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Ling 315

Assignment 1

Spring 2024

Due:  Monday January 29, 11:59pm

Total points:  10 = 5% of the inal mark.

Please provide written answers (in full sentences) to the questions posed in this exercise (the parts that require an answer are bolded). You are encouraged to discuss the assignment with your peers, but each student must write their own assignment in their own words.  Please provide the names of anyone you worked with closely so similarities can be interpreted. You must submit your work as a .pdf ile via Canvas.

On your submission, please include:

. Your name

. Your student ID number

.  The members of your working group (if applicable).

1    Why are we doing this assignment?

This assignment is meant to develop your skills and thinking.  In this work you will be asked to:

.  Review important concepts from recent class meetings and readings.

.  Apply what you know to a new situation.

.  Practice thinking through theory, hypothesis and predictions in psycholinguistics.

.  Communicate your ideas in scientiic writing style.

2 Efects of phonological priming

In our lecture material on sentence formulation, we learned that the accessibility (from the mental lexicon) of a word can have an inluence on sentence formulation (see Konopka and  Brown-Schmidt, 2014).  Words that are more accessible tend to be produced irst and are associated with syntactic positions like the grammatical subject.

Further, in the lecture material on word production (Griin and Ferreira, 2006, p.  25), we learned that in picture naming tasks, presenting a word that is phonologically related to the target picture name at a certain time course can facilitate picture naming.  In other words, the time to  name the picture is shorter.  But the  literature

Figure 1:  Example illustration (by Mono via iStockphoto.com).  Phonologically related primes for this image could be boil (boy) or beet (bee).

on phonological priming efects is complex, and sometimes, having a phonologically related prime can have the opposite efect and actually delay responses (Hamburger and Slowiaczek, 1996).  When a delay is found,  it is interpreted as interference or inhibition due to the presence of a phonologically similar word in verbal short-term memory.  We  can think of this as a one word  ‘blocking’ a related one (e.g., you see the word  beet which then makes it more diicult to access the word beach).

Imagine that you are a researcher interested in the efect of lexical accessibility on sentence formulation.  In particular, you are interested in whether having a phonological prime word related to a word in a target sentence for production makes that word likely be produced earlier (in other words, the prime increases accessibility of the target word) or later (in other words the prime word decreases accessibility of the target due to interference/inhibition) in the sentence. This assignment will help you to design your experiment and generate ideas for potential results.

3 Design and predictions

You decide to conduct a  picture description task with  priming to further  investigate the  relationship  between phonological priming and sentence production. The experiment will use illustrations of events (e.g., Fig.  1) that can  be described  using a transitive verb, either  in an active form  (The  bee stung the boy) or a  passive form (The boy was stung by the bee).  For each picture, two phonologically related primes were used and compared to unrelated primes. The primes were embedded in a list of words that preceded each picture.  Participants were instructed that they would see words presented on the computer screen, and for each word they should respond as to whether they have seen this word before in the experiment (“yes”) or not (“no”).  They were instructed that intermittently they would see a picture, and that they should describe this picture using a single sentence without pronouns (e.g., he, it).  They were not informed of any relation between the words and pictures, but in

the order of the experiment the prime word was always presented immediately before the target picture.

Valid participant responses could therefore fall into several categories. as shown in the table below:

Prime Active response Passive response

boil (related to boy) The bee stung the boy The boy was stung by the bee

beet (related to bee) The bee stung the boy The boy was stung by the bee

fold (unrelated) The bee stung the boy The boy was stung by the bee

1.  Phonologically related primes increase the accessibility of their related word.

2.  Phonologically related primes decrease the accessibility of their related word.

3.  Phonologically related primes have no efect on the accessibility of their related word.

A For  each  of these  hypotheses, what  pattern of results would  be expected? How  frequently  would you expect each response type from the table above?   For part A, assume that active and passive productions  are  equally  likely.    Write a few sentences for each hypothesis and supplement with illustrative tables or graphs if desired. (3 points)

B We  know from  many studies that actives are  more likely to be produced in general than passives, because they are the more ‘natural’ sentence form.  Would this bias afect the patterns you developed in part A? Give an answer for Hypotheses 1 and 2. (1 points)

4 Potential results

Imagine that you tabulate your results and ind the pattern shown in Figure 2.

A  Which hypothesis from section 3 is best supported by these hypothetical data?  Explain your answer in a short paragraph.  (2 points)

B  From these results, is the inding that actives are more ‘natural’ than passives supported?  Explain your answer. (1 point)

Figure 2:  Potential experimental results.

5 Conclusion

Write a concluding paragraph summarizing the results, and what the results would mean for our knowl- edge of how phonologically related words inluence lexical accessibility, and in turn sentence formulation.

(3 points)

References

Griin, Z. and Ferreira, V. S. (2006). Properties of spoken language production. In Handbook of Psycholinguistics: 2nd edition. Elsevier Science & Technology.

Hamburger, M. and Slowiaczek, L. M. (1996).  Phonological priming relects lexical competition.  Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 3(4):520–525.

Konopka,  A.  E.  and  Brown-Schmidt,  S.  (2014).    Message  encoding.    In  The  Oxford  Handbook  of Language Production. Oxford University Press.