Psycholinguistics - Chapter 5.odt

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS Chapter 5: The Internal Lexicon Main Points • when we know a word, we know its phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic attributes • a word's meaning includes both sense and reference - sense = words relationship with other words - reference = relationships between a word and an obj or event in the world • the organization of word knowledge in permanent memory is called internal lexicon - in semantic network, words are represented as nodes and are connected via relations to other words in the network • the process by which we activate our word knowledge is termed lexical access. Lexical access is influenced by the frequency of a word, its phonological and morphological attributes, whether ambiguous, and whether a semantically similar words has just been encountered Introduction • internal lexicon: representation of words in permanent memory - meaning, spelling and pronunciation and its relationship with other words - contains info that is not just lingu • lexical access: process we activate meanings • internal lexicon can be activated in several ways - from perception of the word: if we see elephant on page, ew identify it as recognizable, familiar word and bring our knowledge of the word to bear on the task of comprehension - activate meanings through other words Dimensions of Word Knowledge Phonological Knowledge • pronunciation of the word • tip of the tongue phenomenon: we are not quite successful at retrieving a particular word but can remember something about how it sounds • sometimes activate words bc of their sound Syntactic Knowledge • syntactic category: part of speech • two words belong to same syntactic category when they can sub for one another in a sentence • agrammatism: freq omit closed class words (and inflectional endings) from their sentences while keeping open class words better - process closed class words diff than ppl without this damage Morphological Knowledge • 2 bound morphemes - inflectional morphemes: bound morpheme is added to a free morpheme to express grammatical contrasts in sentence - ex -s - derivational morphemes: create new words – some change categoryAND pronunciation like decide to decision Semantic Knowledge Sense and Reference • reference: r/ship between words and things in the world • referents: things in the world • when understand meaning of sentence – grasp truth conditions ( conditions which sentence may be said to be true) • Laird – concept of mental model might be applied to problems of reference • mental model: cog structure that rep some aspect of our envir • sense: part of meaning that is not its reference - its place in a system of relationships which it contracts with other words • synonymy: two words or expressions mean same thing • coordination: two words exist at same level in hierarchy like cat and dog • hypernymy: relationship of super ordination within a hierarchy – ex bird is a hypernym of sparrow • hyponymy: sparrow is a hyponym of bird • meronymy: parts of an obj referred to by a word - LEG is a part of the chair • word association test: method for studying semantic relations • 4 types of semantic relations - taxonomic relations: table is a coordinate, furniture is hypernym and rocker is a hyponym of a chair - there are meronyms like seat cushion and legs - attributive relations: identify attributes of the word – like adk - functional relations: words like sitting, rest, rocking -> what can be done with a chair • sense pertains to r/ship between words and other words in lang - reference = r/ship between a word and what it stands for in the world Denotation and Connotation • denotation: obj or dictionary meaning of a word - phonological info, orthographic info, syntactic info, semantic info, morphological info • connotation: aspects of meaning beyond that which it explicitly names or describes Organization of the Internal Lexicon Concept of a Semantic Network • main idea for organization of lexicon is that it is set up as semantic network of interconnected elements Hierarchical Network Models • network is hierarchical if some of these elements stand above or below other members of network • Collin and Quillian • taxonomic relations deal with hyponymy, hypernymy and coordination • property relations or attributive = characteristics that may be attributed to the items at diff levels in network • C and Q assumed that space available for storage of semantic info was limited - so benefit to soring info only in one place in network = cog economy • also assumed that info stored only at highest possible node • What They Used: semantic verification task - presented with a stateme