1. Language Comprehension
Perception of Language
The Internal Lexicon

2. The structure of speech
Prosodic factors/suprasegmentals  stress, intonation, rate  influence the perception of speech
Articulatory phonetics
- Production based
- Place and manner of articulation
- voicing
Acoustic phonetics
Examines acoustic properties of speech sounds
Based on the acoustic signal
Formants, transitions, co-articulation, etc.

3. The Motor theory
This model was developed in 1967 by Liberman and colleagues.
The basic principle of this model lies with the production of speech sounds in the speaker's vocal tract.
The Motor Theory proposes that a listener specifically perceives a speaker's phonetic gestures while they are speaking.

4. A researcher, Harry McGurk, was interested in whether auditory or visual modalities are differentially dominant during infants' perceptual development.
To find out, he asked his technician to create a film to test which modality captured infants' attention. In this film, an actor pronounced the syllable "ga" while an auditory "ba" was dubbed over the tape.
Would babies pay attention to the "ga" or the "ba"?

5. The process of making the film, however, led to a surprising finding about adults. The technician (and others) did not perceive either a "ga" or a "ba". Rather, the technician perceived a "da".
MacDonald & McGurk (1978): place of articulation (especially the lips) is cued primarily by eye, and manner of articulation is cued more by ear.
These reports indicate that listeners use information about the way a sound was produced from both auditory and visual modes in the process of speech perception.

6. Semantic & syntactic factors
Miller & Isard, 1963 isolated the influence of syntactic and semantic information.
Three different types of sentences were presented in continuous speech:
1. Accidents kill motorists on the highways. (grammatical)
2. Accidents carry honey between the house.
(anomalous)
3. Around accidents country honey the shoot.
(ungrammatical)

7. The results indicated that people were most accurate with grammatical strings, somewhat less accurate with anomalous strings, and even less able to recognize ungrammatical strings. It would appear that the more predictable a passage is, the better it is recognized.  top-down processing

8. Phonemic restoration Warren & Warren (1970)
The first /s/ in the word legislatures in this sentence was removed and replaced with a cough:
The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city.
Listeners reported hearing the excised /s/. In addition, when told that a sound was missing and asked to guess which one, nearly all listeners were unsuccessful.
It is the context that helps determine how phonemic restorations take place.

9. Mispronunciation detection
Minor errors in pronunciation tend to be ignored, as we ‘‘know’’ what the person was trying to say
It has been zuggested that students be required to preregister.

10. The Internal Lexicon
The topic about internal lexicon means to find out about words as they are stored in the mind.
It also concerns – what they consist of and how do we find them, use them, and relate them to one another.
We try to distinguish between the process of retrieving information about words and storing of the words in memory
The distinction is similar to the one between the information about words contained in dictionary and the processes (flipping the pages and so on) by which we find the information.
Psycholinguists refer to the representation of words in long term memory as the internal lexicon.

11. An interesting thing happens to the WORD, once that word has been found in our lexicon.
The linguistic and non-linguistic properties that we associate with the word become available for us to be used in variety of contexts, including the meaning of the word, its spelling, pronunciation, its relationship to other words and related information.
Most of the linguistic properties of the word are also the part of the dictionary, but many of the non-linguistic properties of the words are uniquely given to the internal lexicon.
Example: elephants are said to never forget things. This piece of information is not a linguistic property of the word.

12. Word Knowledge
phonological
syntactic
morphological
semantic

13. Phonological / Syntactic Knowledge
Phonological Knowledge
Phonological attributes
Pronunciation
Homophones : bear / bare
Tip-of-the-Tongue(TOT) phenomenon
Not successful at retrieving a particular word
But remember something about how it sounds
Syntactic Knowledge
Category
A part of speech
The aging pianist stunned the audience
Grammatical rules
Open-class(Content) words / Close-class(Functional) words

14. Morphological Knowledge
How many words do we know?
Distinction
React / Reaction / Reactive / Reacting
Morphemes
Inflectional morphemes
Express grammatical contrasts
-s(pl), -ed(past)
Derivational morphemes
Create new words
-ion(noun)
Order
Derivational > Inflectional
Neighborhoods

15. Semantic Knowledge [1/4]
Meaning of Words
Sense and reference
Denotation and connotation
Reference
The relationship between words and things in the world
Referent : a thing
Determine the truth condition of a sentence
“There is a brown cow grazing in the field”
Abstract, Not existent
Mental Model

16. Semantic Knowledge [2/4]
Sense
Word’s place in a system of relationship which it contracts with other words in the vocabulary
Relation : Synonymy, Coordination, Hypernymy, Meronymy
Synonymy : same meaning (fear / panic)
Coordination : same level in a hierarchy (cat, dog / animal)
Hypernymy
The relationship of superordination within a hierarchy
Bird : hypernym / Sparrow : hyponym
Meronymy
A part of an object
Back, legs / chair

17. Semantic Knowledge [3/4]
Sense
Word association test
Kent and Rosanoff (1910)
Read aloud a list of words to a person who gave “the first word that occurs to him/her other than stimulus word itself
Chair result
Table > seat > sit > furniture > sitting > wood > rest > ….
Semantic Relations
Taxonomic relations : furniture, table
Attribute relations : seat, cushion, legs
Functional relations : comfortable, wooden, hard

18. Semantic Knowledge [4/4]
Denotation and Connotation
Denotation
The objective and dictionary meaning
Phonological information (pronunciation)
Orthographic information (spelling)
Semantic information (various meanings)
Connotation
Certain aspects of meaning beyond explicit descriptions
E.g. ‘snake’ = evil, danger

19. Structure of the internal lexicon
The most common experimental procedure is known as semantic verification task.
In this task, a person is given a statement such as ‘An apple is a fruit’ and is asked to determine quickly whether the sentence is ‘true’ or ‘false’
The time the subject takes in making the decision indicates the organization of the information in the internal lexicon and the distance between different words in the internal lexicon.
This kind of test is used by psycholinguists and others to determine several cognitive activities that may help to understand the organizational procedures that human mind used to handle the complex systems of language and its structures

20. Hierarchical Network Model Collins & Quillian

21. Semantic Verification Task (Similarity and Typicality Effects)
TRUE
A robin is a bird. faster more typical
An ostrich is a bird slower less typical
FALSE
A whale is a fish. slower more similar
A horse is a fish. faster less similar

22. Collins & Loftus (1975) Model of Spreading Activation
C&L assume that words are represented in the internal lexicon within a network of relationships.
This model retains the notion that concepts are stored as interconnected links, but revises the notion that all nodes are equally accessible.
Limitation:
No phonological, syntactic, and morphological aspects
Model of concept rather than word

23. Bock and Levelt (1994) Model of Spreading Activation
Wool
Milk
Animal
Three levels
Conceptual level
Lemma level
Syntactic aspect
Lexeme level
Phonological aspect
Limitation
No referential aspect
Growth
Gives
Is an
Gives
Is an
Conceptual
Level
Sheep
Goat
Sense
Sense
Noun
Gender
Sheep
(mouton)
Goat
(chevre)
Lemma
Level
Male
Sound
Form
Sound
Form
/p/
/gout/
Lexeme
Level