or in
the context of hotels
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Comprehension: Lexical Access & Word Recognition
❑ Lexical Ambiguity
➢ RTs are longer with ambiguous words than unambiguous ones, suggesting that ambiguous words require more
processing resources.
➢ Listeners retrieve all meanings of an ambiguous word even when the sentence containing the word is biased toward
one of the meanings. ➔ the word palm in The gypsy read the young man’s palm primes both the word hand and the
word tree according to RT measurements.
➢ After about 250 milliseconds, the listener makes a decision about which meaning is the intended one based on the
information in the rest of the sentence.
❑ Conclusion: The initial accessing of a word is strictly bottom-up while the subsequent selection of the contextually
appropriate meaning is a top-down process.
❖ Young children do not show priming of all meanings of an ambiguous word, but only the most frequently used
meaning. ➔ They have more limited processing resources than adults.
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Comprehension: Syntactic Processing
❑ Parsing: building structural representations and determining the syntactic relations
among the words and phrases by the rules of the grammar and based on the
sequential nature of language.
➢ Often sentences have “temporary structural ambiguity”. ➔ a word belongs to more
than one syntactic category.
❖ The warehouse fires . . .
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Comprehension: Syntactic Processing
❑ Parsing: building structural representations and determining the syntactic relations
among the words and phrases by the rules of the grammar and based on the
sequential nature of language.
➢ Often sentences have “temporary structural ambiguity”. ➔ a word belongs to more
than one syntactic category.
❖ The warehouse fires . . .
1. . . . were set by an arsonist.
2. . . . employees over sixty.
✓ Both meanings and categories are activated when encountering the ambiguous word.
✓ Disambiguation is so fast that they are scarcely noticeable.
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Comprehension: Syntactic Processing
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Comprehension: Syntactic Processing
❖ Garden path sentences: another type of ambiguity in which the
grammar permits a constituent to fit into a sentence in two different ways➔ the
readers make an initial analysis, but later they recognize that they have been wrong
and reanalyze the sentence
➢ After the child visited the doctor prescribed a course of injections.
❑ Why do readers make mistakes in their initial analysis?
✓ Because they use general principles that are used by the
mental parser to deal with syntactic ambiguity ➔ heuristics
➢ minimal attachment
➢ late closure
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Comprehension: Syntactic Processing
➢minimal attachment: Build the simplest structure consistent with the grammar of
the language.
❖[[NPThe horse] [Vraced] [PPpast the barn] fell.
❖[[NPThe horse raced past the barn][Vfell].
➢ Minimal attachment in permanent
structural ambiguity:
Jamie saw the man with a telescope.
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Comprehension: Syntactic Processing
➢minimal attachment: Build the simplest structure consistent with the grammar of
the language.
❖[[NPThe horse] [Vraced] [PPpast the barn] fell.
❖[[NPThe horse raced past the barn][Vfell].
➢ Minimal attachment in permanent
structural ambiguity:
Jamie saw the man with a telescope.
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Comprehension: Syntactic Processing
➢ late closure: Attach incoming material to the phrase that is currently being processed.
❖ The reporter said the car crashed yesterday.
❖ The doctor said the patient will die yesterday.
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Comprehension: Syntactic Processing
❖ Heuristics lead the parser to choose the computationally simplest structure among the different grammatical
possibilities.
➢ What other factors influence wrong parsing?
✓ Frequency
The faithful people our church every Sunday.
✓ Prosody
Someone photographed the maid of the actress who was on the balcony.
✓ Lexical bias=> verb choice
(1) Tom understood the problem had no solution.
(2) Tom thought the problem had no solution.
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Comprehension: Syntactic Processing
➢ The parser does not seem to use non-linguistic information to make structural
decisions.
(1) The performer sent the flowers was very pleased.
(2) The florist sent the flowers was very pleased.
➢ We sometimes experience processing difficulty due to memory constraints.
✓ This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the
house that Jack built.
✓ Jack built the house that the malt that the rat that the cat that the dog worried killed
ate lay in.
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Comprehension: Syntactic Processing
❖Techniques for studying sentence comprehension:
➢ Eye-tracking: the process of measuring either the point of gaze (where one is looking)
or the motion of an eye
➢ Shadowing task: subjects are asked to repeat what they hear as promptly as possible
✓ Most subjects manage to do so with a delay of 300 to 800 milliseconds.
✓ Fast shadowers often correct speech errors or mispronunciations unconsciously and add
inflectional endings if they are absent, even when they are told to repeat the errors.
✓ Shadowing experiments support extremely rapid use of top-down information➔ differences in
predictability have an effect within about one-quarter of a second.
✓ They also show how rapidly we do grammatical analysis, because some of the errors that are
corrected, such as missing agreement inflections, depend on knowing the structural relations of
immediately preceding words.
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Speech Production
❖The process: the listener’s job is to decode the intended meaning of a message
from the speech signal produced by a speaker. The speaker must encode an idea into
an utterance using speech sounds and words (or signs) organized according to the
grammatical structures of the language.
❖Data collection
➢ It is more difficult to devise experiments that provide information about how the
speaker proceeds than to do so for the listener’s side of the process.
➢ Much of the best information has come from observing and analyzing spontaneous
speech, especially speech errors.
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Speech Production: Lexical Selection
Word substitution errors: They are seldom random; they show that we may make an
incorrect lexical selection based on partial similarity or relatedness of meanings.
illustrated in the following examples:
Bring me a pen. → Bring me a pencil.
It stays light out late here. → It stays dark out late here.
Please set the table. → Please set the chair.
Are my tires touching the curb? → Are my legs touching the curb?
I don’t know what the term is in German. → I don’t know what the term is in Austrian.
❖Blends:
1. splinters/blisters → splisters
2. edited/annotated → editated
3. frown/scowl → frowl
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Speech Production: Lexical Selection
❖ Phonological neighborhood: speakers often make speech errors involving the
substitution of a word that is phonologically related to the target but unrelated in meaning
✓ Did you feed the bunny? → Did you feed the banana?
✓ We need a few laughs to break up the monotony. → We need a few laughs to break up the mahogany.
✓ The flood damage was so bad they had to evacuate the city. → The flood damage was so bad they had to
evaporate the city.
❖ Word Frequency:
➢ High frequency words are also retrieved more easily than less frequent ones: knife faster than bayonet
➢ Speaker hesitations or pauses are also more common before low frequency words.
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Speech Production: Application & Misapplication of
Rules
❖ Derivational rules: groupment instead of grouping, ambigual instead of ambiguous, or
bloodent instead of bloody➔ regular rules are applied to combine morphemes and form possible but nonexistent
words.
❖ Inflectional rules: *We swimmed in the pool knows that the past tense of swim is swam, but he
mistakenly applied the regular rule to an irregular form.
❖ Morphophonemic rules
➢ the a/an alternation rule in English➔ a burly bird for the intended an early bird ➔ the rule applies, or perhaps
reapplies, after the stage at which early has slipped to burly.
➢ Nasalization: bin beg, pronounced [bɪñ bɛg] for the intended Big Ben [bɪg bɛñ] ➔ allophonic rules apply (or
reapply) after phonemes are misordered.
❑ How do we know about the order? If the misordering occurred after the phonemes had undergone allophonic
rules, the results would have been an burly bird and [bɪn bɛg̃ ].
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Speech Production: Application & Misapplication of
Rules
Spoonerism: named after William Spooner, a distinguished dean of an Oxford college in the early 1900s
➢ He referred to Queen Victoria as “That queer old dean” instead of “That dear old queen,”.
➢ “You have hissed my mystery lecture. You have tasted the whole worm” instead of the intended “You have missed
my history lecture. You have wasted the whole term.”
❑ Speech errors show that features, segments, words, and phrases may be conceptualized well before they are
uttered.
1. The hiring of minority faculty. → The firing of minority faculty.
2. ad hoc → odd hack
3. big and fat → pig and vat
4. There are many ministers in our church. → There are many churches in our minister.
5. salute smartly → smart salutely (The root morphemes are exchanged, but the -ly affix remains in place.)
6. Seymour sliced the salami with a knife. → Seymour sliced a knife with the salami.
(The entire noun phrases—article + noun—were exchanged.)
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Speech Production: Application & Misapplication of
Rules
Findings:
➢ The intonation contour (primary stressed syllables and variations in pitch) remained the
same as in the intended utterances, even when the words were rearranged.➔ The
intonation does not depend on the individual words but are determined by the
syntactic structure of the sentence. Syntactic structures exist independently of the
words that occupy them.
➢ Phonological errors primarily occur in content words rather than grammatical
morphemes, showing the distinction between the type of words. ➔ We do not find
errors like The boying are sings for The boys are singing; also the inflectional endings
are left behind when lexical morphemes switch.
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Speech Production: Planning
➢ Level of planning: Sentence
➢ What do they tell us about speech production?
❖ Longer time to initiate sentences that have less common word order and are more complex
(1) Speakers take longer to initiate passive sentences than active sentences.
a. The ball was chased by Nellie.
b. Nellie chased the ball.
(2) Speakers take longer to subject-object relative clauses than object-subject relative clauses a. The cat that scratched
the dog climbed the tree.
b. The cat that the dog chased climbed the tree.
❑ However, speakers are more likely to produce a passive sentence after hearing a passive, despite its non-typical
word order.
✓ syntactic priming: speakers are asked to describe a scene after hearing an unrelated active or passive
sentence.➔ They are more likely to describe the scene using a passive if that is what they have just heard.➔
once a particular structure has been built, it remains “active” in memory and facilitates the subsequent building
of a similar structure.
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Speech Production: Planning
❖ Patterns of hesitation
✓ Speakers’ hesitations show that planning for complex structures happens at the beginning of clauses. ➔
shorter initiation time for producing a simple NP subject as in (1) than (2) :
(1) The large and raging river . . .
(2) The river that stopped flooding . . . ,
✓ Pauses occur more often at the beginning of clauses than within them, and speech errors involving
exchanges of linguistic units happen within clauses and not across clause boundaries.
➢ The clause boundary is the locus of planning in complex sentences, and that
sentences are bundled into clause-size units before they are produced.
