Cognitive Processes PSY 334 Chapter 11 – Language Structure June 2, 2003

Judgments of Probability  Subjects match the Bayesian objective probabilities when making choices with feedback: Gluck & Bower diagnoses match predictions  Subjects overestimate when asked to explicitly estimate frequencies of symptoms.  Behavior but not conscious judgment corresponds to Bayes theorem.

Subjective Utility  Subject choices are not well predicted by utility theory.  The value placed on money does not correspond to its face value $8 is worth 2 times as much as $3, not 2.67 times as much  Utility curve is steeper in the loss function than in the gain Loss of $10 weighted more strongly than gain of $10

Chance, Luck & Superstition  We tend to see more structure than may exist: Avoidance of chance as an explanation Conspiracy theories Illusory correlation – distinctive pairings are more accessible to memory.  Results of studies are expressed as probabilities. The “person who” is frequently more convincing than a statistical result.

Linguistics  Linguistics – studies the structure of natural language.  Psycholinguistics – studies the way people process natural language.  Linguistics focuses on: Productivity – an infinite number of utterances are possible in any language. Regularity – utterances are systematic in many ways.

Grammar  Words can be combined into trillions of novel sentences, but not randomly. From runners physicians prescribing a states joy rests what thought most.  Grammar is a set of rules that generates acceptable sentences and rejects unacceptable ones.

Three Kinds of Grammar  Syntax – word order and inflection (where emphasis is placed). Did hit the girl the boys?  Semantics – meaning of sentences. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Sincerity frightened the cat.  Phonology – sound structure of sentences (pronunciation).

Prescriptive vs Descriptive  Linguistic intuition – speakers can make judgments about utterances without knowing the explicit rules.  Ambiguities: They are cooking apples – structural. I am going to the bank – lexical.  Everyday speech (performance) does not conform to linguistic theory (competence).

Phrase Structure  Important to both linguistics and psychology of language processing.  Phrase structure – the hierarchical division of the sentence into phrases. Verb phrase Noun phrase  Rewrite rules – rules for generating sentences out of the parts.

Pauses  When people produce sentences, they generate a phrase at a time. Pauses occur at the boundaries of phrases. Pauses are longer at boundaries of major phrases compared to minor ones.  Pauses occur at the smallest level above the word that bundles coherent semantic information (meaning).

Speech Errors  Errors show the reality of phrase structure. When people repeat themselves they tend to repeat or correct a whole phrase.  Anticipation – an early phoneme is changed to a later phoneme (toin coss) Occurs within a phrase – 13% across phrases Word errors can occur across phrases – 83%

Transformations  Some constructions seem to violate phrase hierarchy: Whom is the dog chasing down the street? The dog is chasing whom down the street?  A transformational grammar has been proposed which hypothesizes a deep structure that guides such violations. This idea about grammar is controversial.