Integrating Language Subdomains for Understanding Language Processes

1. Looking ahead: Integrating subdomainsMacDonald (1999)Action & Product traditions

2. Announcements • Wednesday: Last class • Student Course Opinion Questionnaires • Volunteer? • Review - bring specific questions • Paper due if you didn’t hand in a draft • If you did hand in a draft, paper due Friday • Monday: Exam, 8:30 AM, here

3. Research to date • Language-as-Process • What are the moment-by-moment processes involved in language comprehension and production? • Understand mechanics of the mind • Language-as-Action • What are the strategies and heuristics people use during conversation? • How do they accomplish conversational and social goals?

4. Proposal • Understanding the processes/mechanisms involved would benefit from: • MacDonald: • Looking at generalizations over multiple types of processes (I.e., production, comprehension, acquisition) • Understanding how constraints on production lead to distributions that affect comp/acq. • Tanenhaus: • Studying the processes involved in natural langauge use

5. MacDonald (1999) • Integrate research on anguage production, comprehension, and acquisition • Distributional information relevant to all

6. What is Distributional Information? • Frequency of pairings between • Word form and meaning (bug, bat, duck) • Sound sequence and meaning (dear, deer) • Orthography and meaning (read, read) • Verb form and subcategorization frame (e.g. main vs. passive/reduced relative) • Etc. • There’s more to language structure than commonly thought • People are good at tracking frequencies

7. Metacomment • Constraint-based approaches advocate prominent role for frequency-based information (I.e., distributional information) in comrehension • Autonomous theories (e.g., Garden-path, Swinney, Pinker) place more emphasis on ruless

8. Puzzle # 1: Comprehension • Comprehension of verb modification ambiguities is insensitive to lexical biases (which affect comprehension of other ambiguities) • John said that Bill left yesterday. • John will say that Bill left yesterday. • John will say that Bill left tomorrow.

9. Phrase length and production constriants • Short-before-Long • Mary ate for lunch chicken. • Mary ate for lunch the old chicken salad that had sat in the refrigerator for four days. • This means that the the distant modification is more frequently produced with (a) than (b). • John will say tomorrowthat Bill left. • John will say that Bill lefttomorrow.

10. Puzzle #2: Production • Constituent Ordering in Production: Incremental approach suggests that constituents are ordered by accessibility • Short more accessible than Long • Given more accessible than New

11. Then why do verb biases affect production? • Stallings et al. (1998) • Some verbs have a “shifting disposition” that comes from how it tends to appear with different structures. • How often are the verb and its complement not next to each other? • NP/S verbs often have verb modification between verb and complement • The eccentric director reported in a loud voice that the cast party was canceled. • Same verbs tend to participate in HNPS

12. Then why do verb biases affect production? • This distributional information is part of what we know about each verb • Same exact kind of information has been shown to affect comprehension of syntactic ambiguities.

13. Puzzle #3: How is distributional info acquired? • WHY is it acquired? • It helps learn language-specific information • E.g., Word Segmentation (Saffran et al.) • Syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitman) • Mapping between world and language is complicated and probabilistic • E.g., X bleeped the Y to Z - tends to mean transfer

14. Why learn distributional information? • Child isn’t trying to learn a language • Child is trying to understand and be understood - acquistion isn’t separate from comprehension and production

15. Merging Action and Process traditions (Tanenhaus, Trueswell, etc.) • Look at processes of comprehension and production in real-life situations • real-time language use • Goal-driven tasks • Visually and referentially situated • Spoken language • Speech as it really occurs - disfluency, prosody, etc.

16. Reference Resolution in the Wild Sarah Brown-Schmidt, Ellen Campana & Mike Tanenhaus • *ok, ok I got it* ele…ok • alright, *hold on*, I got another easy piece • *I got a* well wait I got a green piece RIGHT above that • above this piece? • well not exactly right above it • it can’t be above it • it’s to the…it’ doesn’t wanna fit in with the cardboard • it’s to the right, right? • yup • w- how? *where* • *it’s* kinda line up with the two holes • line ‘em right next to each other? • yeah, vertically • vertically, meaning? • up and down • up and down

17. Eye-tracking Results: Disambiguated NPs Relative proportion of fixations POD * Significant increase in looks to target after POD. * Demonstrates ability to study on-line processing in the wild.

18. Eye-tracking Results: Ambiguous NPs Relative proportion of fixations * Signficantly more looks to target from onset of NP. * Suggests other factors constrained interpretation of the reference.