March 26, 2001

The readings for this class were:

• Whitney, Chapter 7, 9
• The Silent Challenge by Lila Guterman, March 9, 2001, The Chronicle of Higher Education, A16-A17.

The outline for the class is:

1. Announcements
2. Questions
3. Reading
   • one second of reading, 1972, Gough, P. B. in Language by ear and by eye, J. F. Kavanagh and I. G. Mattingly (eds.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
   • reading span
   • eye-voice span
   • subvocalization and the Stroop test
4. the psychology of interrupted speech, comprehension, and production
   • Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis by David Silverman, 1998, Oxford University Press.
   • terminology:
     • turn constructional component/unit
     • transition relevance place
     • turn allocation component
   • Turn-taking rules
   • fragment #1

     A: Well if you know my argument why did you 
        bother to a:|sk.
     B:             |Because I'd like to defend my argument.
     

   • fragment #2

     K: I saw 'em last night |at uhm school.
     J:                      |They're a riot.
     

   • fragment #3

     1: The retiring chairman whose 
        methods still greatly      
                                                      *
                                    |influence the company was given an award.
     2: As a direct result of 
        their new inventions        
     

   • three components of a functional description of real-time segmentation:
     1. functional completeness
     2. clause marking
     3. clause length
   • two constraints? (J. P. Thorne)
     1. parsing device must not rely on looking up every word of an input sentence ("He will be furribund")
        • closed class words (words with fixed syntactic functions)
        • open class words (all the rest)
     2. at each stage, there must be some memory of prior decisions and some predictive process of what could possibly arrive next
5. Production
   • M. Garrett
     1. decide on a message
     2. decide on a syntactic outline
     3. select content words
     4. select affixes and function words
     5. produce the speech act
   • Willem Levelt (1989) model of speech production
   • (crude) Program to say "frog"
     1. take a breath
     2. lower lip to upper teeth
     3. tongue back
     4. relax vocal cords
     5. start expelling air from lungs
     6. force air stream through narrow constriction at front of oral cavity - /f/ (fricative voiceless labiodental)
     7. round lips
     8. begin vocal cord operations - /r/ (liquid palatal palatal)
     9. lower jaw
     10. part lips (tongue still back, /a/)
     11. raise tongue
     12. build up pressure
     13. release pressure by dropping tongue slightly - /g/ (voiced velar stop)
     14. relax vocal cords
     15. stop exhale
   • Brain Activity During Speaking: From Syntax to Phonology in 40 Milliseconds by van Turemont, Hagoort, & Brown, 24 April 1998, Science, 280:572-574.
   • graphs on elmo
6. dyslexia
   • Dyslexia: Cultural Diversity and Biological Unity by Paulesu, Demonet, Fazio, McCrory, Chanoine, Brunswick, Cappa, Cossu, Habib, Frith, & Frith, 16 March 2001, Science, 291:2165-2167.
   • cortical layout
   • language areas in the brain
   • normal v. dyslexic readers
   • Paulesu, et. al.'s findings
     1. rCBF PET scan of normal (control) readers
     2. rCBF PET scan of dyslexic readers
     3. rCBF PET scan: areas significantly more active in normal compared to dyslexic readers

Digressions/Miscellaneous

• A Roadmap for the Literature on Reading Acquisition and Reading Disability, an annotated bibliography by Susan Brady, Psychology Department, University of Rhode Island and Haskins Laboratories, for The Greenwood Institute and The Greenwood School, June, 2000.
• The Conceptual Metaphor Home Page

Overhead Notes

1.      Now is the time for all good students ...
        Xxx xx xxx xxxx xxx xxx xxxx xxxxxxxx ...
        Xxx xx xxe time fxx xxx xxxx xxxxxxxx ...
                 ^      ^
   

2. syntactic portion: genders are common (-e suffix) and neuter (no suffix)
   red bear (rode beer) v. red book (rood boek)

   phonological portion: /b/ v. /s/
   red shoe (rode schoen)

                           SYNTAX
                       common   neuter
                        right    left
   PHONOLOGICAL      +--------+--------+
       go        /b/ |        |        |
                     +--------+--------+
     no-go       /s/ |        |        |
                     +--------+--------+
   

Parting Thoughts

• Read Whitney, Chapter 10

Self-test Questions

• Define the principle of immediacy of interpretation. How does this principle relate to the debate between modular and interactive views of syntactic parsing? Does immediacy of interpretation also hold when the ongoing interpretation is figurative? Justify your answer with evidence.
• Describe the strongest evidence in favor of the idea that lexical access is autonomous. What evidence provides the strongest support for the autonomy of syntactic parsing? Can the data you have discussed be handled by ineractive approaches to lexical and syntactic processing?
• Discuss how figurative processing permeates language at the lexical, sentence, and passage levels.
• Draw a diagram that represents the general stages of processing the sentence, "My teach is a lighthouse to students." How does the information flow among the stages differ for modular and interactive views?
• Give an example of a speech error that you would regard as a mixed error. Trace through the mental processes that produced the utterance from the message level to articulation. Is your explanation based on a modular or an interactive view?
• Give examples of two different speech errors, each one reflecting the operation of a different level of the speech production system. Why would each error be produced, based on the general model of speech production outlined in the text?
• Outline the mental processes that allow you to have a conversation with someone else. Of the processes you mentioned, which are the most demanding of you working memory resources? Justify your conclusions about working memory demands.
• A key concept in perception of language is the iterative use of partial knowledge in organizing larger and larger speech segments, that percepts result from an interaction of previous knowledge with current knowledge or stimulation. Discuss this tpe of model in connection with the perception of speech. Be sure to incorporate examples that support your thesis.