Language Processing: Humans & Computer

Psycholinguistics:

* The area of linguistics that is concerned with linguistic performance–how we use our linguistic competence–in speech (or sign) production and comprehension.

The Speech Chain:
Brain-to-Brain Linking

* A spoken utterace starts as a message in the speaker’s brain/mind.
* The message is put into linguistic form and interpreted as articulation commands.
* It emerges as an acoustic signal.
* The signal is processed by the listener’s ear and sent to the brain/mind, where it is interpreted.
Comprehension

* One goal of psycholinguistics is to describe the processes people normally use in speaking and understanding language.
* Breakdowns in performance such as “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomena, speech errors, and failure to comprehend tricky sentences tell us a lot about how language is processed.

Can you think of any of your own?

* Examples of when some word was on the tip-of-your-tongue, but you couldn’t think of it

* Speech errors (Hung go)

* Failure to comprehend tricky sentences

* http://www.zippyvideos.com/5589295543497276/time_out-1/original

Speech Sounds: Understanding Begins with Hearing

* Sound is produced whenever there is a disturbance in the position of air molecules.
* Acoustic phonetics is concerned only with speech sounds, all of which can be heard by the normal human ear.

Frequency, Pitch & Volume

* The speed of the variations of air pressure determines the fundamental frequency of sounds.
* This is perceived by the hearer as pitch.
* The magnitude, or intensity, of the variations determines the loudness of the sound.

Speech Perception

* The speech signal can be broken into strings of:
* Phonemes
* Syllables
* Morphemes
* Words
* Phrases

Context & Lexical Access

* Night rate vs. nitrate depends on context
* Meaning of words depends on lexical access or word recognition

Example: A sniggle blick is procking a slar.

* If you don’t recognize the words, you conclude that the sentence is nonsense.

Lexical Semantics

* Processing speech to get at the meaning of what is said requires syntactic analysis as well as knowledge of lexical semantics.
* Stress and intonation provide some clues to syntactic structure. Example: He lives in the white house. He lives in the White House.
* Loudness, pitch, and duration of syllables provide information about meaning.

Timing & Rhythm

* I vant to sock your blut.
* Ivan tsuckyour blut.
* Ted Koppel gave an address.
* Ted Koppel gave Ann a dress.
* Can you think of two sentences that include the same letters or sounds, but differ in timing, rhythm, and meaning?

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Tags: Lexicon, Linguistic competence, Linguistics, Semantics, Speech