Cognitive Control and Language Processing: Key Concepts and Theories
Cognitive Control and Language Processing
Key Concepts
Cognitive Control
Also known as executive function, cognitive control refers to the goal-directed cognitive processes responsible for directing attention and supervising behavioral responses to stimuli.
Constraint-Based Approach
The main competitor to the garden path theory, this approach claims that multiple interpretations of an ambiguous structure are simultaneously evaluated against a broad range of information sources (or constraints) that can affect the parser’s early decisions.
Ditransitive Verbs
Verbs that occur with a direct object and an indirect object (which may be introduced by a preposition).
Garden Path Sentences
Sentences that are difficult to understand because they contain a temporary ambiguity. The tendency is for hearers or readers to initially interpret the ambiguous structure incorrectly, and then experience confusion when that initial interpretation turns out to be grammatically incompatible with later material in the sentence.
Garden Path Theory
A theory of parsing that claims that an initial “first-pass” structure is built during comprehension using a restricted amount of grammatical information and guided by certain parsing principles or tendencies, such as the tendency to build the simplest structure possible. Evaluations of plausible meanings or consideration of the context only come into play at a later stage of parsing.
Heuristics
Shallow but very fast information-processing shortcuts that often lead to incorrect conclusions based on superficial cues.
Incrementality
The property of synthesizing and building meaning “on the fly” as individual units of speech come in, rather than delaying processing until some amount of linguistic material has accumulated.
Intransitive Verbs
Verbs that take a subject but no object, such as (Joe) sneezes or (Keesha) laughs.
Parsing
The process of assigning syntactic structure to the incoming words of a sentence during language comprehension. The structure-building mechanisms and procedures collectively are often referred to as “the parser.”
Reading Span Test
A behavioral test intended to measure an individual’s verbal working memory. The test involves having the individual read a sequence of sentences while holding the last word of each sentence in memory. The number of words successfully remembered corresponds to that individual’s memory span.
Reduced Relative Clause
A grammatical structure in English involving a relative clause in which certain function words have been omitted (for example the reduced relative clause raced past the barn derives from the full relative clause that was raced past the barn). This structure often leads to ambiguity.
Sentential Complement Verbs
Verbs that introduce a clause rather than a direct object noun phrase (NP).
Shadowing Task
An experimental task in which subjects are asked to repeat the words of a speaker’s sentence almost as quickly as the speaker produces them.
Stroop Test
A behavioral test in which subjects are required to name the color of the font that a word appears in while ignoring the (possibly conflicting) meaning of the word.
Surprisal
A measure that is inversely related to the statistical predictability of an event such as a particular continuation of a sentence. Processing difficulty is thought to reflect the degree of surprisal at specific points in the sentence, so that less predictable continuations result in greater processing difficulty.
Thematic Relations
Knowledge about verbs that captures information about the events they describe, including how many and what kinds of participants are involved in the events, and the roles the various participants play.
Transitive Verbs
Verbs that take both a subject and an object, such as (Joe) kicks (the ball) or (Keesha) eats (popcorn).
Models of Word Production
Cascaded Model of Word Production
A model in which later stages of word production don’t need to wait until earlier ones have been fully resolved, but can be initiated while earlier stages are still in progress.
Heavy-NP Shift
A syntactic structure in which a long noun phrase, usually a direct object, is moved toward the end of the sentence instead of in its normal spot adjacent to the verb.
Lemma
An abstract mental representation of a word containing information about its meaning and syntactic category, but not about its sounds.
Lexical Bias
The statistical tendency for sound-based speech errors to result in actual words rather than non-words.
Mixed Errors
Speech errors that involve similarities of both sound and meaning.
Serial Model of Word Production
A model in which earlier stages of word production must be fully completed before later stages begin.
Syntactic Priming
A phenomenon in which speakers are more likely to use a particular structure to express an idea if they have recently used the same structure to express a different idea.
Tip-of-the-Tongue State
State of mind experienced by speakers when they have partially retrieved a word (usually its lemma, and perhaps some of its sound structure) but feel that retrieval of its full phonological form is elusive.