英语语言学Chapter-6-Language-Processing-in-Mind.ppt

单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,Chapter 6,Language Processing in Mind,Introduction,Chomsky statement on“language”:,Language is a mirror of the mind in a deep and significant sense.It is a product of human intelligence,created anew in each individual by operations that lie far beyond the reach of will or consciousness.(,Reflections on Languages,1975,),Some distinctions:,Psycholinguistics,Psychology of language,Psycholinguistics,Psychology of communication,Psycholinguistics,Psycholinguistics study the storage,comprehension,production and acquisition of language in any medium;while psychology of language deals with more general topics such as the extent to which language shapes thought.,Besides the relationship between thought and language,the latter also includes non-verbal communication such as gestures and facial expressions,.,Cognitive,psycholinguistics,Experimental,psycholinguistics,It is concerned above all with making inferences about the content of the human mind.,It is some what more concerned with empirical matters,such as speed of response to a particular word.,Major Strands of Psycholinguistic Research,Language comprehension,:how do people use their knowledge of language,how do they understand what they hear or read?,Language production,:how do they produce messages that others can understand in turn?,Language Acquisition,:how language is represented in the mind and how language is acquired?,Word recognition,Cohort theory,:as soon as people hear speech,they start narrowing down the possible words that they may be hearing.If the first sound they hear is/s/,that eliminates all words beginning with other sounds;if the next sound is/p/,many other possibilities are eliminated.A word is identified as soon as there is only one possibility left.This account is referred as the cohort theory.,Word recognition,Other factors that affects word recognition,:,1)Frequency Effect,2)Recency Effect,3)Context,1),Frequency Effect,:there is the additional ease with which a word is accessed due to its more frequent usage in the language.,2),Recency Effect,:there is the additional ease with which a word is accessed due to its repeated occurrence in the discourse or context.,3),Context,:people recognize a word more readily when the preceding words provide an appropriate context for it.(,related concept:Semantic Association Network,),Lexical ambiguity,When people are asked to finish a sentence,they take longer when the fragment to be finished contains an ambiguous word than when the ambiguous word is replaced by an unambiguous term:,a.After taking the right turn at the intersection,b.After taking the left turn at the intersection,Lexical ambiguity,Frequency and context effects in lexical ambiguity:,If one of the meanings is much more frequent than the other,people tend to assume that the word has more frequent meaning.,Semantic context effect also plays a significant part in deciding which meaning is the most appropriate.,Syntactic processing,Syntactic ambiguity:syntactic ambiguity appears due to the ambiguity of individual words and to the different possible ways that words can be fit into phrases.,The cop saw the spy with the binoculars,.,Some ambiguities are due to the ambiguous category of some of the words in the sentence.,The desert trains.,men to be hardy,seldom run on time,Syntactic processing,Assumptions for solving syntactic ambiguity:,People consider all possibilities and decide which is the best.,People use some strategy to decide which structure to consider first,.(related theory:Minimal attachment theory),Syntactic processing,Minimal attachment theory:people initially construct the simplest(or least complex)syntactic structure when interpreting the structure of sentences.,Semantic and sentence memory,Assimilation theory,:assimilation theory emphasize on the importance of background knowledge in normal situations where we might memorize linguistic material.There is evidence to indicate that,for some levels of memory representation,this background knowledge constitutes a necessary condition,i.e.without the knowledge the appropriate representation cannot be set up.,Basic processes in reading,Eye movement,The perceptual span,The immediacy assumption,Eye movement(目光移动）,:when we read,our eyes actually make a series of rapid movements known as“saccades”,and between saccades there are fixation periods lasting for approximately 250 milliseconds.A point towards the beginning of a word is usually fixated,and there is a distance of approximately eight letters or spaces between successive fixations.,The perceptual span（感知区间）,:it refers to the range of letters from which useful information is extracted.The perceptual span varies depending on factors such as the size of the print,the complexity of the text,and so on.It is typically the case that the perceptual span encompasses about three or four letters to the left of fixation and some fifteen letters to the right of fixation.,The immediacy assumption（即时处理）,:the reader is supposed to carry out the processes required to understand each word and its relationship to previous word in the sentence as soon as that word is encountered.,Discourse/text interpretation,Schemata and inference drawing,Schemata:A schema(pl.schemata),in psychology and cognitive science,is a mental structure that represents some aspect of the world.People use schemata to refer to packets of stored knowledge.It is believed that schemata plays and important role in language processing.,Features of schemata:,Schemata can vary considerably in the information they contain,from the very simple to the very complex.,Schemata are frequently organized hierarchically.,Schemata operate in a top-down or conceptually driven way to facilitate interpretation of environmental stimuli.,Inferences,:the act or process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true.,Functions of schemata,:in language comprehension,essential information is often only implied,so that it is necessary to draw inferences in order to understand fully what is intended,and schemata and other stored knowledge play the key role in this process.They lead people to draw schema-relevant inferences which facilitate comprehension.,According to Dijk and Kintsch,the propositions of a story enter into a short-term working buffer of limited capacity,which is similar to the working memory system.,When the buffer contains a number of propositions,the reader or listener tries to relate them to each other in a coherent fashion.Those propositions which are highly relevant to the main theme of a story tend to be stored for a relatively long time in the working buffer.,Thematic information should be better remembered than non-thematic information.,Readers or listeners make extensive use of their general knowledge to work out the major theme of a story.This leads to the production of Macropropositions,which are general propositions used to form an overall macrostructures of the story.,2.Language Production,Language production is a goal-directed activity,in the sense that people speak and write in order to make friends,influence people,convey information,and so on.,Speech production,writing,Findings for speech production:,The speaker engages in reasonably elaborate planning before beginning to speak.(,spoonerism,anticipation error,exchange error,),Speakers decide on the grammatical structure of a proposed utterance in the functional-level representation,and then select the appropriate words to fit into that structure in the subsequent position-level representation.(,morpheme-exchange error,),To make error in speech production is the price we pay for having such a flexible speech production system.Its flexibility has the great advantage of allowing us to produce novel sentences.Indeed,most speech errors involve novelty,but simply novelty of an unwanted kind.,Speech errors:,Spoonerism(斯本内现象）,:sounds or words from the end of a sentence intrude into the early part of a sentence.This type of error is called spoonerism or slip of the tongue,where the initial letter or letters of two words are transposed.(,Is the,d,ean,b,usy?Is the,b,ean,d,izzy?,t,ake a,sh,ower,sh,ake a,t,ower),Anticipation error:,a word is spoken earlier in the sentence than it should be.(,The school is at school,.),Exchange error:,two items within a sentence are s.,(This is the happiest life of my day),Morpheme-exchange errors:,the roots or basic forms of two words are switched leaving the grammatical structure unchanged,.(He has already trunked two packs.),Writing processes by Hayes and Flower:,The planning process,:it involves producing ideas and arranging them into a writing plan appropriate to the writers goals.,The sentence generation process,:it translates the writing plan into actual sentences that can be written down.,The revision process,:it involves an evaluation of what has been written so far;this evaluation can encompass individual words at one extreme or the overall structure of writing at the other extreme.,Knowledge-telling strategy:simply writing down everything one can think of that is relevant to a topic without organizing the information in any way.,Knowledge-transforming strategy:focusing on potential problems within the planning process and arranging the main points in the most logical order.,Findings:,Expert writers produced larger sentence fragments than less skilled writers.,Expert writers typically spend longer than non-expert writers on revision.Because expert writers are more skilled at detecting errors that require revision,and expert writers tend to focus on the overall coherence and structure of what has been written,whereas non-expert writers concentrate more on individual words and phrases.It takes much more time to change the structure of a piece of writing than simply to alter some of the words.,Other important concepts:,Acquisition,(习得):It usually refers to the process of learning ones mother tongue.The learning process is such that people pick up the knowledge unconsciously in a natural setting.,Aphasia,(失语症):The dissolution of language and speech caused by damage to the brain,most typically,in the central area of the left hemisphere.,Brain lateraIization,(大脑侧化):It refers to the fact that the two halves of the human brain are not exactly alike.Each hemisphere has functionalspecializations;the neural mechanisms of some functions are localized primarily in one half of the brain.,Competence,(语言能力):Implicit knowledge we have about the languages we speak,e.,g.we can easily identify an ungrammatical sentence even though we may not be able to describe what rule(s)it violates.,Critical period hypothesis,(关键期假说):The crucial period is hypothetically,approximately the first ten years of life.Some linguists believe that certain aspects of language acquisition(e.g.sounding like a native speaker)can never be fully acquired if they have not been learned during this period.,Language Acquisition Device,(语言习得机制):Posited by Chomsky in the 1960s,it is a device effectively present in the minds of children by which a grammar of their native language is internalized.,Angular gyrus,(角回):The angular gyrus is the language center in the brain responsible for converting a visual stimulus into an auditory form and vice versa.This area is crucial for the matching of a spoken form with a perceived object,for the naming ofobjects,and for the comprehension of written language,all of which require connections between visual and speech regions.,Brocas aphasia,(布洛卡失语症):Also called motor or expressive aphasia,this is the loss of the ability to produce words or speak fluently as a result of damage to Brocas area.,Brocas area,(布洛卡区):The lower portion of the motor cortex of the brain(just above the left ear,in front of Wernickes area)which is responsible for the production of words and sentences.,Cerebral plasticity(大脑可塑造性,):According to Lenneberg,prior to the end of the critical period,both hemispheres are involved to some extent in language and one can take over if the other is damaged.This neurological flexibility is called cerebral plasticity.,Formulation,(语言计划):The second stage of speech production,after conceptualization,when the message is framed into words,phrases,and clauses by the speaker.,Linguistic determinism,(语言决定论):A theory put forward by theAmerican anthropological linguists Sapir and Whorf,which states that the way people view the world is determined by the structure of their native language.,Linguistic lateralization,(语言侧化):It refers to the brains neurological specialization for language.,Linguistic relativity(语言相对论,):Whorf believed that speakers of different languages perceive and experience the world differently,relative to their linguistic background,hence the notion of linguistic relativity.,Mental lexicon,(心理词汇):Mental lexicon is a concept in,cognitive,science,and linguistics that refers to a language users knowledge of words,the vocabulary and the representation of knowledge about words in minds.The term,lexicon,(dictionary)should in this context be understood as a,metaphor,.It is often believed that the mind is like a computer and that knowledge of,words,are stored like a dictionary.,Wernickes aphasia,(维尼克失语症):Loss of the ability to comprehend speech or written language as a result of damage to Wernickes area of the brain.,Wernickes area(维尼克区,):The lower portion of the sensory cortex of the brain,just above the left ear,behind Brocas area,which is responsible for the processing of most speech and language.,