Language Comprehension

Language Comprehension Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental representations and processes that are involved human language processing. Psycholinguistics is part of the field of cognitive science, and is the study of how individuals comprehend, produce and acquire language. It mainly addresses two questions : What knowledge of language is needed for us to use language ? And what cognitive processes are involved in the ordinary use of language ? Psycholinguists are also interested in the social rules involved in language use, and the brain mechanisms associated with language. Language comprehensionIn this part, language comprehension consist of number of levels of processing (for the convenience of exposition) : levels of speech processing, Words processing (internal lexicon), syntactic parsing and sentence understanding, connected discourse comprehension.a.    Perception of language : identification of isolated speech sounds and of continuous speech.
b.    The internal lexicon : representation and organization of semantic knowledge
(lexical access processes in comprehension).c.    Comprehension of sentences : syntactic and semantic aPsycholinguisticsroaches to
the construction of interpretations.d.     Discourse comprehension : Comprehension of discourse, Memory for discourse,
Schemata and discourse processing. Realistic models of human sentence comprehension must account for:·         Language has structure
·         Robustness to arbitrary input
·         Accurate disambiguation
·         Inference on basis of incomplete input (Tanenhaus et al., 1995; Altmann and Kamide, 1999; Kaiser and Trueswell, 2004)
·         Processing difficulty is differential and localized
For example for language has structure:·         The colored word sequences all have something in common:
·         The girl gave the dog a big sloppy kiss.
·         I gave the dog a big sloppy kiss.
·         Every boy on the left side of the room gave the dog a big sloppy kiss.
·         The teacher of this class gave the dog a big sloppy kiss.
 In linguistics, this commonality is that the underlined word sequences are all of the same phrase type. In this case, the phrase type is called a noun phrase. Languages have many different phrase types, and we can describe the grammar of a languages in how its phrase types come together. Linguistics and Language ProcessingTop-down vs. bottom-up processing a. top-down: We begin interpretation of a sentence spontaneously and automatically based on what information is available to us. For instance, we do not have to wait until we have analyzed all the phonemes in a sentence in order to understand it. b.  bottom-up: Do analysis to isolate phonemes, word boundaries, and relate these things to the mental lexicon. Can happen only piece by piece – no forward projection, no prediction. c. Comparing top-down and bottom-up processing:In a lexical priming study, suppose a word is lexically ambiguous and so has two meanings. However, suppose that only one of those meanings is appropriate, given the syntactic structure of the sentence the word is in. A person using very strong topdown processing would only be primed for the meaning which is appropriate, given the syntactic structure. A person using very strong bottom-up processing would be primed for both meanings, despite the fact that only one meaning is appropriate. Ex: Hoggle fell gracelessly to the ground.Top-down processing: prime only for soilBottom-up processing: prime for soil and grindSentence Comprehension during Literal Meaning ProcessingIn order to be able to understand the structure of sentences, people have to combine different sources of information relating to language constituents. That is, they have to be able to retrieve; (i) the semantic representation of each lexical item in a sentence, (ii) the grammatical information these items carry about their nature, (iii) the syntactic information about other items they can combine with (Chomsky 1980; 1986), and (iv) the kind of dependencies they may form (Pickering and Branigan 1998). Thus, thematic roles that specify the relationship between the constituents (e.g., agent, theme, recipient, instrument, and so on) and grammatical relations (e.g., subject, object, etc.) have to be assigned. Finally, people tend to tie the representation that is built through all these processes to the discourse context. In other words, the precise meaning that is assigned to a sentence is highly correlated with the discourse environment within which this sentence is presented. Factors that Affect ComprehensionIn this section, there are list some of the factors that may facilitate or inhibit comprehension. These can be distinguished in factors relating to individual differences and in factors relating to the properties of the to-be-understood material. With respect to individual differences, as with any other cognitive ability, comprehension skills may vary from one person to another, due to people’s varying degrees of competence and performance (Chomsky 1968). In other words, what makes “good” and “less-good” comprehenders is the fact that some may acquire all the necessary linguistic and extra-linguistic information for understanding, but be unable to apply it because of physiological limitations (e.g., restricted short-term memory capacity due to age or brain damage), or inadequacy of operating under stressful conditions that may disrupt the process of comprehension (e.g., time pressure or noisy environment). On the other hand, others may be capable of dealing with external factors but not possess the required knowledge (e.g., background knowledge and languagespecific information) to successfully construct meaning representations. Regarding the factors that are relevant to the to-be-understood material, it is expected that complex structures will be more difficult to understand than simple structures. The former create more relationships among linguistic elements, thus overloading the mind’s processing capacity, whereas the latter do not need any extra cognitive abilities to be processed. The nature of a text, for example stylistics, clarity of expressed ideas, and so on, may also determine how successful the process of comprehension can be. Finally, factors such as familiarity and frequency have been found to facilitate comprehension since the more familiar we are with certain structures and the more frequently we use them the easier it is to understand them when we read or hear them. The process of comprehension from a psycholinguistic perspective. Comprehension of literal meaning for words and word combinations is based on the integration of semantic features and inferences. For sentences, meaning representations result from the assignment of thematic roles and determination of syntactic categories in combination with semantic information and background knowledge. Text comprehension employs much of the same processes as sentence comprehension, yet entails a more enhanced participation of short-term and long-term memory since the processing task is cognitively more demanding. With respect to comprehension of figurative meaning, we showed that people tend to derive the literal meaning of an utterance first, and only when its testing against context does not result in a plausible interpretation do they seek alternative interpretations. Regarding factors that may affect comprehension, we distinguished between comprehender-specific and material-specific factors.References:1.    Ellis, Rod. 1994. The Study of Second Language Acquisiton. Oxford: Oxford University Press
2.    Steinberg, Danny D., H. Nagata and D.P Aline. 2001. Psycholinguistics: Language, Mind, and World (2nd edition). Londong: Longman
3.    Menyuk, Paula. The acquisition and development of language. Massachusetts institute of technology.
4.    Scovel, Thomas. 1998. Psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press
5.    Clark, Herbert H and E.V Clark. 1977. Psychology and Language: an Introduction to Psycholinguistics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.