Mental LexiconBody of knowledge we hold in our minds about words Includes pronunciation, spelling, meaning syntactic roles

Recognition of words—whether listening or reading

Very Rapid

For example, when listening, recognition is completed within about 275 msec

even though the average word takes about 370 msec to say

How is this accomplished???One model: Morton’s Direct Access Model

Morton’s Direct Access Model•Feature of words activate detectors for possible units (logogens) until one dominates•Like

Treisman's Attenuation Model of Selective Attention or The Bruce-Young Model orThe Embedded Processes Model

-- It is based on the concept of thresholds•The logogen builds up inputs until its individual threshold level is reached; when it fires, the word is recognized•Lower thresholds relate to high frequency (Foss, 1969; Rayner & Duffy, 1986) recent activation context– semantic priming (Zola, 1984; Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971)

Lexical Decision Task: Is it a word?

Vote Vate

LexicalizationThe process by which the thought that underlies a word is turned into the sound of the word

There are 2 stages:1) A concept activates a lemma, an abstract representation that includes meaning and syntactic information

2) The lexeme is accessed—the phonological form of the word

Tip of the Tongue Phenomenon = lemma without lexeme

Studying Sentence Comprehension

An analysis of parsing by looking at structural ambiguities

Lexical ambiguity example: “They threw stones at the bank.”Structural ambiguity example: The professor gave a talk on Mars.”

Garden Path SentencesPeople have a strong tendency to construe (parse) the

early portion in a way that the later portion shows to be incorrect

e.g., “I told the woman serving food was too hard for her.”

Immediacy Principle: Make decision about syntactic role of each word as we hear/read them

SENTENCE PRODUCTIONGarrett’s Model

Message Level

Functional Level

Positional Level

Phonetic Level

Articulation Level

Message Level

Basic idea is formulated –

NOT in verbal form

Functional Level

Semantic representations and thematic roles for content words are chosen

e.g., agents, actions, objects

Positional Level

Syntactic form of the sentence is specified and

Phonological forms for function words and bound morphemes are selected

Phonetic Level

Phonological forms (lexemes) of content words are specified andInserted into the syntactic form already generated

Articulation Level

Commands are created and sent to the vocal apparatus to speak

Using Garrett’s Model to explain

•Slips of the tongue (including “Freudian” slips)

•Pauses

•Clinical CasesJaneESTPaulKeith

Butterworth (1975) had speakers give an unplanned monologueHe found fluent and hesitant phases with cycles 10-40 sec, M = 18 sec

Pattern: Plan-execute, plan-execute, etc.

What Butterworth found about pauses during speech:

• Idea boundaries tended to fall at the end of a fluent phase, beginning of a hesitant phase• words in the hesitant phase were not spoken more slowly; rather, the amount of time spent NOT talking increased• pauses (>250 msec) took up 35-67% of the time (in interviews 4-54%)• in general, about 40-50% of the total “speaking time” was soundless

• If pauses are reduced, the repetition of words & phrases doubled• For pauses that occur when looking at the listener, more false starts & repetitions

Sample Monologue with pauses, hesitations, etc. illustrating the

Plan-execute cycle