LING157/257: Psycholinguistics and Linguistic Theory

Fall 2009

Matt Wagers, instructor

Social Sciences 2, #75
Tu/Th, 10-11:45

Course objectives

The goal of psycholinguistics, as a discipline, is to develop models of language cognition: how is language acquired? how is language comprehended? how is language produced? LING157 will introduce some of these foundational questions. We will examine some basic properties of mental processes and representations involved in language processing (primarily perception); consider how those properties constrain or interact with theories of linguistic knowledge; how linguistic processes can be deployed both over very small time-scales -- say, hundreds of milliseconds -- and how they can change over longer ones -- months to years.

Along the way it will be necessary to learn something about experimental design and techniques in cognitive psychology. To do that, we will undertake several psycholinguistic experiments on ourselves and our friends.

This course is not an exhaustive introduction to the field. It is focused on the relationship between language structure and language perception, and there are three core relationships we will examine: phonology and sound perception, word structure and word recognition, and real-time grammatical accuracy.

Syllabus

Schedule

Reading and assignments should be completed by the date they are listed by. Readings

themeweekdatetopicsreadings (req'd)readings (suppl.)assignment
Foundations 1 24 Sep Introduction, Scope of course, Syllabus distributed
-- -- --
2 29 Sep Real-time language structure
Intro. speech perception
Categorical perception experiment/Lab 1
Assignment | Lab files		 Jackendoff (2002)
Marr (1982)		 Chomsky (1965), Townsend & Bever (2001), ch. 2. Background survey
Abstraction and variability / speech perception and development 1 Oct Phonetics/phonological processes Jusczyk (2000), ch. 1, 3 Fowler (2003) Worksheet I
3 6 Oct Developing sound categories Werker (1995),
Stager & Werker (1997),
Dietrich et al. (2007)		 Jusczyk (2000) ch.4, Kuhl (2004) Lab 1: personal dataset due Wednesday by 5pm
8 Oct Developing sound categories, II
-- -- --
Generation and selection / Lexical representation and process 4 13 Oct Native-language phonology and perception
Lexical access experiment 		Dupoux et al. (1999) Näätänen et al. (1997), Dehaene-Lambertz et al. (2000), Kazanina, Phillips & Idsardi (2006), Kabak & Idsardi (2007) Lab 1 Write-up
15 Oct
Introduction to word recognition
Issues in spoken-word recognition 		Altmann (1997), ch. 6, Allopenna et al. (1998) McQueen (2007), Salverda et al. (2003)
Fiorentino & Poeppel (2007), Marslen-Wilson (2007), Solomyak & Marantz (in press)		 -
5 20 Oct Morphological structure
Longtin, Segui & Hallé (2003),
Hankamer (1989) 		Lab 2: Design worksheet
22 Oct Lab 2 workshop, analysis techniques      
Process, control & memory 6 27 Oct Morphology in word recognition, continued
   Frazier & Fodor (1978), Abney & Johnson (1991), Resnik (1992) Lab 2: Analysis worksheet
Notes from stats intro lecture
29 Oct Parsing models
Information sources and time-course
Wolf & Gibson (2003) McElree & Griffith (1995), Tanenhaus, Trueswell & Garnsey (1994), Crocker (1999) none
7 3 Nov Information sources and time-course
Grammatical fidelity, grammatical fallibility
Final project 		Lab 2 Write-up
Due 4 Nov, midnight
DMDX procedures
5 Nov Grammatical fidelity, grammatical fallibility Stowe (1986)
Sturt (2003)		 Traxler & Pickering (1996), Kazanina et al. (2007)
8 10 Nov Working memory and fidelity/fallibility
McElree et al. (2003) Van Dyke & Lewis (2003), Phillips, Wagers & Lau (2009)
Origins 12 Nov Final project workshop I (meet in Stevenson)
9 17 Nov Real-time architecture and the origin of grammatical constraints
 Kluender & Kutas (1993) Fodor (1978), Berwick & Weinberg (1984) --
Final project 19 Nov More on hypothesis testing -- -- --
10 24 Nov Workshop II
-- --
26 Nov
THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY 		-- -- --
11 1 Dec Development and the origin of the real-time architecture Trueswell & Gleitman (2007) -- --
3 Dec Wrap-up/spill-over/LING158 prospectus TBA -- --

Reading list (by week)

'*': Supplemental reading.
    Week 2
  1. Jackendoff, R., (2002). Foundations of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3 - 37.
  2. Marr, D., (1982). Vision. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. Excerpted, read pp. 69-74 & 80-81; more if you are interested.
  3. Jusczyk, P., (2000). The Discovery of Spoken Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ch. 1, 3, *4
  4. *Chomsky, N., (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1 - 15. I suggest everyone read this at some point this semester.
  5. *Fowler, C., (2003). Speech Production and Perception. In Handbook of Psychology, vol 4, Experimental Psychology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. pp. 237-266.
    Week 3
  1. Werker, J.F., (1995). Exploring developmental changes in cross-language speech production. In L. Gleitman and M. Liberman, eds., An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd ed., vol. 1, pp. 87-106.
  2. Stager, C.L., Werker, J.F., (1997). Infants listen for more phonetic detail in speech perception than in word-learning tasks. Nature, 388, 381-382.
  3. Dietrich, C., Swingley, D., Werker, J.F., (2007). Native language governs interpretation of salient speech sound differences at 18 months. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 16027-31.
  4. Dupoux, E., Hirose, Y., Kakehi, K., Pallier, C., & Mehler, J., (1999). Epenthetic vowels in Japanese: a perceptual illusion? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 1568-78.
  5. Kazanina, N., Phillips, C., Idsardi, W., (2006). The influence of meaning on the perception of speech sounds. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 103, 11381-6.
  6. *Kuhl, P.K., (2004). Early language acquisition: cracking the speech code. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5, 831-843.
  7. *Näätänen, R., et al. (1997). Language-specific phoneme representations revealed by electric and magnetic brain responses. Nature, 385, 432-434.
  8. *Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Dupoux, E., Gout, A., (2000). Electrophysiological correlates of phonological processing: a cross-linguistic study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12, 635-47.
  9. *Kabak, B., Idsardi, W.J., (2007). Structure or consonantal contact constraints? Perceptual distortions in the adaptation of english consonant clusters: syllable structure or consonantal contact constraints? Language and Speech, 50, 23-52.
    Week 4
  1. Altmann, G.T.M. (1999). The ascent of Babel. New York: Oxford UP. ch. 6
  2. Allopenna, P.D., Magnuson, J.S., Tanenhaus, M.K. (1998). Tracking the time course of spoken word recognition using eye movements: evidence for continuous mapping models. Journal of Memory and Language, 38, 419-439.
  3. *McQueen, J.M. (2007). Eight questions about spoken word recognition. In M.G. Gaskell, ed., The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics, Oxford: Oxford UP.
  4. *Salverda, A.P., Dahan, D., McQueen, J.M. (2003). The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension. Cognition, 90, 51-89.
    Week 5
  1. Longtin, C-M., Segui, J., & Hallé, P.A. (2003). Morphological priming without morphological relationship. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 313-334.
  2. Hankamer, J. (1989). Morphological parsing and the lexicon. In W. Marslen-Wilson, ed., Lexical representation and process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 392-408.
  3. *Fiorentino, R. & Poeppel, D. (2007). Compound words and structure in the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12, 953-1000.
  4. *Marslen-Wilson, W.D. (2007). Morphological processes in language comprehension. In M.G. Gaskell, ed., The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics, Oxford: Oxford UP.
  5. *Solomyak, O., & Marantz, A. (2009). Evidence for early morphological decomposition in visual word recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, in press, pp. 1-16.
    Week 6
  1. Wolf, F. & Gibson, E. (2003). Parsing: overview. In Nadel, L, ed. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, MacMillan.
  2. Frazier, L., & Fodor, J.D. (1978). The sausage machine: a new two-stage parsing model. Cognition, 6, 291-325.
  3. Trueswell, J.C., Tanenhaus, M.K., & Garnsey, S. (1994). Semantic influences on parsing: use of thematic role information in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 33: 285-318.
  4. *Abney, S.P. & Johnson, M. (1991). Memory requirements and local ambiguities of parsing strategies. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 20, 233-250.
  5. *Resnik, P. (1992). Left-Corner Parsing and Psychological Plausibility, Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING '92), Nantes, France.
  6. *MacDonald, M.C., Pearlmutter, N.J., and Seidenberg, M.S. (1994). The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 676-703.
  7. *McElree, B. & Griffith, T. (1995). Syntactic and thematic processing in sentence comprehension: evidence for a temporal dissociation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 21, 134-57.
  8. *Crocker, M. (1999). Mechanisms for Sentence Processing. In Garrod & Pickering, eds, Language Processing. London: Psychology Press.
    Week 7
  1. Stowe, L. (1986). Parsing WH-constructions: evidence for on-line gap location. Language and Cognitive Processes, 3, 227-245.
  2. Sturt, P. (2003). The time-course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 542-62.
  3. McElree, B., Foraker, S., & Dyer, L. (2003). Memory structures that subserve sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 67-91.
  4. *Kazanina, N., Lau, E.F., Lieberman, M., Yoshida, M., & Phillips, C. (2007). The effect of syntactic contraints on the processing of backwards anaphora. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 384-409.
  5. *Phillips, C., (2006). The real-time status of island phenomena. Language, 82, 795-823. See references therein for the other major island studies.
  6. *Phillips, C., Wagers, M.W., & Lau, E.F. (2009). Grammatical illusions and selective fallibility in real-time language comprehension. To appear, Language and Linguistics Compass.
  7. *Traxler, M.J., & Pickering, M.J. (1996). Plausibility and the processing of unbounded dependencies: an eye-tracking study. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 454-75.
  8. *Wagers, M.W., & Phillips, C. (2009). Multiple dependencies and the role of grammar in real-time comprehension. Journal of Linguistics, 45, 395-433.
  9. *Van Dyke, J.A. & Lewis, R.L. (2003). Distinguishing effects of structure and decay on attachment and repair: a cue-based parsing account of recovery from misanalyzed ambiguities. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 285-316.
    Week 8
  1. Kluender, R. & Kutas, M. (1993). Subjacency as a processing phenomenon. Language and cognitive processes, 8, 573-633.
  2. *Fodor, J.D. (1978). Parsing strategies and constraints on transformation. Linguistic Inquiry, 9, 427-73.
  3. *Berwick, R. & Weinberg, A. (1984). The grammatical basis of linguistic performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
    Week 9
  1. Trueswell, J.C. & Gleitman, L.R. (2007). Learning to parse and its implications for language acquistion. In Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics. p 635-55.
    Week 10
    No reading this week -- there'll be plenty to think about with your final project. But, browsing the supplemental readings from Week 7 is likely to help in that regard.
    Week 11
  1. Jackendoff (2002), pp 58-67.
  2. Hummel, J. (2001). Binding problem. In Wilson & Keil, eds., The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Available online at CogNet.
  3. Treisman, A. & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97-136. Read as much as you're interested/able in this article, but at a minimum try to cover: pp. 97-107.