Psycholinguistics (2)

Themes in

production

Producing speech

Reading and

writing

Producing speech

-There is store of the words in the mind.

- find and retrieve the word- pronounce it

-To produce a whole utterance there must be forward planning to ensure the words are articulated in the order, with the correct intonation.

We can investigate these processes in three ways:

By experimenta

tion

By the analysis of errors in normal

individuals

By the observation

of the problems

encountered by certain types of aphasic patients

Experimental data

-It is not all easy to investigate the process of speech experimentally, because we normally only have access to the final product.

When we retrieve a word, do we have information about both its meaning and its sound at the same time , or first one and then

the other ?

Levelt et al (1991) found that subject who were naming pictures were not put off if a semantically related word was presented late on in the retrieval process ; this suggests that by that late stage the retrieval had passed through the semantic stage and was being dealt with phonologically, ready for the word to be spoken.

Speech errors and tip of the tongue

-Inadvertent errors in the speech of normal people can provide indications of how we access individual words and how we plan

the larger units of our utterances .

Garrett studied speech errors in some depth and found:

1

• More errors with content words than other words including semantic substitutions words swapping places (e.g. He is planting the garden in the flowers)

• Also transposition of sounds between words (e.g. shinking sips for sinking ships). Where an affix gets separated from its root(e.g. he is schooling to go for he is going to school)it is the affix that stays in place and the content word that moves .

2+3

• Prepositions occasionally undergo semantic substitution .

• There is always a phrase boundary between the two words in a word swap .

4

• There is rarely a phrase boundary between the two words in a sound swap

Aphasia

-many description exist errors and word-finding difficulties in aphasics , and, clearly, models of normal processing need to be able to account for the phenomenon .

Amongst the word-level symptoms that manifest themselves in various forms of aphasia are:

An inability to access content words: this is

like an extreme form of the tip –of-the-tongue phenomenon

Making up non existent words (neologisms )

Semantic errors: substitution of a

word with similar or associated

meaning.Phonological

errors :problems with sequencing

the sounds, or the persistent use of a wrong sound over several attempts

More problems with verbs than

nouns

Reading and writing

To read words:

We must

recognize

their shape

and –or letters

We have some way of relating them

to meani

ng

Mostly we can also

link them with a

phonological form,

though it is certainly

possible to know a word

without knowing

how to say it.

In order to write a word

We need to first

select it from the mental lexicon

Then access information about how it is spelled

-In languages with a good grapheme –phoneme correspondence, such as Spanish , it is possible to move between pronunciation and spelling via simple ‘rules’ whereas English has words that are not pronounced as they are spelled (e.g. knight; leicester ) .

Slip of the pen

-As we might expect if our model of writing parallels that for reading , as described earlier, there is evidence that errors in writing can occur at letter-part, whole- letter and word

level .

Dyslexia and dysgraphia

-Dyslexia in common parlance actually refers to developmental dyslexia.

-Developmental dysgraphia : disabilities that some children of normal intelligence have in learning to read and write , and which can persist into adulthood if not

remedied .

There are several reasons why developmental dyslexia and dysgraphia are still not

understood :

Until recently, children with severe dyslexia

were misdiagnosed as stupid or lazy

Bright, resourceful and –or highly motivate dyslexics often find

ways compensating for their difficulties ,

indeed may not always realize that they are

dyslexic

The term ‘dyslexia ‘ and ‘dysgraphia ‘ do not describe single phenomena. They are used of an array of symptoms, and a given individual may have only some of them. These symptoms may indicate different levels of severity in a single

brain dysfunction, or may be cause d by different things.

-there exist also acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia , however. These affect individuals previously able to read and write , but who lose some or all of that ability after a brain injury . Acquired dyslexia can take different forms , suggesting breakdowns at different stages of the reading process .

Several types of acquired dyslexia have been identified, including:

Surface dyslexia: irregular words are read phonetically , suggesting that , when reading at least , sufferers do not have access to their lexicon (which would supply information about the peculiarities of the pronunciation), and have to use a phonological route to reading .

Phonological dyslexia: non – words (e.g. blobe )cannot be read aloud , but words known to the patient can be correctly read , including ones with irregular pronunciation. This indicates that reading is only achievable via the lexicon, which, of course , does not contain any item that has not been encountered before . There are also problems reading function words Deep dyslexia :non-words and function words cannot be read aloud , and there are semantic errors , such as flower for rose . As in phonological dyslexia , there appears to be no ability to use a phonological route in reading , but there is evidently also a problem in ensuring that it is the target word that is assigned

a pronunciation .

-All of these dyslexia have other symptoms associated with them too. For example of the sorts of problems that acquired dyslexia can present.

-Acquired dysgraphia manifests different symptoms, amongst which are:

1 -semantic errors (e.g. writing sun when asked to write sky)

2 -homophone errors (e.g. writing sought for sort and scene for seen)

3 -phonetic spelling (e.g. flud for flood , neffue for nephew)and the inability to write unknown

or non – words .

The unit of normal processing

-Language comprehension and production can be at least partially achieved using “a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices , even though they appear to be analyzable into sections” (Sinclair 1991:110)

--Amongst those noted by Pawley and Syder is :NP be –TENSE sorry to keep –TENSE you waiting , which generates many sentences all to the same pattern , including : I am sorry to keep you waiting ; I am so sorry to have kept you waiting ; Mr X is sorry to keep you waiting all this time (Pawley and Syder 1983:210)

-

These constructions , and others that are more fixed such as What in the world and thing is , are variously called sentence frames , (routine ) for mulae , chunks, schemata, templates, sentence builders and lexical phrases .

Language and thought

-We ‘simply’ express thoughts through our language, or whether the way our language operates has an effect upon the way we think.

-Out of this have come two hypotheses: 1 -the stronger linguistic determinism- the

way we think is determined by our language so that we are , as Sapir put

it ,(at the mercy of our language) 2 -the weaker linguistic relativity : we are more

likely to interpret the world in a certain way because of our’ language habits .’

Halima Othman AL-Muntasheri

Dr. Amira