last week characteristics of language production: – coordinating multiple sources of information...
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Last weekLast week
Characteristics of language production:– Coordinating multiple sources of
information in real timeMethodological issues
This weekThis week
Overview of the production architecture
Lexical representation:– Tip of the tongue states
Levelt’s (1989) modelLevelt’s (1989) model
FormulationFormulation
Linguistic encoding of conceptual message
Speaker must choose appropriate lexical items to convey intended message
Lexical representations incorporate semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological content
How are these retrieved?
The “tip-of-the-tongue” The “tip-of-the-tongue” experienceexperience
“an instrument used for measuring angular distances, used especially in navigation to observe the altitude of celestial bodies”– The tip-of-the-tongue experience
occurs when people are sure a word is in memory but they are unable to access it
“The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term. If wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them. They do not fit into its mould. And the gap of one word does not feel like the gap of another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily to be when described as gaps.” (William James, 1890, pp. 251-252)
How to studyHow to study
Naturalistic studies (e.g., using a diary)– suggest fairly frequent (a few times a week)– other instances may be forgotten
Experimental procedures– usually, recall to a definition
Though also sometimes pictures
– state “things you know” about the word E.g., first sound, number of syllables
– often test if the word is later recalled– sometimes deliberately induce TOT states
Eliciting tips-of-the-Eliciting tips-of-the-tonguetongue
Brown & McNeill (1966)Brown & McNeill (1966) Studied 56 American undergraduates. 49 low-frequency words (e.g., apse, nepotism, sampan),
prompted by brief definitions. On c. 8.5% of trials, tip-of-the-tongue state ensued:
– Had to guess word's first or last letters, the number of syllables it contained, and which syllable was stressed
Total of 360 TOT states:– 233 ="positive TOTs" (subject was thinking of target word, and
produced scorable data– 127 = "negative TOTs" (subject was thinking of other word, but
could not recall it)– 224 similar-sound TOTs (e.g., Saipan for sampan)
48% had the same number of syllables as the target– 95 similar-meaning TOTs (e.g., houseboat for sampan).Of the SS
items 20% had same number of syllables as target.
Some findings Some findings
Experimental procedures often generate TOTs on about 10-15% of trials– Seems to occur for most people– Seems to occur for most items tested– probably less with very frequent or
very infrequent words
What information is What information is recalled?recalled?
“The rhythm of the lost word may be there without the sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully, without growing more distinct.” (James, 1890, p. 251)
Partial access?Partial access?
Similar words come to mind about half the time– but how much is just guessing?– First letter: correct 50-71% of time (vs. 10%
by chance)– first sound: 36% of time (vs. 6% by chance)
Additional letters: less but above chance– more for last than middle letters– hence, a U-shaped curve– so first letter is privileged (a “pointer”?)
Other aspectsOther aspects
Knowledge of number of syllables seems above chance
Knowledge of other aspects of the word they are looking for
Patients with anomiaPatients with anomia
Patients show more extreme patterns of word-finding difficulty – e.g. EST (Kay & Ellis, 1987)
may be like an exaggeration of normal TOT states
Is the experience Is the experience universal?universal?
Schwartz (1999) found that 45 out of 51 languages use the “tongue” metaphor, suggesting that it probably is universal– not in Icelandic, Amharic,
Indonesian, Kiswahili, Kalenjin– no “tip of the finger” expression in
American Sign Language
Translations of Translations of expressionsexpressions
“on the tongue” “on the tip/point/head of the
tongue”– most common
“on the top of the tongue” “on the front of the tongue”“sparkling at the end of the tongue”“in the mouth and throat”
Word production & TOTsWord production & TOTs
TOTs and Anomias suggest a basic split between semantics/syntax and phonology:– people can access meaning and
grammar but not pronunciation
What might be known in a What might be known in a TOT?TOT?
Semantics Syntax
– grammatical category (“part of speech”) e.g. noun, verb, adjective
– Gender e.g. le chien, la vache; le camion, la voiture
– Number e.g. dog vs. dogs; trousers vs. shirt
– Count/mass status e.g. oats vs. flour
Vigliocco et al. (1997)Vigliocco et al. (1997)
Subjects presented with word definitions– Gender was always arbitrary
If unable to retrieve word, they answered– How well do you think you know the word?– Guess the gender– Guess the number of syllables– Guess as many letters and positions as possible– Report any word that comes to mind
Then presented with target word– Do you know this word?– Is this the word you were thinking of?
Vigliocco et al (1997)Vigliocco et al (1997)
+ TOT– Both reported some correct
information in questionnaire– And said yes to recognition question
- TOT– Otherwise
Overall, 9% + TOT; 19% - TOT
Vigliocco et al (1997)Vigliocco et al (1997)
+ TOT: 84% correct gender guess - TOT: 53% correct gender guess
– chance level Conclusion
– Subjects often know grammatical gender information even when they have no phonological information
– Supports split between syntax and phonology in production
Vigliocco, Vinson, Martin Vigliocco, Vinson, Martin & Garrett (1999)& Garrett (1999)
English: Count vs mass nouns (e.g., egg vs sugar)– Definitions to elicit ToT:
Final part that typically serves to round out or complete the design of a literary work; conclusion (EPILOGUE)
White, fatty cartilage found in meat (GRISTLE)
– Asked whether participants could tell them which was appropriate:
There is_/There is a _ There won’t be much_/There won’t be many_ There is some_/There are a few_
– Better at this when in +TOT than –TOT state
Separate components Separate components in language productionin language production Language production appears effortless
and therefore “one stage” TOT data suggest this is wrong –
production can be difficult It seems to break down “in the middle”
– Semantic processing can be OK “I know what I’m trying to say”
– But phonological processing can be impaired “but I just can’t think of the word”
– Vigliocco and colleagues’ studies suggest syntax can be accessed without phonology
Other evidenceOther evidence
Much other evidence for the same conclusion– TOT data showing other syntactic knowledge
(Vigliocco et al., 1999, and Caramazza and Miozzo, 1997, on grammatical gender)
– Other TOT data (e.g., priming data - Rastle & Burke, 1996)
– other aphasia data (Badecker et al., 1995; Henaff Gonon et al., 1989)
– slips of the tongue, experiments on time-course of retrieval etc. (see later)
Separable componentsSeparable components
Hence, a “barrier” between phonological and semantic processing
Evidence emerging for a “barrier” between phonological and syntactic processing
Speech error dataSpeech error data
Substitution errors:– All I want is something for my
shoulders [intended: elbows]– I’ve got whipped cream on my
mushroom [intended: moustache] Exchange errors:
– I left the briefcase in my cigar– Do you reel feally bad?
Speech errorsSpeech errors
Two types of errors (semantic and phonological)– errors at different stages in the production
process?
Semantic exchange errors– exchanges tend to be same grammatical
class– exchanges tend to occur between phrases– don’t need to occur in similar phonological
environments
Speech errorsSpeech errors
Phonological exchange errors– need not be words– tend to be adjacent words, or at least
within phrase– tend to be different grammatical classes
Hence, errors support the notion of two production stages, in accord with TOT data.
Lemma and Word-FormLemma and Word-Form
Word form (Lexeme): phonologically specified representation
Lemma: representation specifying syntactic features– in some accounts, also specifies
semantic information– but the recent evidence supports a
purely syntactic lemma
Lemmas and word-formsLemmas and word-forms
Normally, accessing a word involves lemma access followed rapidly by word-form access
But sometimes only the lemma is accessed– during TOT state– regularly in anomic patients
Lemmas vs word-formsLemmas vs word-forms
In models of sentence production, syntactic processing occurs before phonological processing – syntactic processing uses lemma– phonological processing uses word-
form
Levelt et al (1999) modelLevelt et al (1999) model Lemma may consist of a “node” containing
information about the “base form” of a word (e.g. give) and “pointers” to syntactic features, e.g.:– grammatical number (singular or plural, normally)– grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, neuter –
depending on language)– category (noun, verb, etc.)– subcategory (transitive verb, intransitive verb, etc.)– count or mass noun– tense of verb (present, past, etc.)
Two accounts of TOTsTwo accounts of TOTs
Blocking – target is suppressed by a stronger competitor– rememberers retrieve “blockers” or
“interlopers” related to the correct target– these interlopers inhibit the correct target– but rememberers recognise the interlopers
as incorrect as well Partial activation – target is only
weakly represented
Partial activationPartial activation
Meyer and Bock (1992) provide indirect evidence for partial activation (contra earlier findings):– Participants produced responses to
definitions– Definitions accompanied by cues
related in sound to target (phonological cue) related in meaning to target (semantic cue)
– we’ll ignore unrelated to target (unrelated cue)
Meyer & Bock (1992) Meyer & Bock (1992)
Blocking hypothesis– phonological cue should interfere
with target access i.e., decrease correct responses relative
to unrelated cue Partial activation hypothesis
– phonological cue should assist target access
i.e., increase correct responses relative to unrelated cue
Experiment 1: Cue before Experiment 1: Cue before targettarget
Cueing condition
No. of correct targets
No. of TOT states
Phonological 1013 628
Semantic 951 682
Unrelated 917 658
Meyer and Bock (1992)Meyer and Bock (1992)
Critically, more correct responses following phonological cue than unrelated cue– phonological information provides
activation in lexical selection– and TOT states due to partial
activation rather than blocking– note, hard to interpret the TOT states
themselves
Experiment 2: Cue after Experiment 2: Cue after initial responseinitial response
Cueing condition
correct tgts reported before cue
correct tgts reported after cue
No. of TOT states
Phonological
697 108 578
Semantic 701 49 635
Unrelated 667 28 564
Meyer & Bock (1992)Meyer & Bock (1992)
– no differences between conditions before cue (as expected)
– But differences after cueAgain, more correct responses
following phonological cue than unrelated cue– supports partial activation account again– facilitation works with a late
presentation of the cue
Partial activationPartial activation
See also Harley and Brown (1998)– TOTs are more common for words
with few phonological neighbours (i.e. few words that differ by only one phoneme from the target)
– Hence suggests that neighbours facilitate rather than inhibit target retrieval
SummarySummary
3 stages to production:– Conceptualisation– Formulation– Articulation
Formulation involves lexical retrieval:– Semantic/syntactic content (lemma)– Phonological content (word-form)
Lemma can be retrieved without word-form necessarily being retrieved
When this occurs, ToT state ensues
Phenomenology and Phenomenology and metacognitionmetacognition
Doctrine of concordance: very high correlation between cognitive processes, behaviour and phenomenological experience
Tulving (1989) criticised this doctrine – for instance, retrieval is not the same as the experience of recollection – e.g., words are often retrieved during
speech without any experience of recollection
– “mental time travel” only occurs in certain situations involving episodic memory
– other non-retrieval factors affect our judgement of “pastness”
For instance, metacognition literature demonstrates clear differences between “feeling of knowing” and actual knowledge
Two separate components:– one carries out the process (“object-level”)– the other monitors the process (“meta-level”)
TOT states could reflect meta-level processes
Cues and cue Cues and cue familiarityfamiliarity
TOTs are not based on sensitivity to inaccessible targets
Instead, rememberers infer the target’s existence from clues– the cue (e.g., the definition)– retrieved partial information– any other generated information
Thus, Reder (1987) and Reder and Ritter (1992)– rapid judgements of feeling of
knowing (e.g., What is the capital of Peru?) depend on familiarity with the terms in the question
– these judgements are improved by priming the terms in the questions, not by priming the answers
Koriat and Lieblich (1977) – more repetitive definitions led to more TOTs – suggests that cue factors play a role in TOT
states Schwartz – TOTs are a “lens” to bring
phenomenology into focus, not a “window” on the nature of retrieval – a note of caution – but lots of parallels between TOT data and
other tests of lexical retrieval mechanisms
And more recently still, Harley and Bown (1998) varied the frequency and phonological distinctiveness of the target words and found "that TOTs are more likely to arise on low-frequency words that have few close phonological neighbours" (p151). They use their data to reflect upon the broader process of "lexicalisation"[glossary], which they define as "the process of phonological retrieval in speech production given a semantic input" (p152), and they opt for a "two-stage" explanatory model of lexical access, that is to say, a model which strictly separates each word's semantic and phonological representations. TOTs can therefore be seen as arising "when the first stage of lexical access is completed successfully, but not the second" (pp152-153). However, the critical point as far as Harley and Bown are concerned is as follows .....
"Our central result is that phonological neighbours contribute to, rather than hinder, phonological retrieval in speech production. [.....] A TOT occurs when the semantic specification successfully accesses the abstract lemma [glossary]. This causes the 'feeling of knowing' the word. Nevertheless, the lemma is then unable to pass sufficient activation onto and thereby access the corresponding phonological word form. [.....] There are two possible reasons for failure at this stage. Either the connections between the lemma and the phonological forms might be weakened, or the phonological forms might themselves be weakly represented for these items." (Harley and Bown, 1998, p162)
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