George Washington University

TRED 256: LINGUISTIC APPLICATIONS

  
 
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   Language Processing: Humans & Computer
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Applications Presentation: Camille & Valery on Semantics | Handout

Syntax presentation Lesson Plan by Jon, Emily, Alex, and Julia

Student Presentation: Steve: Baldi video

Chapter 9 (363)

Pre-Discussion questions:
  1. What's the point of learning the material in this chapter?
  2. How does it apply to either language learning/teaching or what you might actually do after you finish your studies?
  3. Can you see any everyday applications of this material?

Psycholinguistics area of linguistics concerned with linguistic performance in speech or sign production & comprehension

    Nature of linguistic knowledge:

  • not a set of fixed phrases stored in memory
  • speech chain (brain-to-brain linking)
  • mechanisms allow us to break stream of sounds into linguistic units
Comprehension:

    Breakdowns reveal how the language processor works.

Speech Signal

    acoustic terms: describe sounds' physical aspects
    fundamental frequency
    intensity
    spectrograms (voice-prints)
why
Try to read the above spectrogram.
See more on reading spectrograms here
Once you learn how to read them you can try the Mystery Spectrogram!
   
Formants of vowels: characteristic patterns of vowels on spectrogram; these are the phonemes of American English

Speech Perception and Comprehension

Segmentation: how to listener perceives sounds as distinct units; the "segmentation problem"
Recognition of speech sounds produced by different speakers in various environments  the "invariance problem"

    Perceptual units:

  • phonemes
  • syllables
  • morphemes
  • words
  • phrases

Factors that affect perception/comprehension:

  • native language (perceptual bias)
  • context (situation or topic)
  • content of one's mental lexicon (lexical access)
  • ability to analyze syntactically (parse)
  • knowledge of lexical semantics
  • prosodic aspects of speech (intonation)
Note: webmining can be a way for computers to develop lexical semantics

Comprehension Models and Experimental Studies

Top-down vs. bottom-up processing
    Top-down: start with semantic and syntactic information and end with sensory input
    Bottom-up: move from acoustical signal to semantic interpretation

Lexical access and Word recognition
    Lexical decision experiments: response time is measured to find out how quickly words are recognized   
    Priming techniques: semantically related words can increase the rate of comprehension of other words
    Naming task: shows subjects read words faster than non-words

Jill's Worksheets: Vocabulary Log & Reciprocal Teaching
 
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