Psychology Paper: Cognitive Science - Comprehension of Language PDF

____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Subject Psychology Paper No and Title Paper no. 1: Cognitive Science Module No and Title Module no.30: Comprehension of Language...

____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Subject Psychology Paper No and Title Paper no. 1: Cognitive Science Module No and Title Module no.30: Comprehension of Language Module Tag PSY_P1_M30 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Learning Outcomes 2. Introduction 3. Word Recognition 4. Sentence Comprehension 5. Discourse Comprehension 6. Reading speed and Comprehension 7. Summary PSYCHOLOGY Paper no. 1: Cognitive Science Module no.30: Comprehension of Language ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. Learning Outcomes After studying this module, you shall be able to: 1. Understand how people recognise words 2. State what entails sentence comprehension 3. Describe discourse comprehension 4. Comment on reading speed and comprehension 5. Identify everyday implications of comprehension of language 2. Introduction In the previous module you read how language is acquired and produced. It also acquainted you to the contributions of different perspectives on language acquisition. The module also highlighted how neural system supports language comprehension and production. By now it may have struck you why are cognitive psychologists interested in words and reading? In the present module, building on the foundation laid by the previous modules, we will try to seek answers to what is language comprehension in depth. We will also read about word recognition, sentence and discourse comprehension and finally reading speed. This will probably help in evoking in us an appreciation for the aforementioned from a cognitive science lens. Let us read about each one of these in the following sections. The question that comes instantly to our mind when we think about language comprehension is ‘what do we need in the first place to comprehend a sentence’. And almost naturally comes the response to this, and that is, ‘recognition of words’. It is true that to comprehend a sentence we need to first recognise the words that constitute that sentence, but this presents only a partial picture. One must also recognise the syntactic relations among the words to build a mental structure of sentence’s meaning. In addition to that we must also grasp the relation between each subsequent sentence and its meaning (individual meaning as well as meaning in relation to the previous sentence). These structures that are built by the reader or the listener often start at the local level of the words and sentences and proceeds towards the global units found in the extended discourse. In building these structures the reader or the listener not only relies upon the explicitly stated meanings but also infer the implicit or implied meanings. Words are not only used singularly, indeed they may have plurality of meaning. Words and sentences may be used in more than one literal ways and also in non-literal ways such as in metaphors and irony. Before we move towards the nuances of language comprehension, let us first understand word recognition in more detail. 3. Word Recognition The simplest meaning utterance consist of a single word. Beginning from producing a single word, consider the large repertoire of words that people end up possessing ordinarily. Assuming that people know anywhere from 30,000 to 80,000 words, how do they recognise and retrieve the right representation of words so quickly? This question has bothered psychologists and linguists alike and they have sought answers to this for long. PSYCHOLOGY Paper no. 1: Cognitive Science Module no.30: Comprehension of Language ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ When we talk about word recognition, we mean both verbal and visual recognition of the word. Speech is an age long capacity of human beings and can be traced to the history of evolution to the humans. Some form of speech and communication was found in almost all human civilisations. However, reading and writing as skills associated with language are a relatively newer. Lexicon is the term that language researchers use to mean the entire set of mental representations of words. It is understood as a mental dictionary, a repository of what each of us know about words, what each of these words stand for and how they can be put to use. These mental representations by no case can be restricted to only list of facts about the pronunciation of a word, parts of speech and its meaning, alphabetic order and so on. Rather to appreciate words we must we must see words as networks of mental representations. Such considerations have made language researchers believe that word representations as networks comprise of three major components namely spelling, sound and meaning. When we hear any word, we first respond to the phonology of the word. Later, the distinct domains or features of the word must be identified to make sense of it. To understand this better, think of the features associated with the word dog. DOG D O G When we hear the word dog, we identify the sound associated with it as the phonological features of the word. These phonemes help the speaker to pronounce the word, ‘dog’. The orthographic features refer to the letters used to spell a word in the visual format. When one reads a word, the individual letters and the visual shape of the word do not stand distinct and separate; rather they are processed as a whole. D-O-G does not stand as distinct but as a coherent whole ‘dog’. Along with the orthographic features of the words, the reader must also identify the graphemes used to visually represent the phonemes of a written language. The identification of graphemes, activation of phonological features (recognition of phonemes), morphemes and concepts together contribute to the Lexical-Semantic System. You can refer to the structure of language in the previous modules on Language. Words are not only recognised by sufficiently identifying the above mentioned components. Equally important is the knowledge of the context in which the words are encountered and embedded. We all may agree to it that we form hypotheses and make good guesses about the meaning of words (Palmer, MacLeod, Hunt, & Davidson, 1985) by situating them in the context. Even when critical data is missing or we come across a new word, by closely relating the word to the context, or simply, the words and sentences along with which the new word is used, we make an informed guess about the word. When we encounter a completely different word in a sentence, our memory processes almost instantly flash to us that the word is ‘out-of-context’ and hence inappropriately placed. Thus we are sensitive to word PSYCHOLOGY Paper no. 1: Cognitive Science Module no.30: Comprehension of Language ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ meanings. As stated above, merely recognition of words does not complete language comprehension; we also have to comprehend sentences in order to completely understand language. In the section that follows we will try to understand what it takes to comprehend sentences. 4. Sentence Comprehension How a reader or a listener will make sense of a sentence is dependent on both the nature of sentence as well as the listener’s language capacities. Complex sentences are harder to comprehend than simple sentences. For instance, affirmative sentences are easier to comprehend than negative ones. Clark and Chase (1972) argued that negative sentences require the reader to engage in more processing than do affirmative assertions. Another dimension of speech that poses challenges in understanding sentences is complexity of voice. Ordinarily active voice is easier to comprehend than passive voice. In addition to that simple sentences with one independent clause are simpler to understand in comparison to sentences with dependent clauses. Just et. al (1996) found that while comprehending sentences, as the complexity of the sentences increased, the processing time and the probability of answering incorrectly also increased. Text comprehension and understanding is influenced by situational information or instructions. Experiments (Anderson and Pichert, 1978) suggest that understanding or encoding textual material is influenced by contextual information that activates a specific type of schema. Walter Kintsch (1979) developed influential theories of language comprehension. The model he proposed dealt with the way textual information is understood. It holds that the underlying unit of memory for text material is the proposition. The model states that sentences of greater propositional complexity are difficult to comprehend than sentences with simple propositional structure, even if the surface complexity of the two sentences is about the same. He also made very precise predictions about the effect of certain types of literature on the reading processes. Till now we have referred to words as if each word can have only one meaning. Polysemy is the property of language that a single word can have more than one meanings. Can you think of words that have more than one meaning. Try to use these words into different sentences where their meaning comes out differently. Try to ask your friends what do these words mean in different sentences? Were they able to get the meaning right? Chances are that some of them may have got the contextual meaning correctly. When readers and listeners come across words with more than one interpretation, how do cognitive processes arrive at the right meaning? Along with different meanings, metaphors, ironical and sarcastic statements are also understood even when their literal meanings are very different from their non-literal and intended meanings. With proper context, the nonliteral meaning of a metaphor is grasped without first trying the literal interpretation (Glucksberg, Gildea & Brookin, 1982). Young children find it difficult to comprehend the nonliteral meaning and they sometimes only get stuck with the literal meaning. Read the following conversation and try to comprehend what sense would a young child make of the sentences if he/she was to understand it only literally. Mother: I am going to be in train tomorrow night. Child: So where will you have dinner? PSYCHOLOGY Paper no. 1: Cognitive Science Module no.30: Comprehension of Language ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Mother: I will have dinner over train. (And the child starts crying assuming that the mother is literally going to have dinner on top of the train…) This demonstrates that children when very young are not able to understand the complexities of language usage. Two models are important when decoding how conversations are conducted and comprehended. The Code model (Sperber and Wilson, 2002) assumes that both speaker and listener share a great deal of mutual knowledge. In the initial stage of communication, ‘speaker’ thoughts are encoded in words, the listener must decode these signals to arrive at the thought the speaker originally intended to communicate. The Inferential model (Grice, 1975), analysed communication in terms of intentions and inferences. A speaker intends to inform a listener and the listener infers what the speaker intends. Grice (1971) suggested a person means something by intending an utterance ‘to produce some effects in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention’ (p. 58). Sperber and Wilson (1986) state that while communicating people at times use coding and at other time inferential model; they blend both of these for effective communication. Furthermore, just as in a conversation, we speak in a manner that makes the other person understand what we are trying to say, similarly, writers write in a fashion to cooperate with the readers. They write in ways that make the meanings stand out and hence comprehendible. Specifically, writers clearly mark the information that the readers already know and this provides scope for a shared communication between the readers and the writer. Whenever new information is added, the writers clearly spell out this new piece that they want their readers to grasp. This makes the text easily comprehendible for the readers who link the new information into their structures that contain previous information given by other sentences. When linkages are drawn between previous and new sentences a coherent whole is constructed about the text in question. This given-new strategy (Clark, 1977) in reading thus assumes that writers mark information already understood and information meant to be a new assertion to make readers make correct inferences. 5. Discourse Comprehension According to Foss (1988), structures develop at multiple levels-words, sentences and discourses. We have already read about words and sentences in the previous sections. In this section, let us briefly read about discourse comprehension. Ever since the word ‘discourse’ began to be used, the word was interpreted in a number of ways. Here it is important to understand what is meant by the term discourse. Originally the word ‘discourse’ comes from the Latin word ‘discursus’ which denoted conversation or speech. Johnson- Laird (1983) states that discourse occurs when the references in a sentence are locally coherent with one another and when the sentences can be fit into a global framework of causes and effects. Simply stating, discourse is a group of sentences combined in a meaningful manner. Beaugrande (1981) suggested seven criteria that need to be fulfilled by a written or spoken text to qualify as a discourse. These include-  Cohesion-grammatical relationship between the parts of the sentence required for interpretation  Coherence-the order of the statements and how they relate to each other PSYCHOLOGY Paper no. 1: Cognitive Science Module no.30: Comprehension of Language ____________________________________________________________________________________________________  Intentionality-whether the message is conveyed deliberately  Acceptability-indicates whether the audience approves the communicative product as satisfactory  Informativeness-whether some new information is getting added in the discourse  Situationality-circumstances in which the remark is made  Intertexuality-refers to the outside world or the interpretation of the schemata. Thus one must not think that understanding the discourse is restricted to mere processing of the series of sentences. Indeed it required much more than that. Discourse context and the psychological processes involved in the discourse experiences contribute in the comprehension of the discourse. To comprehend a discourse successfully, one requires making inferences to connect ideas both with and across local (among sentences) and global discourse (among sentences and the world) structures. This involves building connections and integration from previous discourse contents that one has previously encountered. Readers’ individual characteristic such as individual differences in learner perception, memory capacities, language ability, goals for reading and prior knowledge are crucial in making sense of the discourse. Knowledge about a particular text aids comprehension. For instance, people with specialized knowledge about astrophysics, mechanics of a plane etc. are likely to comprehend text with technical information in their respective field better than those who have no technical knowledge about that field. Insufficient knowledge limits comprehension because the reader must develop some structures of knowledge about the material as well as encode the information being read. Linguistic cues impact the content of the reader’s memory. Lexical cues help to establish coherence among discourse elements. Lexical cohesion denotes links between words which carry meaning: verbs, nouns and adjectives. Connectors such as ‘between’, ‘however’ highlight conceptual and logical relations among ideas; anaphors highlight important concepts from prior texts; structural features such as syntax and titles/headings also help the reader in understanding the discourse. The section that follows elaborates on reading speed and comprehension. You will see the role of linguistic cues, reader characteristics and context as important in determining reading speed also. 6. Reading Speed and Comprehension When we talk about reading, we are all fascinated by reading speed. The other question that one may find interesting is what is reading comprehension and how has it been studied. In this section we will try to read about the same. We know that reading is time consuming and involves higher level cognitive skill. It is a skill on which mastering different subjects partially depend. A student who is unable to read efficiently will find it difficult to engage with different subjects. All academic courses require students to read extensively. Reading well demands that one handles words effectively and efficiently. Most people read relatively easy to comprehend material at rate of about 250-300 words per minute. Speed reading involves reading at a rate that is four times the average rate. There are ways of enhancing ones reading speed without the loss of comprehension. Cognitive psychologists have been intrigued by these claims and investigated the interaction of perceptual processes and higher-order processes of comprehension in working memory during reading (Just and Carpenter, 1980, 1992). The interplay of these perceptual and cognitive processes provides insights into the feasibility of reading speed. PSYCHOLOGY Paper no. 1: Cognitive Science Module no.30: Comprehension of Language ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ In order to unravel the role of eye tracking in text processing, let us understand our own perceptual processes while we read this text. When we read, our eyes make a series of movements and the periods when the eye movement stops momentarily, it is called fixation. Each time we fix our eyes on a word or on part of a word, it provides a discrete input to our visual system. Pollatsek and Rayner (1989) claim that the duration of most of such fixations range from 200-350 milliseconds, with greater variability. The reader gains a series of snapshots of information of the information about this written text as the eyes move across and down the page. In determining how much we can see in a given fixation-a kind of snapshot, Javal (1878) found that during reading the eye does not weep across a printed line but moves in a series of small jumps called saccades. Momentary fixations occur in between these jumps. A typical saccade is about eight or nine letter spaces. Taking this further Cattell (1886a) tried to discover how much could be read during a single visual fixation and found that reaction time required to identify forms, colours, letters and sentences were related to ones familiarity with the visual material. In also proved that when people are exposed to a serried of letters and words for as less as 10 milliseconds, the capacity to report letters was dependent on how close the sequence of the letters approached a meaningful sequence i.e. a word. The next question that comes to mind is how are some people better readers than others? How do we train for speed reading? As a reader you may have yourself employed some strategies for this. We sometimes scan our index finger across the line of the text and move it forward without pausing it. If the eyes keep up with the forward movement of the finger then referring to the backward text is avoided. This supposedly increases the speed of reading. While training for speed reading, the reader is instructed to avoid making regressive eye movements. Instead, the speed reader tries to focus forward at a rapid rate. Training regimens at times present words or sentences on a computer screen in a sequential manner and the earlier text disappears from the computer screen. This avoids the possibility of looking back at the earlier text at a later point of time. This is not to say that backward referencing is unproductive. It is actually beneficial in cases where ambiguities have to be resolved in order to fully comprehend the text. Unfamiliar words, words with multiple meanings and interpretations and words cannot be understood fully if adequate time and effort are not directed towards them. Words that are frequent, short and predictable in the context of the text are often skipped over altogether. Good readers with large working capacities take extra time to interpret and comprehend the text. Reading fast can result in loss of comprehension and memory for the text. This holds especially true when the text is unfamiliar and difficult to comprehend. However, trained skimming is useful when studying the text to get an overview of the main topics. Also, when using the 3R study strategy of read, recite and review, trained skimming allows one to review the text quickly, identify relevant sections from the text and find passages that require careful and slow reading. Up to this point we have focussed our discussion of the reading processes on the recognition of letters and words. The reason people read is to extract meaning from textual materials. Reading comprehension describes this process of understanding the meaning of written material. To understand this, let us engage with this simple sentence, ‘the table is blue’. Due to visual perception and word identification, we receive sensory stimuli that are transmitted to the brain. But this may be devoid of meaning. Given meaning to the text is presumably the purpose of reading. When you read the above given sentence, you may have understood that we are referring to a single table and it is coloured blue. You comprehend the meaning of the sentence and that meaning is about the same that I intended and as most others would understand. Further, to understand reading comprehension better, the process can be broken into stages, which assumes that reading is a sequence of processes that starts with the perception of the written words and leads to the understanding of the meaning of sentences. Just and Carpenter (1987) conceptualised the PSYCHOLOGY Paper no. 1: Cognitive Science Module no.30: Comprehension of Language ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ process of reading and comprehension s the coordinated execution of a series of stages that include extracting physical features of letters, encoding words and accessing the lexicon and so forth. 7. Summary  When one reads a word, the individual letters and the visual shape of the word do not stand distinct and separate; rather they are processed as a whole.  Word recognition is facilitated by familiarity with the words and context of their usage.  Complex sentences are harder to comprehend than simple sentences. Active voice is easier to comprehend and affirmative sentences are easier to comprehend than negative sentences.  While communicating people at times use coding and at other time inferential model; they blend both of these for effective communication.  The given-new strategy in reading assumes that writers mark information already understood and information meant to be a new assertion to make readers make correct inferences.  Reading involves interaction between the written symbols and memory processes.  Studies of eye fixation indicate that comprehension is influenced by factors such as rare words, integration of clauses, previous knowledge of words and inferences drawn while reading the text.  Comprehension in reading is the process of understanding the meaning of written material. PSYCHOLOGY Paper no. 1: Cognitive Science Module no.30: Comprehension of Language ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ PSYCHOLOGY Paper no. 1: Cognitive Science Module no.30: Comprehension of Language ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ PSYCHOLOGY Paper no. 1: Cognitive Science Module no.30: Comprehension of Language ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ PSYCHOLOGY Paper no. 1: Cognitive Science Module no.30: Comprehension of Language