Psychology of Language (PLE: Psycholinguistics)

An Introduction to Sentence and Discourse Processes

Murray Singer

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135005627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Psicolingüística

Originally published in 1990, this comprehensive volume addresses the central issues of sentence and discourse processes, with particular emphasis placed on reading and listening comprehension. The text material is accessible to both upper-level undergraduate and graduate students and informative for professionals and educators. In this regard, this uncommon volume identifies the logic of both the specific experimental manipulations that are described, and the more general on-line and memory measures frequently invoked. The principles presented in the text are supported by hundreds of numbered and unnumbered examples, and by precise tables and figures.

1

Introduction

Human beings live and function in an environment of language. From the moment of birth, a child encounters a steady stream of speech. Some of this speech is aimed directly at the infant, and some at other people. By the age of three, the child is capable of participating in complex and useful conversations. In mature adults, the ability to produce and understand language is taken for granted, and most likely seldom pondered.

The apparently effortless way in which people understand language is revealed by the following sentence from a magazine article.

Fortunately for the earth’s current inhabitants, the sun is enjoying a stable middle age, about halfway between its formation some 4.5 billion years ago and its demise about 5 billion years hence (“The Fate of the Sun,” 1987).

To understand this ordinary sentence, the reader must perform many tasks. First, the written symbols must be recognized as representing familiar letters and words. The meaning of each of those words must be retrieved from memory. For each ambiguous word, such as earth, current, and stable, the correct sense must be selected. Pronouns, such as its, must be related to their corresponding concepts, such as SUN. Because the form of a sentence has a large impact on its meaning, the reader must perform a grammatical analysis of the sentence. In this regard, superficially similar sentences, such as The patient was in the doctor’s waiting room, and The patient doctor waited in the room, have very different meanings. The list of comprehension subtasks is very lengthy.

The ease of comprehension is all the more amazing in view of the speed with which it is accomplished. College students can read technical material at approximately 200 words per minute. The speech rate of adults is about 3 words per second, and listeners have no trouble following a message delivered at this rate. Indeed, the rate of both spoken and written comprehension can be increased without an undue loss of comprehension (Miller, 1981). For example, it has been reported that television advertisers sometimes speed up spoken messages by 20% in order to make more efficient use of a 30-second slot. Thus, language comprehension presents the paradox of a task that is tremendously complex, and yet poses few difficulties for most adults and children. Is it possible to reconcile these two observations?

The pervasiveness of language use in human activities is reflected by many practical questions. Why does one school child learn to read relatively effortlessly whereas another struggles for years with this basic, essential skill? Why does one advertising message convince us to acquire a product, whereas another fails? Why is one college textbook easy and even pleasurable to read, and another, frustrating and boring? It is only by a scientific examination of language comprehension that we may approach answers to such questions.

Psychology and Language

What is language? At one level, it is a symbolic system that merits study and description by linguists and other scientists. Viewed in another way, language is a medium of communication, which permits ideas to be conveyed among members of a social community. The study of language is a psychological problem because language is a product of the human mind, and psychology is the science of the mind. The psychological study of language has many branches, a reflection of the complexity of language itself.

Table 1.1 presents a two-dimensional analysis of several branches of the psychology of language, with emphasis on oral-auditory communication. The first dimension is language function, namely, input versus output. The second dimension contrasts the manipulation of physical signals, such as speech sounds, with the processing of the abstract symbols of thought. According to this scheme, the decoding of incoming speech signals by the auditory system is called speech perception. The output of the physical signal, by means of the speech organs, is called articulation. The mental analysis of incoming symbols of meaning is called comprehension. Finally, formulating messages in the mind prior to articulation, including stages such as syntactic planning and word choice, is called production. There is sufficient understanding of each of these areas of the psychology of language that entire textbooks are frequently devoted to just one of them (e.g., Crowder, 1982; Miller, 1981). The present volume is predominantly concerned with comprehension, and deals also with some issues of language production.

Table 1.1

Some Subfields of the Psychology of Language

	Information
Language Function	Physical	Abstract
Input	Speech Perception	Comprehension
Output	Articulation	Production

This book focuses on the processing of sentences and discourse. The sentence is a familiar linguistic unit whose precise definition is elusive (Sells, 1985, p. 5). Discourse refers to any extended, coherent message. This includes narrative and expository texts, speeches, poetry, conversation, and many other familiar types of communication.

Furthermore, this book concentrates on the concepts, methods, and findings that experimental psychologists have presented in the study of language comprehension. However, the study of language is increasingly an interdisciplinary task, of interest to linguists, computer scientists, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, and students of literature, as well as to psychologists. Progress in each of these disciplines, particularly linguistics and computer science, has had a considerable impact on the study of the psychology of language since 1950. The interdisciplinary study of cognition, of which language is one essential aspect, is known as cognitive science.

The next three sections of this chapter describe the contributions of human information processing, linguistics, and computer science to the psychology of language. Subsequent sections compare reading and listening, and examine the experimental methods of the psychology of language. Finally, some notes on the use of this book are presented.

The Role of Human Information Processing

Cognitive psychology refers to the study of the basic processes of thought, including those of perception, memory, and attention. In combination, these processes permit people to perform an unlimited variety of complex mental tasks, including problem solving and reasoning, the learning of new ideas and skills, and the use of language.

The 1950s witnessed the beginning of the cognitive revolution in modern psychology (e.g., Baars, 1986). Between 1915 and 1955, North American psychology was dominated by the behaviorist school of thought. According to this position, behavior was to be understood in terms of the regularities of the responses evoked by patterns of environmental stimuli, such as a pigeon’s peck in response to the appearance of a grain of corn. Behaviorists considered thinking to fall outside the domain of psychology, following the argument that thoughts are not directly observable. Therefore, little progress was achieved in the study of thinking during the behaviorist era, particularly in North America.

Several factors contributed to the reemergence of the study of cognition. First, many behavioral phenomena could not be readily explained without reference to thinking (e.g., Hebb, 1949; Lashley, 1951; Tolman, 1948). A second factor was the appearance, in the late 1940s, of electronic computers and the academic discipline of computer science. Computer science offered to psychology an important metaphor of the mind: that of information processing (e.g., Gentner & Grudin, 1985). Computers, like human beings, are capable of decoding, storing, manipulating, and retrieving information. Accordingly, psychologists began to address people’s information processing capabilities: How much information can a person store? How long will it remain intact? How quickly may it be retrieved? The new information processing approach soon resulted in numerous landmark findings concerning the nature of human memory and problem solving (e.g., Miller, 1956; Newell, Shaw, & Simon, 1958; Peterson & Peterson, 1959). The cognitive revolution quickly gained momentum.

A complete theory of cognition requires the analysis of the representation of knowledge, and of the mental processes that operate on those representations. The goal of this section is to outline the representation and processing principles of cognitive psychology, emphasizing the concepts most relevant to the psychology of language.

Representation

When people hear a sentence, such as (1), they analyze its content and store this content in memory.

(1)	The ants on the wooden table ate the sweet jelly.

Likewise, upon seeing the Mona Lisa, people encode the image of a woman smiling enigmatically in front of a picturesque landscape. However, people neither routinely memorize the string of 10 words of sentence (1) (Bransford & Franks, 1971; Jarvella, 1971; Sachs, 1967), nor retain the fine detail of the Mona Lisa (Norman & Rumelhart, 1975, p. 25). This section addresses the nature of the memory representations that people extract from complex stimuli.

Propositional Representation. The fact that people can understand sentence (1) and remember its meaning prompted researchers to identify the basic unit of meaning conveyed by language messages. Underlying every sentence are one or more elementary ideas, called propositions (Anderson & Bower, 1973; Clark, 1969; Kintsch, 1972; Norman & Rumelhart, 1975; Schank, 1972; Winograd, 1972). Each proposition consists of a predicate plus one or more arguments. For example, underlying the sentence, The children broke the lamp, is the proposition (BREAK, CHILDREN, LAMP) (see Kintsch, 1974). It consists of the predicate, BREAK, and the arguments, CHILDREN and LAMP. Predicates and arguments are abstract concepts rather than words. However, these concepts often correspond to familiar words.

The predicate of a proposition is usually derived from a verbal unit in a sentence, such as a verb, an adverb, or an adjective. The predicate BREAK in our example corresponds to the verb of The children broke the lamp. For the sentence, John is thin, the predicate is derived from the adjective, thin. The proposition in question is (THIN, JOHN), with the predicate, THIN.

The arguments of a proposition are the concepts that are related to the predicate. The arguments are usually derived from the nouns of the sentence, and there may be one, two, three, or more of them in a single proposition. (THIN, JOHN) has one argument, namely JOHN. (BREAK, CHILDREN, LAMP) has two arguments, CHILDREN and LAMP. Underlying the sentence, The pilot painted the fence with the brush, is the proposition, (PAINT, PILOT, FENCE, BRUSH). This proposition has three arguments, PILOT, FENCE, and BRUSH.

Many sentences convey several propositions. For example, the propositional content of Th...