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Lexicon, experimentalLexicon, experimental

Oct 22, 2008

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Psycholinguistic ways of Psycholinguistic ways of examining the lexicon/syntaxexamining the lexicon/syntax

Three things we will look at:

a. Mental Lexicon

b. Collocates

c. Influence of lexicon on sentence structure

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1. Mental Lexicon1. Mental Lexicon

How can we investigate the mental lexicon?

Main question: how is the mental lexicon organized? How do we retrieve words?

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a. aphasiaa. aphasiaT: Now then, what’s this a picture of? (showing a picture of an apple)P: Ra-ra-rabbit.T: No, not a rabbit . . . It’s a kind of fruit.P: FruitT: What kind of fruit is it?P: Oh this is a lovely rabbit.T: Not a rabbit. It’s an apple.P: Apple, yes.T: Can you name any other pieces of fruit? What other kinds of fruit would you have in a dish with an apple.P: Beginning with an A?T: No, not necessarily.P: O well rhubarb.T: Perhaps, yes.P: Rhubarb.T: What’s this boy doing? (showing a picture of a boy swimming.)P: O he’s in the sea.T: yes.P: Driving. . . driving. It’s not very deep. He’s driving with his feet, his legs driving. Well, er driving er

diving.T: In fact, he’s . . . P: Swimming.T: Good, what about this one? (showing a picture of a boy climbing over a wall).P: Driving on a wall.T: He’s what?P: Dr . . . driving, he’s climbing on a wall.

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b. Semantic Verification Taskb. Semantic Verification Task1. Is a robin a bird?2. Is a bad a bird?3. Is a goose a computer?4. Is a horse a mammal?5. Does a monkey have

teeth?6. Does a pickle have

fingernails?7. Does a bird have feet?8. Is a cow a bird?9. Is a tomato a vegetable?10. Does a bird have wings?

5. Does an octopus run on batteries?6. Is a horse a mammal?7. Is robbery a crime?8. Is murder a crime?9. Is libel a crime?10. Is a shark dangerous?11. Is a cow dangerous?12. Is a cat dangerous?13. Did Abraham Lincoln have a

beard?14. Is corn a vegetable?

Which were easy to reject? Which were more difficult?

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b. Semantic Verification Taskb. Semantic Verification Task

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2. Collocates2. Collocates

What are some psycholinguistic ways to look at collocates?Psycholinguists usually take information from corpora and

use it to create stimuli . . . .

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a. response timesa. response times

research question: Are collocates stored as a single unit in the mental lexicon?

Sosa & McFarlane, 2002

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a. response timesa. response times

Why are response times slower for high frequency words?

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b. eye movementsb. eye movements

Research question: Do native and non-native speakers of English process collocates and non-collocates similarly?

Looked at eye movement response times (and what they looked at for both native and non-native speakers AND at both collocates and non-collocates

Findings:

Both groups processed one faster than the otherThe freaky thing is that natives processed collocates

faster . . . Non native speakers processed non-collocates faster

Why?Gerard, 2008

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3. Lexicon and sentence 3. Lexicon and sentence structurestructure

a. lexical priming

b. syntactic priming

main question: what aspects of the lexicon/syntax determines what sentence structure we use?

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a. lexicona. lexicon

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What else we know. . .What else we know. . .

Animate objects chosen as subjects Humans chosen as subjects More frequent word chosen as subjects Phonological priming (especially

rhyming) more likely to cause word to be chosen than semantic priming

Age that word is learned determines which word is chosen as subject

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The woman dialed 911 to report an emergency situation in her building.

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The car’s windshield was struck by a brick.

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One of the fans punched the referee.

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Bock & Griffin (2000)Bock & Griffin (2000)

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b. syntaxb. syntax

a: The ghost sold the werewolf a flower

a: The man gave the woman a box

b: The ghost sold a flower to the werewolf

b: The man gave a box to the woman

Bock (1986): syntactic persistance tested by picture naming

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b. syntaxb. syntax

a: The werewolf baked a cake for the witch

b: The snowman brought a book to the boy

Bock (1989): global syntactic role matters, syntactic priming does not depend on lexical similarity

NP V NP PP

c: The snowman brought a book to study

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b. syntaxb. syntax Manipulations of roles:

The foreigner was loitering by the traffic light

The boy is being woken by the alarm clock Manipulations of verb form:

Same vs different tense (hands/handed)

Same vs different number (hands/hand)

Same vs different aspect (hands/is handing)

Bock & Loebell (1990)Bock & Loebell (1990)

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b. syntax

Bock & Griffin (2000)Bock & Griffin (2000)

How long does syntax priming last?

Bock & Griffin (2000) used same stimuli but varied the amount of time between stimuli and showing Picture from 0 to 2 sentences

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b. syntax

Bock & Griffin (2000Bock & Griffin (2000

How long does syntax priming last?

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Even longer . . . Even longer . . .

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b. syntaxb. syntax

In real life, syntactic priming seems to occur as well

Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland (2000): Speakers tend to reuse syntactic constructions of other speakers

Potter & Lombardi (1998):Speakers tend to reuse syntactic constructions of just

read materials

It may be a feature that helps us to learn language . . . . Researchers are now using priming to teach second languages