Chapter 11: Understanding Words - PDF

SOME !UESTIONS WE WILL CONSIDER T his chapter tells a story that begins with how we perceive and understand words; then considers how strings of words create meaningful sentences; and ends by considering...

SOME !UESTIONS WE WILL CONSIDER T his chapter tells a story that begins with how we perceive and understand words; then considers how strings of words create meaningful sentences; and ends by considering how we use language to communicate in text, stories, and conversation. How do we understand individual words, and how are Throughout this story, we will encounter the recurring themes of how readers and lis- words combined to create teners use inference and prediction to create meaning. This chapter therefore follows in sentences? (325) the footsteps of previous chapters that have discussed the role of inference and prediction How can we understand in cognition. For example, in Chapter 3, Perception, we described Helmholtz’s theory of sentences that have more unconscious inference, which proposed that to deal with the ambiguity of the visual stimu- than one meaning? (331) lus (see page 65), we unconsciously infer which of a number of possible alternatives is most How do we understand stories? (337) likely to be what is “out there” in the environment (page 70). What are the connections between language and music? (347) We have also seen how, as we scan a scene by making a series of eye movements, these eye movements are partially guided by our knowledge of where important objects are likely to be in the scene (page 105). And in Chapter 6, Long-Term Memory, we saw how memories for past experiences are used to predict what might be likely to occur in the future (page 177). You may wonder how inference and prediction are involved in language. You will see that some things you may think are simple, like understanding the words in a conversation, actually pose challenges that must be solved by bringing to bear knowledge from your past experience with language. And then there are those constructions called sentences, which are created by strings of words, one after the other. While you might think that understand- ing a sentence is just a matter of adding up the meanings of the words, you will see that the meanings of the words are just the beginning, because the order of the words also matters, some of the words may have multiple meanings, and two sentences that are identical can have different meanings. Just as every other type of cognition you’ve encountered so far has turned out to be more complicated than you may have thought it would be, the same thing holds for language. You routinely use inference and prediction to understand language, just as you are doing right now, as you are reading this, probably without even realizing it. What is Language? The following definition of language captures the idea that the ability to string sounds and words together opens the door to a world of communication: Language is a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences. But this definition doesn’t go far enough, because it conceivably could include some forms of animal communication. Cats “meow” when their food dish is empty; monkeys have a repertoire of “calls” that stand for things such as “danger” or “greeting”; bees perform a “waggle dance” at the hive that indicates the location of flowers. But as impressive as some animal communication is, it is much more rigid than human language. Animals use a limited number of sounds or gestures to communicate about a limited number of things that are important for survival. In contrast, humans use a wide variety of signals, which can be com- bined in countless ways. One of the properties of human language is, therefore, creativity. The Creativity of Human Language Human language provides a way of arranging a sequence of signals—sounds for spoken lan- guage, letters and written words for written language, and physical signs for sign language— 322 to transmit, from one person to another, things ranging from the simple and commonplace Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203  What is Language? 323 (“My car is over there”) to messages that have perhaps never been previously written or uttered in the entire history of the world (“My trip with Zelda, my cousin from California who lost her job in February, was on Groundhog Day”). Language makes it possible to create new and unique sentences because it has a structure that is both hierarchical and governed by rules. The hierarchical nature of language means that it consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units. For example, words can be combined to create phrases, which in turn can create sentences, which themselves can become components of a story. The rule-based nature of language means that these components can be arranged in certain ways (“What is my cat saying?” is permissible in English), but not in other ways (“Cat my saying is what?” is not). These two properties—a hierarchical structure and rules—endow humans with the ability to go far beyond the fixed calls and signs of animals to communicate whatever we want to express. The Universal Need to Communicate with Language Although people do “talk” to themselves, as when Hamlet wondered, “To be or not to be,” or when you daydream in class, language is primarily used for communication, whether it be conversing with another person or reading what someone has written. This need to communicate using language has been called “universal” because it occurs wherever there are people. For example, consider the following: People’s need to communicate is so powerful that when deaf children find themselves in an environment where nobody speaks or uses sign language, they invent a sign language themselves (Goldin-Meadow, 1982). All humans with normal capacities develop a language and learn to follow its complex rules, even though they are usually not aware of these rules. Although many people find the study of grammar to be very difficult, they have no trouble using language. Language is universal across cultures. There are more than 5,000 different languages, and there isn’t a single culture without language. When European explorers first set foot in New Guinea in the 1500s, the people they discovered, who had been isolated from the rest of the world for eons, had developed more than 750 languages, many of them quite different from one another. Language development is similar across cultures. No matter what the culture or the particular language, children generally begin babbling at about 7 months, a few meaningful words appear by their first birthday, and the first multiword utterances occur at about age 2 (Levelt, 2001). Even though a large number of languages are very different from one another, we can describe them as being “unique but the same.” They are unique in that they use different words and sounds, and they may use different rules for combining these words (although many languages use similar rules). They are the same in that all languages have words that serve the functions of nouns and verbs, and all languages include a system to make things negative, to ask questions, and to refer to the past and present. Studying Language Language has fascinated thinkers for thousands of years, dating back to the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (350–450 BCE), and before. The modern sci- entific study of language traces its beginnings to the work of Paul Broca (1861) and Carl Wernicke (1874). Broca’s study of patients with brain damage led to the proposal that an area in the frontal lobe (Broca’s area) is responsible for the production of language. Wernicke Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 324 CHAPTER 11 Language proposed that an area in the temporal lobe (Wernicke’s area) is responsible for comprehen- sion. We described Broca’s and Wernicke’s observations in Chapter 2 (see page 39), and also noted that modern research has shown that the situation is quite a bit more complicated than just two language areas in the brain (see page 44). In this chapter, we will focus not on the connection between language and the brain, but on behavioral research on the cognitive mechanisms of language. We take up the story of behavioral research on language in the 1950s when behaviorism was still the dominant approach in psychology (see page 10). In 1957, B. F. Skinner, the main proponent of be- haviorism, published a book called Verbal Behavior, in which he proposed that language is learned through reinforcement. According to this idea, just as children learn appropriate behavior by being rewarded for “good” behavior and punished for “bad” behavior, chil- dren learn language by being rewarded for using correct language and punished (or not rewarded) for using incorrect language. In the same year, linguist Noam Chomsky (1957) published a book titled Syntactic Structures, in which he proposed that human language is coded in the genes. According to this idea, just as humans are genetically programmed to walk, they are also programmed to ac- quire and use language. Chomsky concluded that despite the wide variations that exist across languages, the underlying basis of all language is similar. Most important for our purposes, Chomsky saw studying language as a way to study the properties of the mind and therefore disagreed with the behaviorist idea that the mind is not a valid topic of study for psychology. Chomsky’s disagreement with behaviorism led him to publish a scathing review of Skin- ner’s Verbal Behavior in 1959. In his review, he presented arguments against the behaviorist idea that language can be explained in terms of reinforcements and without reference to the mind. One of Chomsky’s most persuasive arguments was that as children learn language, they produce sentences that they have never heard and that have never been reinforced. (A classic example of a sentence that has been created by many children and that is unlikely to have been taught or reinforced by parents is “I hate you, Mommy.”) Chomsky’s criticism of behaviorism was an important event in the cognitive revolution and began changing the focus of the young discipline of psycholinguistics, the field concerned with the psychological study of language. The goal of psycholinguistics is to discover the psychological processes by which hu- mans acquire and process language (Clark & Van der Wege, 2002; Gleason & Ratner, 1998; Miller, 1965). The four major concerns of psycholinguistics are as follows: 1. Comprehension. How do people understand spoken and written language? This includes how people process language sounds; how they understand words, sen- tences, and stories expressed in writing, speech, or sign language; and how people have conversations with one another. 2. Representation. How is language represented in the mind? This includes how peo- ple group words together into phrases to create meaningful sentences and how they make connections between different parts of a story. 3. Speech production. How do people produce language? This includes the physical processes of speech production and the mental processes that occur as a person creates speech. 4. Acquisition. How do people learn language? This includes not only how children learn language but also how people learn additional languages, either as children or later in life. Because of the vast scope of psycholinguistics, we are going to restrict our attention to the first two of these concerns, describing research on comprehension and representation, which together explain how we understand language. The plan is to start with words, then look at how words are combined to create sentences, then how sentences create “stories” that we read, hear, or create ourselves as we have conversations with other people. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203  Understanding Words : A Few Complications 325 Understanding Words: A Few Complications We begin our discussion of words by defining a few terms. Our lexicon is all of the words we know, which has also been called our “mental dictionary.” Semantics is the meaning of language. This is important for words, because each word has one or more meanings. The meaning of words is called lexical semantics. Our goal in this section is to consider how we determine the meanings of words. You might think that determining a word’s meaning is simple: We just look it up in our lexicon. But determining word meaning is more compli- cated than a single “look up.” We will now consider a number of factors that pose challenges to perceiving and understanding words. Not All Words Are Created Equal: Differences in Frequency Some words occur more frequently than others in a particular language. For example, in English, home occurs 547 times per million words, and hike occurs only 4 times per million words. The frequency with which a word appears in a language is called word frequency, and the word frequency effect refers to the fact that we respond more rapidly to high-fre- quency words like home than to low-frequency words like hike. The reason this is important is because a word’s frequency influences how we process the word. One way to illustrate processing differences between high- and low-frequency words is to use a lexical decision task in which the task is to decide as quickly as possible whether strings of letters are words or nonwords. Try this for the following four words: reverie, cratily, history, garvola. Note that there were two real words, reverie, which is a low-frequency word, and history, which is a high-frequency word. Research using the lexical decision task has demonstrated slower responding to low-frequency words (Carrol, 2004; also see Chapter 9, page 279 for a description of another way the lexical decision task has been used). The slower response for low-frequency words has also been demonstrated by measuring people’s eye movements while reading. Keith Rayner and Susan Duffy (1986) measured participants’ eye movements and the durations of the fixations that Low frequency occur as the eye pauses at a particular place (see Chapter 4, page 103) while they read sentences that contained either a high-frequency or a low-frequency target High frequency word, where frequency refers to how often a word occurs in normal language us- 400 age. The average frequencies were 5.1 times per million for the low-frequency words and 122.3 times per million for the high-frequency words. For example, the low- Fixation duration (msec) 300 frequency target word in the sentence “The slow waltz captured their attention” is waltz, and replacing waltz with the high-frequency word music creates the sentence “The slow music captured their attention.” The duration of the first fixation on the 200 words, shown in Figure 11.1a, was 37 msec longer for low-frequency words com- pared to high-frequency words. (Sometimes a word might be fixated more than once, as when the person reads a word and then looks back at it in response to what the per- 100 son has read later in the sentence.) Figure 11.1b shows that the total gaze duration— the sum of all fixations made on a word, was 87 msec longer for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words. One reason for these longer fixations on low- 0 (a) First fixation (b) Gaze frequency words could be that the readers needed more time to access the meaning of the low-frequency words. The word frequency effect, therefore, demonstrates how Figure 11.1 Fixation durations on low- our past experience with words influences our ability to access their meaning. frequency and high-frequency words in sentences measured by Rayner and Duffy The Pronunciation of Words Is Variable (1986). (a) First fixation durations; (b) Total gaze duration. In both cases, fixation times Another problem that makes understanding words challenging is that not every- are longer for low-frequency words. one pronounces words in the same way. People talk with different accents and at (Source: Based on data from Rayner and Duffy, 1986, different speeds, and, most important, people often take a relaxed approach to Table 2, p. 195) Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 326 CHAPTER 11 Language pronouncing words when they are speaking naturally. For example, if you were talking to a friend, how would you say “Did you go to class today?” Would you say “Did you” or “Di- joo”? You have your own ways of producing various words and phonemes, and other people have theirs. For example, analysis of how people actually speak has determined that there are 50 different ways to pronounce the word the (Waldrop, 1988). So how do we deal with this? One way is to use the context within which the word appears. The fact that context helps is illustrated by what happens when you hear a word taken out of context. Irwin Pollack and J. M. Pickett (1964) showed that words are more difficult to understand when taken out of context and presented alone, by recording the conversations of participants who sat in a room waiting for the experiment to begin. When the participants were then presented with recordings of single words taken out of their own conversations, they could identify only half the words, even though they were listening to their own voices! The fact that the people in this experiment were able to identify words as they were talking to each other, but couldn’t identify the same words when the words were isolated, illustrates that their ability to perceive words in conversations is aided by the con- text provided by the words and sentences that make up the conversation. There Are No Silences Between Words in Normal Conversation The fact that the sounds of speech are easier to understand when we hear them spoken in a sentence is particularly amazing when we consider that unlike the words you are now reading that are separated by spaces, words spoken in a sentence are usually not separated by silence. This is not what we might expect, because when we listen to someone speak we usually hear the individual words, and sometimes it may seem as if there are silences that separate one word from another. However, remember our discussion in Chapter 3 (page 68) in which we noted that a record of the physical energy produced by conversational speech reveals that there are often no physical breaks between words in the speech signal or that breaks can occur in the middle of words (see Figure 3.12). In Chapter 3 we described an experiment by Jennifer Saffran and coworkers (2008), which showed that infants are sensitive to statistical regularities in the speech signal—the way that different sounds follow one another in a particular language and how knowing these regularities helps infants achieve speech segmentation—the perception of individual words even though there are often no pauses between words. (see page 68). We use the statistical properties of language all the time without realizing it. For example, we have learned that certain sounds are more likely to follow one another within a word, and some sounds are more likely to follow each other in different words. Consider the words pretty baby. In English, it is likely that pre and ty will follow each other in the same word (pre-ty) and that ty and ba will be separated in two different words (pretty baby). Another thing that aids speech segmentation is our knowledge of the meanings of words. In Chapter 3 we pointed out that when we listen to an unfamiliar foreign language, it is often difficult to distinguish one word from the next, but if we know a language, individ- ual words stand out (see page 68). This observation illustrates that knowing the meanings of words helps us perceive them. Perhaps you have had the experience of hearing individual words that you happen to know in a foreign language seem to “pop out” from what appears to be an otherwise continuous stream of speech. Another example of how meaning is responsible for organizing sounds into words is provided by these two sentences: Jamie’s mother said, “Be a big girl and eat your vegetables.” The thing Big Earl loved most in the world was his car. “Big girl” and “Big Earl” are both pronounced the same way, so hearing them differently depends on the overall meaning of the sentence in which these words appear. This example Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203  Understanding Ambiguous Words 327 is similar to the familiar “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream” that many people learn as children. The sound stimuli for “I scream” and “ice cream” are identical, so the different organizations must be achieved by the meaning of the sentence in which these words appear. So our ability to hear and understand spoken words is affected by (1) how frequently we have encountered a word in the past; (2) the context in which the words appear; (3) our knowledge of statistical regularities of our language; and (4) our knowledge of word mean- ings. There’s an important message here—all of these things involve knowledge achieved by learning/experience with language. Sound familiar? Yes, this continues the theme of the im- portance of knowledge that occurs throughout this chapter as we consider how we under- stand sentences, stories, and conversations. But we aren’t through with words yet, because just to make things more interesting, many words have multiple meanings. Understanding Ambiguous Words Words can often have more than one meaning, a situation called lexical ambiguity. For example, the word bug can refer to an insect, a hidden listening device, or to annoying some- one, among other things. When ambiguous words appear in a sentence, we usually use the context of the sentence to determine which definition applies. For example, if Susan says, “My mother is bugging me,” we can be pretty sure that bugging refers to the fact that Susan’s mother is annoying her, as opposed to sprinkling insects on her or installing a hidden lis- tening device in her room (although we might need further context to totally rule out this last possibility). Accessing Multiple Meanings The examples for bug indicate that context often clears up ambiguity so rapidly that we are not aware of its existence. But research has shown that something interesting happens in the mind right after a word is heard. Michael Tanenhaus and coworkers (1979) showed that people briefly access multiple meanings of ambiguous words before the effect of context takes over. They did this by presenting participants with a tape recording of short sentences such as She held the rose, in which the target word rose is a noun referring to a flower, or They all rose, in which rose is a verb referring to people standing up. Tanenhaus and coworkers wanted to determine what meanings of rose occurred in a person’s mind for each of these sentences. To do this, they used a procedure called lexical priming. METHOD Lexical Priming Remember from Chapter 6 (page 182) that priming occurs when seeing a stimulus makes it easier to respond to that stimulus when it is presented again. This is called repetition priming, because priming occurs when the same word is repeated. The basic principle behind priming is that the first presentation of a stimulus activates a representation of the stimulus, and a person can respond more rapidly if this activation is still present when the stimulus is presented again. Lexical priming is priming that involves the meaning of words. Lexical priming occurs when a word is followed by another word with a similar meaning. For example, presenting the word rose and then the word flower can cause a person to respond faster to the word flower because the meanings of rose and flower are related. This priming effect does not, however, occur if the word cloud is presented before flower because their meanings are not related. The presence of a lexical priming effect therefore indi- cates whether two words, like rose and flower, have similar meanings in a person’s mind. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 328 CHAPTER 11 Language Tanenhaus and coworkers measured lexical priming using Condition 1: She held a rose (noun) Probe: Flower (noun) two conditions: (1) The noun-noun condition: a word is pre- Condition 2: They all rose (verb) Probe: Flower (noun) sented as a noun followed by a noun probe stimulus; and (2) 40 The verb-noun condition: a word is presented as a verb fol- lowed by a noun probe stimulus. For example, in Condition 1, 30 Priming effect (msec) participants would hear a sentence like She held a rose, in which rose is a noun (a type of flower), followed immediately by the 20 probe word flower. Their task was to read the probe word as 10 quickly as possible. The time that elapsed between the end of the sentence and when the participant began saying the word is 0 the reaction time. To determine if presenting the word rose caused faster respond- –10 ing to flower, a control condition was run in which a sentence like Condition 1 Condition 2 Condition 1 Condition 2 She held a post was followed by the same probe word, flower. Because (a) 0 delay (b) 200 msec delay the meaning of post is not related to the meaning of flower, priming would not be expected, and this is what happened. As shown in Figure 11.2 (a) Priming effect (decrease in response time the left bar in Figure 11.2a, the word rose, used as a flower, resulted compared to the control condition) at zero delay between in a 37 msec faster response to the word flower than in the control word and probe. Condition 1: Noun (Example: She held a rose) condition. This is what we would expect, because rose, the flower, is followed by noun probe (flower). Condition 2: Verb (They all rose) followed by noun probe (flower). (b) Priming effect for related to the meaning of the word flower. the same conditions at 200 msec delay. Tanenhaus’s results become more significant when we con- (Source: Based on data from Tanenhaus et al., 1979). sider Condition 2, when the sentence was They all rose, in which rose is a verb (people getting up) and the probe word was still flower. The control for this sentence was They all touched. The result, shown in the right bar in Figure 11.3a, shows that priming occurred in this condition as well. Even though rose was presented as a verb, it still caused a faster response to flower! What this means is that the “flower” meaning of rose is activated immediately after hear- ing rose, whether it is used as a noun or a verb. Tanenhaus also showed that the verb meaning of rose is activated whether it is used as a noun or a verb, and concluded from these results that all of an ambiguous word’s meanings are activated immediately after the word is heard. To make things even more interesting, when Tanenhaus ran the same experiment but added a delay of 200 msec between the end of the sentences and the probe word, the result changed. As shown in Figure 11.2b, priming still occurs for Condition 1—rose the noun primes flower—but no longer occurs for Condition 2—rose the verb does not prime flower. What this means is that by 200 msec after hearing the word rose as a verb, the flower mean- ing of rose is gone. Thus, the context provided by a sentence helps determine the meaning of a word, but context exerts its influence after a slight delay during which other meanings of a word are briefly accessed (also see Swinney, 1979, for a similar result and Lucas, 1999, for more on how context affects the meaning of words.) Frequency Influences Which Meanings Are Activated While context helps determine the appropriate meaning of words in a sentence, there’s an- other factor at work: how frequently different meanings occur, with meanings that occur more frequently being more likely. As Matthew Traxler (2012) puts it, “Many words have multiple meanings, but these meanings are not all created equal.” For example, consider the word tin. The most frequent meaning of tin is a type of metal, while a less-frequent meaning is a small metal container. The relative frequency of the meanings of ambiguous words is described in terms of meaning dominance. Words such as tin, in which one meaning (a type of metal) occurs more often than the other (a small metal container), is an example of biased dominance. Words such as cast, in which one meaning (members of a play) and the other meaning (plaster cast) are equally likely, is an example of balanced dominance. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203  Understanding Ambiguous Words 329 Figure 11.3 Accessing the Word with balanced dominance: CAST (play); CAST (plaster) meaning of ambiguous words Word with biased dominance: TIN (metal); tin (food container) while reading a sentence is determined by the word’s No prior context: Speed determined by dominance dominance and the context CAST created by the sentence. If TIN CAST there is no prior context: (a) competition between equally SLOW FAST likely meanings of a word with The cast worked.. The tin was.... balanced dominance results in slow access; (b) activation of only the most frequent meaning of a word with biased dominance results in fast access. If there is context before a word with biased dominance: (a) CAST (play) and CAST (plaster) (b) TIN (metal) is dominant (c) activation of both the less are equally dominant frequent and most frequent meanings results in slow access; Prior context: Speed determined by dominance and context (d) activation of only the most frequent meaning results in fast tin TIN TIN access. See text for examples....beans in a tin SLOW...mountain to FAST look for tin (c) tin (food container) is not dominant; (d) TIN (metal) is dominant TIN (metal) is dominant This difference between biased and balanced dominance influences the way people access the meanings of words as they read them. This has been demonstrated in experiments in which researchers measure eye movements as participants read sentences and note the fixation time for an ambiguous word and also for a control word with just one meaning that replaces the ambiguous word in the sentence. Consider the following sentence, in which the ambiguous word cast has balanced dominance. The cast worked into the night. (control word: cook) As a person reads the word cast, both meanings of cast are activated, because cast (member of a play) and cast (plaster cast) are equally likely. Because the two meanings compete for activation, the person looks longer at cast than at the control word cook, which has only one meaning as a noun. Eventually, when the reader reaches the end of the sentence, the meaning becomes clear (Duffy et al., 1988; Rayner & Frazier, 1989; Traxler, 2012) (Figure 11.3a). But consider the following, with the ambiguous word tin: The tin was bright and shiny. (control word: gold) In this case, people read the biased ambiguous word tin just as quickly as the control word, because only the dominant meaning of tin is activated, and the meaning of tin as a metal is accessed quickly (Figure 11.3b). Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203 330 CHAPTER 11 Language But meaning frequency isn’t the only factor that determines the accessibility of the meaning of a word. Context can play a role as well. Consider, for example, the following sentence, in which the context added before the ambiguous word tin indicates the less-fre- quent meaning of tin: The miners went to the store and saw that they had beans in a tin. (control word: cup) In this case, when the person reaches the word tin, the less frequent meaning is activated at increased strength because of the prior context, and the more frequent meaning of tin is activated as well. Thus, in this example, as with the first sentence that contained the word cast, two meanings are activated, so the person looks longer at tin (Figure 11.3c). Finally, consider the sentence below, in which the context indicates the more frequent meaning of tin: The miners went under the mountain to look for tin. (control word: gold) In this example, only the dominant meaning of tin is activated, so tin is read rapidly (Figure 11.3d). We’ve seen in this chapter that the process of accessing the meaning of a word is com- plicated and is influenced by multiple factors. First, the frequency of a word determines how long it takes to process its meaning. Second, if a word has more than one meaning, the context of the sentence influences which meaning we access. Finally, our ability to access the correct meaning of a word depends on both the word’s frequency and, for words with more than one meaning, a combination of meaning dominance and context. So sim- ply identifying, recognizing, and knowing the meaning of individual words is a complex and impressive feat. However, except in rare situations in which words operate alone—as in exclamations such as Stop! or Wait!—words are used with other words to form sen- tences, and, as we will see next, sentences add another level of complexity to understand- ing language. T E ST YOUR SELF 11.1 1. What is the hierarchical nature of language? The rule-based nature of language? 2. Why has the need to communicate been called universal? 3. What events are associated with the beginning of the modern study of language in the 1950s? 4. What is psycholinguistics? What are its concerns, and what part of psycholinguistics does this chapter focus on? 5. What is semantics? The lexicon? 6. How does word frequency affect our processing of words? Describe the eye movement experiment that illustrates an effect of word frequency. 7. What is the evidence that context helps people deal with the variability of word pronunciation? 8. What is speech segmentation and why is it a problem? What are some of the factors that help us achieve speech segmentation? 9. What is lexical ambiguity? Describe the experiment that used lexical priming to show that (a) all of the multiple meanings of a word are accessed immediately after the word is heard; and (b) context determines the appropriate meaning of an ambiguous word within about 200 msec. 10. What is meaning dominance? Biased dominance? Balanced dominance? 11. How do frequency and context combine to determine the correct meaning of ambiguous words? Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-200-203