Conflicting Evidence for Mental Schemas in Language Production and Processing

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-176
Author(s):  
Eleonore Schmitt
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Reading Task ◽  
Conflicting Evidence ◽  
Mental Schemas

Abstract This study examines the influence of mental schemas on language production and processing in German morphology. For the purposes of this study, mental schemas are defined as an association between a certain form and a function. It is argued that the so-called weak declension class of German masculine nouns is constructed around a mental schema: Prototypically, members of this class are polysyllabic nouns that are stressed on the penultimate syllable, end with a schwa, and refer to human beings (e.g., Matróse ‘sailor’). There is strong empirical evidence that this schema influences language production. However, language processing has not been studied so far. The study fills this gap using a self-paced reading task with pseudo-nouns to test the influence of mental schemas on reading times. While the study validates the effect of schemas on language production, no influence on language processing could be found.

Processing subject focus across two Spanish varieties

Probus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-127
Author(s):  
Bradley Hoot ◽  
Tania Leal
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Reading Task ◽  
New Information ◽  
Basic Facts

AbstractLinguists have keenly studied the realization of focus – the part of the sentence introducing new information – because it involves the interaction of different linguistic modules. Syntacticians have argued that Spanish uses word order for information-structural purposes, marking focused constituents via rightmost movement. However, recent studies have challenged this claim. To contribute sentence-processing evidence, we conducted a self-paced reading task and a judgment task with Mexican and Catalonian Spanish speakers. We found that movement to final position can signal focus in Spanish, in contrast to the aforementioned work. We contextualize our results within the literature, identifying three basic facts that theories of Spanish focus and theories of language processing should explain, and advance a fourth: that mismatches in information-structural expectations can induce processing delays. Finally, we propose that some differences in the existing experimental results may stem from methodological differences.

Humor Comprehension and Appreciation: An fMRI Study

2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (11) ◽  
pp. 1789-1798 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Bartolo ◽  
Francesca Benuzzi ◽  
Luca Nocetti ◽  
Patrizia Baraldi ◽  
Paolo Nichelli
Keyword(s):  
Left Hemisphere ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Inferior Frontal Gyrus ◽  
Brain Lesion ◽  
Superior Temporal Gyrus ◽  
Middle Temporal Gyrus ◽  
Stage Model ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Two Stage ◽  
The Right

Humor is a unique ability in human beings. Suls [A two-stage model for the appreciation of jokes and cartoons. In P. E. Goldstein & J. H. McGhee (Eds.), The psychology of humour. Theoretical perspectives and empirical issues. New York: Academic Press, 1972, pp. 81–100] proposed a two-stage model of humor: detection and resolution of incongruity. Incongruity is generated when a prediction is not confirmed in the final part of a story. To comprehend humor, it is necessary to revisit the story, transforming an incongruous situation into a funny, congruous one. Patient and neuroimaging studies carried out until now lead to different outcomes. In particular, patient studies found that right brain-lesion patients have difficulties in humor comprehension, whereas neuroimaging studies suggested a major involvement of the left hemisphere in both humor detection and comprehension. To prevent activation of the left hemisphere due to language processing, we devised a nonverbal task comprising cartoon pairs. Our findings demonstrate activation of both the left and the right hemispheres when comparing funny versus nonfunny cartoons. In particular, we found activation of the right inferior frontal gyrus (BA 47), the left superior temporal gyrus (BA 38), the left middle temporal gyrus (BA 21), and the left cerebellum. These areas were also activated in a nonverbal task exploring attribution of intention [Brunet, E., Sarfati, Y., Hardy-Bayle, M. C., & Decety, J. A PET investigation of the attribution of intentions with a nonverbal task. Neuroimage, 11, 157–166, 2000]. We hypothesize that the resolution of incongruity might occur through a process of intention attribution. We also asked subjects to rate the funniness of each cartoon pair. A parametric analysis showed that the left amygdala was activated in relation to subjective amusement. We hypothesize that the amygdala plays a key role in giving humor an emotional dimension.

scholarly journals Efecto de la Escolarización en la Producción de Relaciones Causales y Contracausales: Evidencia Psicolingüística para el Ámbito Educativo

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 258
Author(s):  
Gabriela Mariel Zunino
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Semantic Relations ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Discourse Comprehension ◽  
Educational Processes ◽  
Different Characteristics ◽  
Different Levels

In order to promote the practical application of psycholinguistic data in educational fields and expecting that this transfer would enhance the development of both the pedagogical field and the investigation in experimental psycholinguistics, we present two experiments to analyse the production of semantic relations in discourse, especially the causality/countercausality dimension. We found that the pattern of causal advantage is cross-wise and consistent in subjects with different levels of formal education, so it could be a suitable scaffold to develop other aspects of discourse comprehension and production. We compare our results with previous findings about discourse comprehension and interpret the data in the framework of educational processes. To use of empirical evidence about language processing on educational fields allows not only to review specific issues such as the characteristics of teaching materials, but also to improve educational process in a comprehensive way, making possible to adapt different approaches to populations with different characteristics.

Spoken language comprehension: insights from eye movements

2007 ◽  
pp. 308-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Tanenhaus
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Language Production ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Response Measure ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Spoken Language Processing ◽  
Spoken Language Comprehension

Recently, eye movements have become a widely used response measure for studying spoken language processing in both adults and children, in situations where participants comprehend and generate utterances about a circumscribed “Visual World” while fixation is monitored, typically using a free-view eye-tracker. Psycholinguists now use the Visual World eye-movement method to study both language production and language comprehension, in studies that run the gamut of current topics in language processing. Eye movements are a response measure of choice for addressing many classic questions about spoken language processing in psycholinguistics. This article reviews the burgeoning Visual World literature on language comprehension, highlighting some of the seminal studies and examining how the Visual World approach has contributed new insights to our understanding of spoken word recognition, parsing, reference resolution, and interactive conversation. It considers some of the methodological issues that come to the fore when psycholinguists use eye movements to examine spoken language comprehension.

Language processing and language acquisition through the lens of Relational Morphology

2019 ◽  
pp. 201-232
Author(s):  
Ray Jackendoff ◽  
Jenny Audring
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Spreading Activation ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Memory Network ◽  
Complex Words

This chapter asks what is happening to linguistic representations during language use, and how representations are formed in the course of language acquisition. It is shown how Relational Morphology’s theory of representations can be directly embedded into models of processing and acquisition. Central is that the lexicon, complete with schemas and relational links, constitutes the long-term memory network that supports language production and comprehension. The chapter first discusses processing: the nature of working memory; promiscuous (opportunistic) processing; spreading activation; priming; probabilistic parsing; the balance between storage and computation in recognizing morphologically complex words; and the role of relational links and schemas in word retrieval. It then turns to acquisition, which is to be thought of as adding nodes and relational links to the lexical network. The general approach is based on the Propose but Verify procedure of Trueswell et al. (2013), plus conservative generalization, as in usage-based approaches.

Speech and Language Production at Age 2

1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 879-892 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren K. Nelson ◽  
Harold R. Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Complexity Analysis ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Limited Capacity ◽  
Speech And Language ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Propositional Complexity ◽  
The Relationship

The purpose of this study was to explore how 2-year-old children manage the relationship between phonetic production and production of word combinations in their spontaneous speech. The subjects were 5 normally developing 2-year-olds who were participants in an ongoing longitudinal study of speech and language acquisition. Three measures were used to estimate phonetic production skills in the children’s spontaneous speech samples. These included a measure of the accuracy of consonant production (Percentage of Consonants Correct), and two estimators of phonetic complexity (phonetic products for utterance and word length units). Regression analyses were used to determine the relationship between complexity of word combinations, as measured by length of utterance in morphemes and a propositional complexity analysis, and utilization of phonetic production skills. The results revealed modest tradeoffs between complexity of word combinations and accuracy of consonant production for 2 of the 5 children. The results also showed tradeoffs between complexity of word combinations and phonetic complexity of individual lexical items (phonetic product for words) for 4 of the 5 children. As the complexity of these 4 children’s multiword combinations increased, the phonetic complexity of individual lexical items decreased. These results are consistent with synergistic theories of language acquisition and language processing that emphasize dynamic tradeoffs in interactions among language processing levels in a limited capacity production system.

scholarly journals Improving Semantic Similarity with Cross-Lingual Resources: A Study in Bangla—A Low Resourced Language

Informatics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajat Pandit ◽  
Saptarshi Sengupta ◽  
Sudip Kumar Naskar ◽  
Niladri Sekhar Dash ◽  
Mohini Mohan Sardar
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Similarity ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Evaluation ◽  
Evaluation Scores ◽  
Similarity Calculation ◽  
Marked Enhancement ◽  
Cross Lingual ◽  
Standing Problem

Semantic similarity is a long-standing problem in natural language processing (NLP). It is a topic of great interest as its understanding can provide a look into how human beings comprehend meaning and make associations between words. However, when this problem is looked at from the viewpoint of machine understanding, particularly for under resourced languages, it poses a different problem altogether. In this paper, semantic similarity is explored in Bangla, a less resourced language. For ameliorating the situation in such languages, the most rudimentary method (path-based) and the latest state-of-the-art method (Word2Vec) for semantic similarity calculation were augmented using cross-lingual resources in English and the results obtained are truly astonishing. In the presented paper, two semantic similarity approaches have been explored in Bangla, namely the path-based and distributional model and their cross-lingual counterparts were synthesized in light of the English WordNet and Corpora. The proposed methods were evaluated on a dataset comprising of 162 Bangla word pairs, which were annotated by five expert raters. The correlation scores obtained between the four metrics and human evaluation scores demonstrate a marked enhancement that the cross-lingual approach brings into the process of semantic similarity calculation for Bangla.

scholarly journals A unified neurocomputational bilateral model of spoken language production in healthy participants and recovery in poststroke aphasia

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (51) ◽  
pp. 32779-32790
Author(s):  
Ya-Ning Chang ◽  
Matthew A. Lambon Ralph
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Right Hemisphere ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Partial Recovery ◽  
Language Performance ◽  
Unified Framework ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Formal Basis ◽  
Healthy Participants

Understanding the processes underlying normal, impaired, and recovered language performance has been a long-standing goal for cognitive and clinical neuroscience. Many verbally described hypotheses about language lateralization and recovery have been generated. However, they have not been considered within a single, unified, and implemented computational framework, and the literatures on healthy participants and patients are largely separated. These investigations also span different types of data, including behavioral results and functional MRI brain activations, which augment the challenge for any unified theory. Consequently, many key issues, apparent contradictions, and puzzles remain to be solved. We developed a neurocomputational, bilateral pathway model of spoken language production, designed to provide a unified framework to simulate different types of data from healthy participants and aphasic patients. The model encapsulates key computational principles (differential computational capacity, emergent division of labor across pathways, experience-dependent plasticity-related recovery) and provides an explanation for the bilateral yet asymmetric lateralization of language in healthy participants, chronic aphasia after left rather than right hemisphere lesions, and the basis of partial recovery in patients. The model provides a formal basis for understanding the relationship between behavioral performance and brain activation. The unified model is consistent with the degeneracy and variable neurodisplacement theories of language recovery, and adds computational insights to these hypotheses regarding the neural machinery underlying language processing and plasticity-related recovery following damage.

The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Text Comprehension ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
First Language ◽  
Grammatical Encoding ◽  
Current State

This handbook reviews the current state of the art in the field of psycholinguistics. Part I deals with language comprehension at the sublexical, lexical, and sentence and discourse levels. It explores concepts of speech representation and the search for universal speech segmentation mechanisms against a background of linguistic diversity and compares first language with second language segmentation. It also discusses visual word recognition, lexico-semantics, the different forms of lexical ambiguity, sentence comprehension, text comprehension, and language in deaf populations. Part II focuses on language production, with chapters covering topics such as word production and related processes based on evidence from aphasia, the major debates surrounding grammatical encoding. Part III considers various aspects of interaction and communication, including the role of gesture in language processing, approaches to the study of perspective-taking, and the interrelationships between language comprehension, emotion, and sociality. Part IV is concerned with language development and evolution, focusing on topics ranging from the development of prosodic phonology, the neurobiology of artificial grammar learning, and developmental dyslexia. The book concludes with Part V, which looks at methodological advances in psycholinguistic research, such as the use of intracranial electrophysiology in the area of language processing.

Is the Syntax Development of Dysphasic Children Deviant and Why? New Findings to an Old Question

1990 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannelore Grimm ◽  
Sabine Weinert
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Language Deficits ◽  
Processing Strategies ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Normal Language ◽  
Language Input

The present study addresses three main issues: First, it considers whether the syntax development of dysphasic preschoolers is adequately described as being a purely quantitative retardation or whether there are qualitative differences as well. Second, the suggestion put forward by Grimm (1987) that the syntactic deficits of dysphasic children result from deficient language processing strategies is further explored. Third, it asks whether the language deficits are related to specific structural and interactional aspects of the language input. We examined two groups of children with comparable levels of language development: 8 dysphasic children, ages 3:9 to 4:8 years, and 8 control children, ages 2:1 to 2:11 years, who showed normal language development. The empirical evidence suggested that the dysphasic children’s syntax development was not only delayed but also deviant, and that the children’s deviant syntax structures were the result of insufficient language processing and could not be traced back to structural characteristics of the sentences used by their mothers.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document