1. Intro to Psycholinguistics What its experiments are teaching us about language processing and production

2. Assumptions of Psycholinguists Grammar 1 knowledge is unconscious Our processing of language is unconscious Slips of the tongue can reveal information about how language is produced Mis-hearings can produce information about how language is perceived

3. Slips of the Tongue Spoonerisms You have hissed all my mystery legends You have tasted the whole worm –Argues that the entire sentence is produced before you begin to utter it (or else how could Spooner reverse those sounds? –Argues that morpheme, rather than word, is the basis of language production (Spooner attaches morpheme –ed to a verb not to the sound beginning with /w/)

4. Tip of the Tongue Phenomena Looks at how words are stored in our lexicon – and argues that they are stored multiply –For example, how do you retrieve a missing word or name? Alphabetically? Rhyme? Synonyms? Similar spellings?

5. Lexical decisions experiment Subjects see “words” on screen; must press “yes” if it is a PDE word; no, if not. Speed affected by: –How frequently the word used Example “free” vs. “fret” –If the word is phonologically possible Example “blove” vs. bnove” –Priming – words presented just before Argues that words are stored “near” other similar words

6. Parsing a Sentence One word presented at a time; subjects control speed at which they read sentence by pressing space bar. Learn: –Readers pause at the end of clauses –Readers spend less time on functional words (determiners, prepositions, conjunctions) –More time on nouns and verbs

7. Regressive Saccades Moments at which a reader stops and reviews what has been previously read Syntactically complex sentences –Multi-clause sentences, especially those without clearly marked clause boundaries Example: Since Jay always walks a mile seems short to him. Semantically anomalous sentences –Example: “The pizza was too hot to cry.”

8. Top Down and Bottom Up Bottom – Up Processing: we use features to hear phonemes to build up syllables to get to morphemes and words and then combine words into meaningful sentences. Top – Down Processing: once we have a word, we begin predicting what the next words will be and listening for them We likely do both simultaneously.

9. Morpheme Activation Hear a two morpheme word, such as “barking” Analyze “bark” as possible N = “tree covering” or possible V = “sound of dog.” Analyze “ing” as verb inflectional ending, so discard “bark” as possible noun Choose “barking” as verb meaning “sound of dog” + “ing”

10. “Garden Path Sentences” They tell us two things about language processing: –Minimal attachment We do not postulate a new syntactic node unless we have to –Late closure We prefer to attach words to the clause being processed rather than infer a new clause Ex: The horse raced past the barn fell.

11. Sentence Ambiguity When we hear an ambiguous sentence, we choose one meaning and reject the others unconsciously: The tuna can hit the boat

12. Serial Vs. Parallel Processing –Serial Processing: argument that we process linguistic input step by step, usually beginning with the simplest data level – the feature, moving up into phonemes, syllables, morphemes, words, syntax –Parallel Processing: argument that we process linguistic input at all “levels” simultaneously In both, we are only conscious of sentence level meaning, never of our steps to get that meaning!