Psycholinguistic: Sentences : Syntax, Meaning, and Comprehension

In this chapter, we are concerned with how people process sentences. How are words meaning integrated with the structural meanings of sentence. We cannot derive the meaning, or meanings of a sentence, from the meanings of the individual words alone. WORDS ORDER is one aspect crucial in many languages, including English.

FORMAL GRAMMARS

We describe several of these formal linguistic grammars for several reasons. First, they have provided a major impetus for psychological research on language, particularly during the past ten years, when psychologists used them as tentative models of how sentences are processed. Further and more important for our purposes, each type of formal grammar reflects one or another important aspect of the structure of language.

(( The pterodactyl) (entertains (the lonesome child))).

This bracketing of the sentences can be represented by a labeled tree diagram, shown in Figure 4.1, that reveals the hierarchical structure more clearly. The DETERMINER (Det) the and NOUN (N) pterodactyl combine to form a NOUN PHRASE (NP), which is the subject of the SENTENCE (S). the predicate, or VERB PHRASE (VP), is composed of a TRANSITIVE VERB (V_t), entertains, and another noun phrase. The second NP is the direct object and is composed of a determiner the and ADJECTIVE (Adj) lonesome, and noun, child.    

Phrase-Structure Grammars are among the simplest of the formal grammars. They describe a structural analysis of a sentence in order that the words actually occur. For this reason, they are also called SURFACE-STRUCTURED ANALYSES.

“Semantic” Grammar and Artificial Intelligence, these grammars have been exclusively syntactic in that the meanings of words and sentences are not formally considered. A number of linguists have recognized this abd have proposed alternatives to the purely syntactic approach of transformational grammars. To take one example, Fillmore (1968) proposed a CASE GRAMMAR, which treats the verb of asentence as the central organizing unit. One advantage of this is analogous to the realtion between transformational grammars and phrase-structured grammars.                               

 Competence and Performance, in the sense that any adequate grammar captures what people “know” about a language, the grammar describes LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE. If the rules of grammar can be used to describe formally all the grammatical sentences of alanguage and no ungrammatical ones, and if people can do the same thing intuitively, then in the sense the competence of the grammar is equivalent to the linguistic competence of the people who speak the language. But it does not necessarily specify how people go about producing the output, or LINGUISTIC PERFORMANCE.

SENTENCE PERCEPTION

We usually begin to process a part of the sentences before the rest comes in, and this processing involves several kinds of operations. We assign meanings to words; we analyze syntactic and semantic relations; and we try to integrate information as quickly as possible so as to minimize the load on immediate memory.

Segmentation, we can crudely partition our memory system into two general components, WORKING MEMORY and LONG-TERM MEMORY. Our long-term memory comprises all of our knowledge, including episodic and semantic memory. If the interpretation of sentence processing is correct, then we would expect people to forget a sentence segment that has just been processed. On this view, when a sentence is heard, the words are held in immediate memory until an interpretable segment is completed, then while the next sequence of words comes in, the first segment is processed.

Sentence organization, one way to reveal the organization of such sentences is to give someone a word from a memorized sentence and ask for the first other word from that comes to mind. Whatever the organizational pattern of a sentence is, it is not a left-to right sequence, and the units are not only individual words.

Processing Ambiguous Sentences, sentences may be ambiguous in one of two ways, lexical or syntactic. LEXICAL AMBIGUITY occurs when a word may be interpreted in two different ways, as in sentences below:

1.a  The sailors liked the port from Portugal

1.b  The sailor liked the port in Portugal

In sentence (1.a), the more likely interpretation would be the red wine, whereas in sentence (1.b), the more likely interpretation would be the harbor.

SYNTATIC AMBIGUITY occurs when a sentence can be organized in two different ways, as in sentences below:

            2.a  They (are visiting) relatives in Chicago

            2.b  They are from Chicago

In the first example, the word they does not refer to the relatives, and the word visiting function as a verb. In the second, they does refer to relatives, and visiting is used as a modifier of relatives.

       SENTENCE COMPREHENSION

In general, we consider that a sentence has been understood or comprehended when we are able to use the information derived from the sentence in some appropriate way. One way to asses sentence comprehension was developed by Lee MCMahon (1963), using an ingenious adaptation of the successive matching paradigm.

3.a       The car hit the truck

3.b       The truck was hit by the car. Which sentence takes longer to comprehend ?

In some early versions of Chomky’s transformational-generative grammar, passive sentences were considered to be more complex than active sentences, and so it was expected that sentence (25b) would be psychologically more complex and thus take longer to process. This expectation was confirmed in a number of studies motivated by transformational-generative grammars (McMahon, 1963; Gough, 1965, 1966; Slobin, 1966). Each of these experiments used a variant of McMahon’s successive matching task, and they found that passive sentences took longer to verify than did active sentences. Since linguistic theory no longer provided a rationale for the relative difficulty of active and passive sentences, other reasons for their relative difficulty had to be uncovered.

MEMORY FOR SENTENCES

We have already seen that sentences can be remembered in two general ways-verbatim or in some interpreted format. VERBATIM MEMORY for sentences corresponds to memory for surface structure, the exact words in the order that they had appeared in. the INTERPRETED FORMAT refers to our memory for a sentence that no longer has the exact words in their original order, and this corresponds to a generalized “deep-structured” format.

Linguistic Deep Structures, the grammar characterized any given sentence in terms of a surface structure that is derivable from an underlying kernel or deep structure. To understand a sentence it is necessary (though not of course sufficient) to reconstruct its representation on each level, including the transformational level where the kernel sentences underlying a given sentence can be though of, in a sense, as the ‘elementary content elements’ out of which this sentence is constructed. As syntactic theory developed, it became evident that one had a wide choice of “deep structures” even within transformational-generative grammar, one had a choice of Chomsky’s 1957 model, in which active sentence were considered to be “simpler” than passive sentences, and his 1965 model, in which active and passive sentences were equally “complex.”   

Imagery, if the words refer to concrete, easily visualized things, they are easier to remember than words that refer to abstract concepts. If people are asked to visualize the referents of the words, they remember them better than when they are not asked to do so. These, as well as many other findings of the effectiveness of visual imagery for memory, suggest that the information expressed by sentences might also be represented in memory in the form of images.

4.a       The gloves were made by tailors.

4.b       The gloves were made by hand

If only the verbatim record of the sentences had been retained, then tailors and hand should be equally effective as prompts for remembering the sentences. Tailors was a more effective prompt for later recall, presumably because information about how things are made is not as central to the meaning of a sentence as who made things (the agent of a sentence).

Abstract Conceptual Representation, when imagery is not appropriate, we use other devices to comprehend and remember the. We can understand and sentences like

            5.         Philosophers are concerned with epistemological issues.

With sentences like this one, and with high-imagery sentences as well, we remember the gist and often forget the specific words and sentences themselves.

            6.         He sent a letter bout it to Galileo, the great scientist.

The italicized sentence above is the critical sentence, although people did not know it while hearing the story. After zero, 80, 160 syllables, the story was interrupted and a test sentence was presented. People were to espond “yes” if that test sentence had occurred verbatim, and “no” if it differed in any way from the critical sentence. A test sentence could be any one of these four types:

IDENTICAL: He sent a letter about it to Galileo, the great Italian scientist. (no change)

SEMANTIC : Galileo, the great Italian scientist, sent him a letter about it. (change in word order and meaning )

PASSIVE : A letter about it was sent to Galileo, the great Italian scientist. (no change in meaning, change in sentence voice )

FORMAL : He sent Galileo, the great Italian scientist, a letter about it. ( no change in meaning, change in order of phrases )

Sentences Comprising a Complex Idea

FOUR :           (t)        The ants in the kitchen ate the sweet jelly which was on the table.

THREEs :        (a)        The ants ate the sweet jelly which was on the table.                                      (a)        The ants in the kitchen ate the jelly which was on the table.

                        (t)        The ants in the kitchen ate the sweet jelly.

TWOs :            (a)        The ants in the kitchen ate the jelly.

                        (a&t)    The ants ate the sweet jelly.

                        (t)        The sweet jelly was on the table.

                        (t)        The ants ate the jelly which was on the table.

ONEs :                        (a)        The ants were in the kitchen.

(a)          The jelly was on the table.

(t)        The jelly was sweet.

(t)        The ants ate the jelly.

other Fours :    (t)        The warm breeze blowing from the sea stirred the heavy       evening air.

                        (t)        The rock which rolled down the mountain crushed the tiny hut at the edge of the woods.

                        (t)        The old man resting on the couch read the story in the newspaper.

COPREHENSION AND KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD

Comprehension, broadly conceived, is an active process that uses prior knowledge to interpret and organize the meanings of utterances.

(ex)      John remembered to let the dog out.

We know that the dog is supposed to be out. However, there is a qualitative difference between these two items of information. That the dog is out can be logically inferred from sentence (ex), and is, therefore called an INFERENCE. The latter information, that the dog is supposed to be out, is a PRESUPPOSITION.

When comprehending the sentence, we assume that the presupposition is true, even though it is not necessarily true. 

            Neither sentences nor longer utterances are comprehended in isolation. If a semantically rich grammar is necessary for dealing with sentences, an equally rich “grammar” would be needed with for dealing with discourse in general.