Comprehensive Psycholinguistics Study Notes and Concepts
Core Psycholinguistic Concepts
Perseveration errors: A speech error where a sound, word, or linguistic element from an earlier unit is mistakenly repeated later in the utterance.
Syntactic priming: The tendency for speakers to process or produce a sentence using a syntactic structure they have recently encountered or used.
Preverbal message: The non-linguistic conceptual representation formed in the speaker’s mind (conceptualization phase) before it is mapped onto words and grammar.
Example: Deciding to ask someone to close the window based on feeling cold, before choosing the specific words “Could you close the window?”.
Form priming: A psychological phenomenon where exposure to a stimulus (prime) facilitates the processing of a subsequent target stimulus that shares formal/orthographic or phonological similarities.
Word-exchange error: A speech error where two words of the same grammatical category swap places within a sentence, often across long distances.
Example: Saying “I must let the house out of the cat” instead of “I must let the cat out of the house”.
Parser: The mental cognitive mechanism or component that analyzes the grammatical structure of a sentence (assigning syntactic roles) during sentence comprehension.
Example: Determining whether “The girl” is the subject or object while reading “The girl saw the dog”.
Verb argument bias: The inherent preference or likelihood of a specific verb to be followed by a particular syntactic structure or complement (e.g., direct object vs. sentential complement).
Late closure: A principle of sentence parsing stating that, whenever possible, incoming words are attached to the clause or phrase currently being processed.
Elaborative inferences: Inferences drawn during reading or listening that add extra, non-essential details or predictions to the text based on world knowledge.
Spatial inferences: Inferences drawn about the physical, structural, or spatial relationships between entities described in a text.
Early vs. Late Morpheme Acquisition
Early acquired: Free morphemes (content/open-class words like nouns and verbs) and high-frequency inflectional morphemes (e.g., present progressive -ing, plural -s).
Late acquired: Derivational morphemes (e.g., -ness, -ity, -un-) and complex bound/functional morphemes (e.g., third-person singular -s, passive morphology).
Lexical Learning Principles
Whole-object assumption: The belief that a new label refers to the entire object, not its parts or attributes.
Taxonomic constraint: The assumption that words refer to categories of similar objects rather than thematic relationships.
Mutual exclusivity principle: The assumption that an object has only one label (a new word applies to an unfamiliar object).
Garden Path Sentences
Global garden path (permanently ambiguous):
- “The horse raced past the barn fell.”
- “The old man the boats.”
Local garden path (temporarily ambiguous):
- “While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods.”
- “Because he ran the second mile went quickly.”
Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down Processing: Difference: Bottom-up processing builds meaning sequentially from sensory inputs (phonemes/letters → words → syntax). Top-down processing uses higher-level context, domain knowledge, and expectations to guide interpretation. When top-down is used: Hearers rely on top-down processing under noisy auditory conditions (phonemic restoration), when processing ambiguous/homophonous words, or when contextual expectations strongly predict upcoming linguistic input.
Second Language (L2) Acquisition Errors
Interference: Applying native language rules to L2 (e.g., an Italian speaker saying “Is raining” instead of “It is raining”, dropping the mandatory L2 dummy subject).
Second language strategy: Overgeneralization of L2 rules (e.g., producing “goos” or “goed” by applying standard regular past tense/plural rules to irregular forms).
First language strategy: Direct word-for-word translation or transferring native word-order constraints into L2.
Four Gricean Maxims: Quantity, Quality, Relation (Relevance), and Manner.
Psychological Factors in L2 Learning
Motivation: Integrative (desire to integrate into the culture) or instrumental (career/academic goal).
Affective filter / Anxiety: High levels of anxiety, low confidence, or stress impede language processing and acquisition.
Language aptitude / Age: Cognitive flexibility, working memory capacity, and age of acquisition (critical/sensitive period effects).
Two Crucial Ingredients for Language Acquisition: Innate biological capacity (Universal Grammar / Language Acquisition Device): Genetic predisposition to acquire language. Environmental linguistic input (Interaction / Primary Linguistic Data): Rich communicative interaction with native speakers.
Positive Consequences of Bilingualism on Cognitive Control
Executive Function: Enhanced inhibition control and working memory (ability to suppress non-target language interference).
Cognitive Flexibility: Greater mental agility and task-switching efficiency.
Code-Switching: The practice of alternating between two or more languages or language varieties in a single conversation or utterance. It can take place intersententially (between sentences) or intrasententially (within the same sentence/clause). Communicative function: It serves a social/pragmatic communicative function, i.e., establishing identity, conveying solidarity, emphasizing a point, or signaling group membership.
Lexical Access and Organization
Three Ways the Lexicon is Organized: Phonologically/Orthographically (sound structure and spelling patterns). Semantically (meaning networks, synonyms, antonyms, taxonomic hierarchies). Syntactically/Grammatically (word class/category and argument structure).
Lexical Access & Organization: Studies/Methods: 1. Priming paradigms (semantic/phonological priming), 2. Eye-tracking studies.
Relations among words: Semantic, phonological, or associative relations. Variables: 1. Word frequency, 2. Age of acquisition, 3. Concreteness / Imageability.
Elaboration on Lexical Decision Task: Participants judge whether a string of letters is a real word or a non-word. Reaction times measure how quickly target items are retrieved from memory, demonstrating that highly frequent or primed words are accessed faster due to lower activation thresholds.
How the Parser Builds Structure: The parser builds structure incrementally (word-by-word) in real time using structural economy heuristics (e.g., Minimal Attachment and Late Closure) while integrating thematic, lexical-bias, and contextual cues to revise ambiguous parses when necessary.
Three Things That Happen in Long-Term Memory Storage: Gist abstraction: The exact surface syntax/verbatim wording is rapidly forgotten while the underlying semantic meaning (propositional representation) is retained.
Additional Speech Errors and Processing Phenomena
Anticipation errors: Occur when a sound or word from a later part of an utterance is spoken too early (e.g., saying “a tyke on a bike” instead of “a mike on a bike”).
Plural attraction: A speech or processing error where a verb accidentally agrees in number with a nearby plural noun instead of the actual singular head noun (e.g., “The key to the doors are missing”).
Segment exchange errors: Occur when two sounds (segments) swap positions within a sentence (e.g., saying “fiss and mipse” instead of “fish and chips”).
Semantic priming: A psychological phenomenon where exposure to one word facilitates or speeds up the recognition/processing of a semantically related word (e.g., hearing “cat” makes processing “dog” faster).
Thematic information: Semantic information regarding the functional roles entities play in an event or sentence structure (e.g., Agent, Patient, Instrument, Theme).
McGurk effect: An auditory-visual illusion showing that visual information from lip movement interacts with auditory perception (e.g., hearing “ba” while seeing visual mouth movements for “ga” results in perceiving “da”).
Minimal attachment: A parsing principle stating that listeners or readers prefer to construct the simplest possible syntactic structure with the fewest structural nodes.
Bridging inferences: Logical connections drawn by a listener/reader to link explicit statements in a text when there is no direct connection (e.g., “John took the beer out of the car. The beer was warm.” Inference: The beer came from the car).
Instrumental inferences: Inferences drawn about the tool or instrument used to perform an action (e.g., hearing “He swept the floor” and inferring he used a broom).
Felicitous: Referring to an utterance that is pragmatically appropriate, suitable, and effective in a given context or discourse scenario.
Metalinguistic Skills and Clause Boundaries
Related with: Reading ability, language acquisition, and literacy performance.
Three most important skills: Phonological awareness, syntactic awareness, and semantic/pragmatic awareness.
Clause Boundaries
Definition: The visual, acoustic, or structural markers that signal the beginning or end of a clause within a sentence.
Why parser’s task is made easier: It allows the parser to process units in manageable chunks (reducing memory load) and prevents false syntactic attachments or garden-path errors.
How marked: Marked by punctuation (commas, semicolons), conjunctions/complementizers (that, because, which), or prosodic cues (pauses, pitch changes).
Children vs. Adults in Second Language Acquisition
Children do better than adults in SLA due to:
- Greater brain plasticity during the critical period.
- Lower affective filter (less anxiety, lower self-consciousness).
- Implicit, natural acquisition environments compared to adult explicit learning.
Characteristics of speech errors:
- Errors preserve grammatical category (nouns substitute for nouns, verbs for verbs).
- Errors obey phonotactic constraints of the native language (permissible sound combinations).
Basic social factors affecting SLA: Socioeconomic status (SES) and cultural attitude toward the target language community (acculturation and motivation).
Morpheme Acquisition and Speech Perception
Variables explaining order of morpheme acquisition (Brown & Steinberg):
Grammatical complexity: Simpler syntactic and semantic rules are acquired first.
Frequency in input: How often children hear the morphemes in surrounding speech.
Phonological perceptibility/saliency: How distinct or audible the sound/syllable of the morpheme is.
Frequency and ambiguity in lexical decision vs. sentence processing: High-frequency words are recognized faster; ambiguous words cause slower decision times or transient competition. In sentences: Context often disambiguates meanings quickly, neutralizing ambiguous lexical delays, whereas word frequency continues to impact reading speed even within full sentence structures.
Steps in language production: Conceptualization (forming the message/intent). Formulation (grammatical, lexical, and phonological encoding). Articulation (motor execution of speech).
Three features of speech signal for speech perception system: High variability (speaker variations, dialects, speech rates). Continuous nature (lack of clear physical boundaries/silences between individual spoken words). Invariance problem (the same phoneme sounds different depending on context/coarticulation).
Cohort model of lexical access: A model suggesting that hearing the initial sound of a word activates all words in the listener’s mental lexicon that share that sound (the cohort), which is then progressively narrowed down as more auditory input arrives until a single candidate remains.
Sentence processing revelation (“Mirabelle knows the boys are rowdy”): It demonstrates that the parser anticipates structural complements (clausal complements after verbs like “knows”) and constructs thematic structures incrementally before reading the entire clause.
Advanced Parsing and Syntax Analysis
Deep structure of “Teacher Strikes Idle Kids”:
[Teacher] [strikes (verb)] [idle kids (noun phrase)]. [Teacher strikes (noun phrase)] [idle (verb)] [kids (noun phrase)].
What it reveals: Sentence building requires disambiguating underlying hierarchical syntactic structures that surface forms leave ambiguous.
Plausibility/Real-world knowledge in pronoun assignment (“Whenever they lecture during the procedure, charming babies …”): Yes, real-world knowledge guides assignment because babies do not perform medical procedures or lecture, forcing the parser to assign “they” to instructors/doctors.
Averting garden path effect: Correct Option: a. The performer sent the flowers was very pleased. (Rephrased/interpreted contextually: The performer [who was] sent the flowers… Option A/B depend on target reduction; b creates a garden path because “florist sent flowers” is structurally and semantically misdirecting as a main verb, whereas a allows real-world knowledge to resolve the passive participle reading).
Psycholinguist George Miller’s principle: About short-term memory capacity (holding approximately 7 plus or minus 2 items or chunks of information at a time).
Four maxims of cooperative conversation (Grice): Maxim of Quantity, Maxim of Quality, Maxim of Relation (Relevance), and Maxim of Manner.
Elaborate on one preferred lecture: (Select and summarize a topic from your course notes—e.g., Language Acquisition, Speech Perception, or Parsing Strategies—detailing key theories, main findings, and your personal takeaways.)
Jabberwocky syntax computation (“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves…”): It reveals that syntactic relations are computed independently of word meaning. Structural function words, suffixes (-y, -s, -ing), and word order allow the parser to build a valid syntactic tree even when the content words are completely meaningless non-words.