What Is Language?
The Creativity of Human Language
The Universality of Language
Studying Language in Cognitive Psychology
Perceiving and Understanding Words
Components of Words
Perceiving Words
Understanding Words
Demonstration: Lexical Decision Task
Method: Lexical Priming
Summary: Words Alone and in Sentences
Understanding Sentences
Semantics and Syntax
Method: Event-Related Potential
Parsing a Sentence
Test Yourself 10.1
Understanding Text and Stories
How Inference Creates Coherence
Situation Models
Producing Language: Speech Errors
Method: Identifying Speech Errors
Speech Errors and Language Mechanisms
Producing Language: Conversations
Semantic Coordination
Syntactic Coordination
Method: Syntactic Priming
Something to Consider: Culture, Language,
and Cognition
Method: Categorical Perception
Test Yourself 10.2
Chapter Summary
Think About It
If You Want to Know More
Key Terms
CogLab: Word Superiority; Lexical Decision;
Categorical Perception—Identification; Categorical
Perception—Discrimination
356
10Language
Some Questions We Will Consider
How do we understand individual words,
and how are words combined to create
sentences? (363)
How can we understand sentences that have
more than one meaning? (370)
What do speech errors (slips of the tongue)
tell us about language? (381)
Is it true that the language that people use in
a particular culture can affect the way they
think? (387)
•
•
•
•
357Language
There are ways to communicate that don’t involve language, but language is the most
powerful tool we have for transmitting ideas, feelings, and knowledge from one person
to another. What exactly is language, and what is it about language that makes it so
useful?
What Is Language?
We can define language as a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables
us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences. Although one of the main features
of language is communication, it is important to differentiate human language
from the communication of nonhuman animals. Cats “meow” when their food dish is
empty. Monkeys have a repertoire of “calls” that stand for things such as “danger” or
“greeting,” and bees signal through a “waggle dance” that they perform at the hive to
indicate the location of flowers. Although there is some evidence that monkeys may be
able to use language in a way similar to humans (see “If You Want to Know More: Animal
Language”), most animal communication lacks the properties that make human
language unique.
The Creativity of Human Language
Human language goes far beyond a series of fixed signals that transmit a single message
like “feed me,” “danger,” or “go that way for flowers.” Language provides a way
of arranging a sequence of signals—sounds for spoken language, letters and written
words for written language, and physical signals for sign language—that provide a wide
variety of ways to transmit, from one person to another, things ranging from the simple
and commonplace (“My car is over there”) to things that have perhaps never been previously
written or uttered in the entire history of the world (“I’m thinking of getting
a new Mustang because I’m quitting my job in February and taking a trip across the
country to celebrate Groundhog Day with my cousin Zelda”).
Language makes it possible to create new and unique sentences because it has a
structure that is (1) hierarchical and (2) governed by rules. Language is hierarchical
because it consists of a series of 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. Language is governed
by rules that specify permissible ways for these components to be arranged (“What is
my cat saying?” is permissible in English; “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 they want to
express.
358 Chapter 10
The Universality of Language
Although people do “talk” to themselves, as when Hamlet wondered “To be or not to
be” or when you daydream in class, the predominant staging ground for language is one
person conversing with another. Consider the following:
● People’s need to communicate is so powerful that when deaf children find
themselves in an environment where there are no people who speak or use
sign language, they invent a sign language themselves (Goldwin-Meadow,
1982).
● Everyone with normal capacities develops a language and learns 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 over 5,000 different languages,
and there isn’t a single culture that is without language. When
European explorers first set forth in New Guinea, the people they discovered,
who had been isolated from the rest of the world for eons, had developed
over 750 different languages, many of them quite different from one
another.
● Language development is similar across cultures. No matter what the culture,
children generally begin babbling at about 7 months, a few meaningful
words appear by the 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 because they use different words and sounds, and they may use
different rules of combining these words (although many languages use
similar rules). They are the same because all languages have words that
serve the function 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 in Cognitive Psychology
Wilhelm Wundt, founder of the first laboratory of scientific psychology, wrote about
the nature of the sentence in 1900, but as with other areas of cognitive psychology,
modern research on language had to await the “cognitive revolution” that began in the
1950s. Two events that occurred during that time stand out. The first was the 1957 publication
of a book by B. F. Skinner, the modern champion of behaviorism. In this book,
Verbal Behavior, Skinner proposed that language is learned through reinforcement. According
to this idea, just as children learn appropriate behavior by being rewarded for
359Language
“good” behavior and punished for “bad” behavior, children learn language by being
rewarded for using correct language and punished (or not rewarded) for using incorrect
language.
In the same year, the linguist Noam Chomsky published a book titled Syntactic
Structures. This book, and Chomsky’s work that followed, proposed that human language
was coded in the genes. According to this idea, just as humans are genetically
programmed to walk, they are programmed to acquire 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
Skinner’s Verbal Behavior in 1959. In his review, he presented arguments that effectively
destroyed 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 therefore never been reinforced. (A classic example of a sentence that has been
created by many children, and which is unlikely to have been taught by parents, is “I
hate you, Mommy.”) Chomsky’s criticism of behaviorism was one of the most important
events of the cognitive revolution and led to the development of psycholinguistics, the
field concerned with the psychological study of language.
The goal of psycholinguistics is to discover the psychological processes by which
humans acquire and process language (Clark & Van der Wege, 2002; Gleason & Ratner,
1998). The three 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, sentences, and stories, as expressed in writing, speech, or sign language;
and how people have conversations with one another.
2. 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.
3. 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 by describing research on how we understand language
and how we produce it. (See “If You Want to Know More: Language Acquisition” for
suggestions for readings about language acquisition.) We begin by considering each of
the components of language, beginning with small components such as sounds and words
(Figure 10.1), then combinations of words that form sentences, and finally “texts”—stories
that are created by combining a number of sentences. At the end of the chapter, we de-
360 Chapter 10
scribe some of the factors involved in producing language, considering both the errors
people make while speaking and how people participate in and understand conversations.
Finally, we look at cross-cultural research on language that considers the role of
language in thinking.
Perceiving and Understanding Words
One of the most amazing things about words is how many we know and how rapidly we
acquire them. Infants produce their first words during their second year (sometimes a
little earlier, sometimes later), and after a slow start, begin adding words rapidly until,
by the time they have become adults, they can understand over 50,000 different words
(Altmann, 2001; Dell, 1995). All of the words a person understands are called person’s
lexicon.
• How do we understand and
pronounce words?
• How do grammar and meaning
help us understand sentences?
• How do sentences create meaningful
stories?
Sentences
Texts
Culture and
language
Words
• What do speech errors tell us about the
mechanisms of language?
• How do people participate in
conversations?
• Is there a connection between
language and cognition?
Producing language
■ Figure 10.1
Flow diagram for
this chapter.
361Language
Components of Words
The two smallest units of language are phonemes, which refer to sounds, and morphemes,
which refer to meanings.
Phonemes Each word you are reading is made up of letters. If you were to read these
words out loud, you would produce sounds called phonemes, where a phoneme is the
shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word. Thus, the
word bit contains the phonemes /b/, /i/, and /t/ (phonemes are indicated by phonetic
symbols that are set off with slashes), because we can change bit into pit by replacing /b/
with /p/, to bat by replacing /i/ with /ae/, or to bid by replacing /t/ with /d/.
Note that because phonemes refer to sounds, they are not the same as letters, which
can have a number of different sounds (consider the “e” sound in “we” and “wet”), and
which can be silent in certain situations (the “e” in “some”). Because different languages
use different sounds, the number of phonemes varies in different languages. There are
only 11 phonemes in Hawaiian, about 47 in English, and as many as 60 in some African
dialects.
Morphemes Morphemes are the smallest units of language that have a definable meaning
or a grammatical function. “Truck” consists of a single morpheme, and even though
“table” has two syllables, it also consists of a single morpheme, because the syllables
alone have no meaning. In contrast “bedroom” has two syllables and two morphemes,
“bed” and “room.” Endings such as “s” and “ed,” which contribute to the meaning of
a word, are morphemes. Thus even though “trucks” has just one syllable, it consists of
two morphemes, “truck” and “s.”
Perceiving Words
How we perceive the letters that make up written words and the sounds that create spoken
words is a huge topic. We know from our discussion of the word superiority effect
in Chapter 3 that a word’s meaning helps a person perceive the letters that make up the
word (see page 64). The meanings associated with words create a context that makes
perception of the word’s components easier. The meaning of words also helps us hear a
word’s phonemes, even when these phonemes are obscured by another sound.
Phonemic Restoration Effect Richard Warren (1970) demonstrated the effect of meaning
on the perception of phonemes. Warren had participants listen to a recording of the
sentence “The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the
capital city.” Warren replaced the first /s/ in “legislatures” with the sound of a cough
and told his participants that they should indicate where in the sentence the cough occurred.
No participant identified the correct position of the cough, and, even more significantly,
none of them noticed that the /s/ in “legislatures” was missing. This effect,
which Warren called the phonemic restoration effect, was experienced even by stu-
Word
Superiority
Word
Superiority
362 Chapter 10
dents and staff in the psychology department who knew that the /s/ was missing. Participants
“filled in” the missing phoneme based on the context produced by the sentence
and the portion of the word that was presented.
Warren also showed that the phonemic restoration effect can be influenced by the
meaning of the words that follow the missing phoneme. For example, the last word of
the phrase “There was time to *ave . . .” (where the * indicates the presence of a cough
or some other sound) could be shave, save, wave, or rave, but participants heard the word
wave when the remainder of the sentence had to do with saying good-bye to a departing
friend. Thus, our perception of speech is influenced by top-down processing—our
knowledge of the meanings of words that we bring to the situation. The effect of topdown
processing has also been demonstrated by finding that more restoration occurs for
a real word like prOgress (where the capital letter indicates the masked phoneme) than
for a similar “pseudoword” like crOgress (Samuel, 1990). We will now consider another
example of how our knowledge of the meanings of words helps us to perceive them.
Speech Segmentation The words on this page are easy to recognize. Each word is separated
by a space, so it’s easy to tell one word from another. However, when people hear
words in a conversation, these words are not separated by spaces, or pauses, even though
it may sound like they are.
When we look at a record of the physical energy produced by conversational speech,
we see that the speech signal is continuous, with either no physical breaks in the signal
or breaks that don’t correspond to the breaks we perceive between words (Figure 10.2).
The fact that there are usually no spaces between words becomes obvious when you
listen to someone speaking a foreign language. To someone who is unfamiliar with that
language, the words seem to speed by in an unbroken string. However, to a speaker of
meiz it oaz n doaz eet oaz n litl laamz eet ievee
mice
0 sec 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5
eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy
Time
■ Figure 10.2 Sound energy for the phrase “Mice eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat
ivy.” The italicized words just below the sound record indicate how this phrase was pronounced by the
speaker. The vertical lines next to the words indicate where each word begins. Note that it is difficult
or impossible to tell from the sound record where one word ends and the other begins. (Speech signal
courtesy of Peter Howell.)
363Language
that language, the words seem separated, just as the words of languages you know seem
separated to you. The process of perceiving individual words from the continuous flow
of the speech signal is called speech segmentation (see Chapter 3, page 82).
Our ability to achieve speech segmentation is made more complex by the fact that
not everyone produces words in the same way. People talk with different accents and
at different speeds, and most important, people often take a relaxed approach to pronouncing
words when they are speaking naturally. For example, how would you say
“Did you go to class today,” if you were talking to a friend? Would you say “Did you” or
“Dijoo”? 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).
The way people pronounce words in conversational speech makes about half of the
words unintelligible when taken from their fluent context and presented alone. Irwin
Pollack and J. M. Pickett (1964) demonstrated this 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!
There are a number of types of information that listeners can use to deal with the
problems posed by words in spoken sentences. One of these is the context, or the meaning,
of a conversation. The importance of context is illustrated by the results of the
Pollack and Pickett experiment, because it showed that when words are taken out of the
context provided by other words in a conversation, understanding the words becomes
much more difficult.
Our understanding of meaning also helps solve the problem of speech segmentation.
An unfamiliar language that sounds like an unbroken string of sounds becomes
segmented into individual words once you learn the language. When you learn the language,
you not only learn meanings but you also learn that certain sounds are more
likely to occur at the ends or beginnings of words. For example, in English, words can
end in rk (work, fork), but not kr. However, words can begin with kr (krypton, krill), but
not rk. There is evidence that people learn these rules about permissible beginnings and
endings of words as young children (Gomez & Gerkin, 1999, 2000; Saffran et al., 1999).
As we saw in Chapter 3, infants as young as 8 months of age can achieve speech segmentation
through a process called statistical learning. We now move from perceiving letters
and words to factors that influence our ability to understand words.
Understanding Words
Our ability to understand words is influenced by a number of factors, including how
common the word is and the other words that surround it in a sentence.
Word Frequency An adult’s lexicon may contain over 50,000 words, but some of these
words can be more easily accessed than others. One factor that contributes to these
differences in accessibility is word frequency—the relative usage of a word in a par-
364 Chapter 10
ticular language. For example, in English, home occurs 547 times per million words, and
hike occurs only 4 times per million words. The word-frequency effect refers to the
fact that we respond more rapidly to high-frequency words like home than to lowfrequency
words like hike. One way this has been demonstrated is through the lexical
decision task (see Method: Lexical Decision Task, page 303).
Demonstration
Lexical Decision Task
In the lexical decision task, a participant reads a list that consists of words and nonwords.
Your task is to indicate as quickly as possible whether each entry in the lists below is a word.
Try this yourself by silently reading List 1 below and saying “yes” each time you encounter
a word. Either time yourself to determine how long it takes to get through the list or just
notice how difficult the task is.
List 1
Gambastya, revery, voitle, chard, wefe, cratily, decoy, puldow, faflot, oriole, voluble,
boovle, chalt, awry, signet, trave, crock, cryptic, ewe, himpola.
Now try the same thing for List 2:
List 2
Mulvow, governor, bless, tuglety, gare, relief, ruftily, history, pindle, develop, grdot,
norve, busy, effort, garvola, match, sard, pleasant, coin, maisle.
The task you have just completed (which is taken from D. W. Carroll, 1999; also see
Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1993) is called a lexical decision task because you had to decide whether
each group of letters was a word in your lexicon.
When researchers presented this task under controlled conditions, they found that
people read high-frequency words faster than low-frequency words (Savin, 1963). Thus,
it is likely that you were able to carry out the lexical decision task more rapidly for List
2 compared to List 1.
This slower response for less-frequent words has also been demonstrated by measuring
people’s eye movements as they are reading (see Method: Measuring Eye Movements,
page 120). The eye movements that occur during reading consist of fixations,
during which the eye stops on a word for about a quarter of a second (250 ms), and
movements, which propel the eye to the next fixation.
In a recent eye-movement study, Keith Rayner and coworkers (2003) had participants
read sentences that contained either a high- or a low-frequency target word. For
example, the sentence “Sam wore the horrid coat though his pretty girlfriend complained,”
contains the high-frequency target word pretty. The other version of the sentence
was exactly the same, but with the high-frequency word pretty replaced by the
Lexical
Decision
Lexical
Decision
365Language
low-frequency word demure. The results, shown in Figure 10.3, indicate
that readers looked at the low-frequency words about 40 ms longer than the
high-frequency words.
Context Effects Our ability to access words in a sentence is affected not only
by frequency, but also by the meaning of the rest of the sentence. As we
will see when we consider how we understand sentences, we are constantly
attempting to figure out what a sentence means as we are reading it. This
process involves both understanding individual words and understanding
how these words fit into the overall meaning of the sentence. For example,
it takes less time to understand The Eskimos were frightened by the walrus than
to understand The bankers were frightened by the walrus, because words that
are expected within the context of the sentence (like walrus appearing with
Eskimos) are understood more rapidly than words that are not expected (like
walrus appearing with bankers; Marslen-Wilson, 1990).
Lexical Ambiguity Words can often have more than one meaning, a situation
called lexical ambiguity. For example, the word bug can refer to insects,
or hidden listening devices, or being annoyed, 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 listening device in her room (although we might
need further context to totally rule out this last possibility).
Context often clears up ambiguity so rapidly that we are not aware of its existence.
However, David Swinney (1979) showed that people briefly access multiple meanings
of ambiguous words before the effect of context takes over. He did this by presenting
participants with a tape recording of sentences such as the following:
Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems.
The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches, and other
bugs in the corner of the room.
If you had to predict which meaning listeners would use for bugs in this sentence,
insect would be the logical choice because the sentence mentions spiders and roaches.
However, using a technique called lexical priming, Swinney found that right after the
word bug was presented, his listeners had accessed two meanings.
Method
Lexical Priming
Remember from Chapter 5 that priming occurs when seeing a stimulus makes it easier to respond
to that stimulus when it is presented again (See Method: Repetition Priming, page 192).
The basic principle behind priming is that the first presentation of a stimulus activates a
High Low
Word frequency
Fixationtime(ms)
0
340
320
300
280
■ Figure 10.3 Results of
Rayner et al.’s (2003) experiment.
The bars indicate how
long participants looked at
target words like pretty and
demure. These results show
that participants fixated lowfrequency
words longer than
high-frequency words.
366 Chapter 10
representation of the stimulus, and a person can respond more rapidly to the stimulus if this
activation is still present when the stimulus is presented again.
Priming involving the naming of words is called lexical priming. Because lexical priming
involves the meaning of words, priming effects can occur when a word is followed by
another word with a similar meaning. For example, presenting the word ant before presenting
the word bug can cause a person to respond faster to the word bug than if ant had not
preceded it. The presence of a lexical priming effect would, therefore, indicate whether two
words, like ant and bug, have similar meanings in a person’s mind.
Swinney used lexical priming by presenting the passage about the government
building to participants and, as they were hearing the word bug, presenting a word or a
nonword on a screen (Figure 10.4a). The words he presented were either related to the
“insect” meaning of bug (ant), or to the “hidden listening device” meaning (spy), or were
not related at all (sky). The participant was told to indicate as quickly as possible whether
the item flashed on the screen was a word or a nonword. (See Method: Lexical Decision
Task, page 364.)
Swinney’s result, shown in Figure 10.4b, was that participants responded with nearly
the same speed to both ant and spy (the small difference between them is not significant),
and the response to both of these words was significantly faster than the response to sky.
This faster responding to words associated with two of the meanings of bug means that
even though there is information in the sentence indicating that bug is an insect, listeners
accessed both meanings of bug as it was being presented. This effect was, however,
short-lived, because when Swinney repeated the same test but waited for two or three
“Ant” “Spy”
Test words
“Sky”
Reactiontimetolexical
decision(ms)
0
1,000
950
900
850
(b)(a)
ANT
“. . . and other bugs . . .”
Flash when hear
word “bug”
Lexical decision: Word or nonword?
■ Figure 10.4 (a) The procedure for Swinney’s (1979) experiment. See text for details. (b) The results
of Swinney’s experiment. The fact that the reaction times to ant and spy were not significantly different
showed that people briefly accessed both meanings of the word bugs as they read this word in a
sentence.
367Language
syllables before presenting the test words, the effect had vanished. Thus, within about
200 ms after hearing bug, the insect meaning had been selected from the ones initially
activated. Context does, therefore, have an effect on the activation of word meaning, but
it exerts its influence after all meanings of a word have been briefly accessed.
Summary: Words Alone and in Sentences
Figure 10.5 summarizes the results we have described for perceiving letters and words,
and Figure 10.6 summarizes the results for accessing words. Note that for all of the
effects we discussed (except for the word-frequency effect), the meanings of words faElimination
of lexical ambiguity
Context of sentence helps eliminate
lexical ambiguity. (Adding “like ants and
roaches” after bugs makes the meaning
even clearer.)
The class was held even though there were bugs in the basement.
Lexical ambiguity: short term
All meanings accessed for
ambiguous words—first 200 ms.
Word-frequency effect
More frequent words are accessed
faster (change class to vigil for a
less frequent word).
Context provided by the sentence
Word perceived faster if it fits
meaning of sentence (change
basement to iceberg
for poor fit).
■ Figure 10.6 Summary
of the four effects
we described in connection
with accessing
words: (1) short-term
lexical ambiguity,
(2) elimination of lexical
ambiguity, (3) how the
context of a sentence
can cause words to be
perceived faster, and
(4) the word-frequency
effect.
This is a sentence made up of words.
Speech segmentation
Meaning and other factors help
separate words in speech.
Word superiority effect (see Chapter 3)
Letters in written words are
perceived more easily.
(The w is perceived more
easily than if it were alone.)
Phonemic restoration effect
If noise is superimposed on a
phoneme, the phoneme is still
heard.
■ Figure 10.5 Summary of the two
effects we described that influence
the perception of letters and words:
(1) speech segmentation, and (2) the
phonemic restoration effect. The wordsuperiority
effect from Chapter 3 (see
p. 64) is also included.
368 Chapter 10
cilitated perceiving letters and phonemes, and the meaning of sentences facilitated
understanding words. These results are important because they illustrate one of the
main messages of this chapter: Although the study of language is often described in
terms of its individual components—such as letters, words, and sentences—these components
are not processed in isolation. As we discuss how we understand sentences, we
will see more examples of how each of these components interacts with and influences
one another.
Understanding Sentences
Although the last section was about words, we ended up discussing sentences as well.
This isn’t surprising because words rarely appear in isolation. They appear together in
sentences, with all of the words combining to create the meaning of the sentence. To
understand how words work together to create the meaning of the sentence, we first
need to distinguish between two properties of sentences: semantics and syntax.
Semantics and Syntax
Semantics is the meanings of words and sentences. Syntax is the rules for combining
words into sentences. Recent experiments have demonstrated a physiological distinction
between these two characteristics of words and sentences. For example, semantics
and syntax are associated with different components of a physiological response called
the event-related potential (ERP).
Method
Event-Related Potential
Most stimuli activate many thousands of neurons in the brain. The signals generated by
these neurons can be measured in humans by recording the event-related potential with disk
electrodes placed on a person’s scalp (Figure 10.7a). When a stimulus is presented, the electrodes
record voltage changes in the brain that are generated by the thousands of neurons
near each electrode.
One thing that makes the ERP a valuable tool for cognitive psychology is that the response
consists of a number of different components, which occur at different delays after
a stimulus is presented. Figure 10.7b shows the N400 component of the ERP. “N” stands for
“negative” (note that negative is up in ERP records), and 400 stands for the time at which
the response peaks—400 ms from the presentation of the stimulus in this case. The N400
component is influenced by whether a word fits the meaning of a sentence. For example,
the colored line in Figure 10.7b shows the N400 response to the word “eat” in the sentence
“The cats won’t eat.” The gray line shows the response to the word “bake” in “The cats won’t
369Language
bake.” The N400 response increases to “bake” because the word “bake” doesn’t fit in this sentence
(Neville et al., 1991; Osterhout et al., 1997; also see Kutas & Federmeier, 2000).
The fact that the N400 response is sensitive to the meaning of a word in a sentence
means that this response is associated with semantics. Figure 10.7c shows that the P600
wave is associated with violations of syntax. This wave is small when syntax is correct,
but becomes larger when syntax is incorrect. Thus, “The cats won’t eating . . .” causes a
larger P600 response than “The cats won’t eat. . . .” The fact that semantics and syntax
are associated with different waves of the ERP supports the idea that they are associated
with different mechanisms.
The idea that semantics and syntax are associated with different mechanisms has
also been supported by brain imaging studies, which have shown that different areas of
the brain are activated by semantics and syntax (Dapretto & Bookheimer, 1999). Also,
damage to some areas of the brain causes difficulties in understanding the meanings of
words, and damage to other areas causes problems understanding grammar (Breedin &
Saffran, 1999).
We will see that semantics and syntax interact with one another as a reader or
listener works to determine the meaning of a sentence. One of the central processes
for determining meaning is parsing, the mental grouping of words in a sentence into
phrases.
wave of the ERP is affected by semantics. It becomes larger (dark gray line) when the meaning of a
word does not fit the rest of the sentence. (c) The P600 wave of the ERP is affected by syntax. It becomes
larger (dark gray line) when syntax is incorrect. (Parts b and c: Reprinted from Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, Volume 1, Issue 6, Osterhout et al., “Event-Related Potentials and Language,” Figure 1,
Copyright © 1997 with permission from Elsevier.)
0 200 400 600 800
+
–
(b) How semantics affects N400
N400
The cats won’t EAT . . .
The cats won’t BAKE . . .
0 200 400
Time (ms) Time (ms)
600 800
+
–
P600
The cats won’t EAT . . .
The cats won’t EATING . . .
(c) How syntax affects P600
0 0Image not available due to copyright restrictions
■ Figure 10.7 (b) The N400
370 Chapter 10
Parsing a Sentence
The goal of parsing is to determine the message of a sentence. This message is determined
by the meanings of the words in the sentence and how these words are grouped
together into phrases. As we will see, a number of groupings are often possible for the
same string of words. Consider for example, the sentence
The spy saw the man with the binoculars.
As people begin reading a sentence such as this one, they make guesses about how the
sentence is going to unfold. Upon reading “The spy saw the man . . . ,” it seems as if
there is only one meaning—a spy looking at a man. However, as the sentence continues,
the phrase “. . . with the binoculars” poses a problem, because now there are two possible
meanings:
Meaning 1: The spy was looking through some binoculars to see the man. This meaning
groups “the spy” and “the binoculars,” like this:
The spy saw the man with the binoculars.
or
Meaning 2: The spy was looking at a man, who had some binoculars. This meaning
groups “the man” and “the binoculars,” like this:
The spy saw the man with the binoculars.
This sentence provides an example of syntactic ambiguity—the words are the same,
but there is more than one possible structure, and so there is more than one meaning.
Although there is no way to know the correct meaning of this sentence from the information
given, there is a tendency for people to interpret this sentence in terms of the
first meaning, with the spy being the one with the binoculars.
What causes us to prefer one way of parsing the sentence over another? Psychologists
have proposed that there is a mechanism responsible for determining the meaning
of the sentence. This mechanism has been called a number of things, including the
language-analysis device and the sentence-analyzing mechanism. We will simply call it the
parser. The parser determines the meaning of the sentence, primarily by determining
how words are grouped together into phrases. Psychologists are interested in answering
the question: “What factors determine how the parsing mechanism works?” Two
answers have been proposed to this question; one assigns the central role to syntax,
with semantics coming into play later, and the other proposes that syntax and semantics
work simultaneously to determine the meaning of a sentence.
371Language
The Syntax-First Approach to Parsing As its name implies, the syntax-first approach to
parsing focuses on how parsing is determined by syntax—the grammatical structure of
the sentence. We can appreciate a connection between syntax and sentence understanding
by considering the following poem from Lewis Carroll’s (1872) Through the Looking
Glass and What Alice Found There:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Even though the words in this poem are nonsense, we still have a sense of what the poem
is about. The first two lines seem to be about creatures called slithy toves doing something
called gyring and gimbling in a place called the wabe. We are able to create meaning
out of gibberish because we use syntax to infer meaning (Kako & Wagner, 2001).
The syntax-first approach to parsing states that the parsing mechanism groups
phrases together based on structural principles. One of these principles is called late
closure. The principle of late closure states that when a person encounters a new word,
the parser assumes that this word is part of the current phrase (Frazier, 1987). We can
illustrate this by considering the following sentence:
Because he always jogs a mile seems like a short distance to him.
Table 10.1 indicates how you may have read this sentence. At first, this sentence seems
to be about a man who jogs a mile (a) and (b), but trouble occurs when you get to seems
Table 10.1 The Principle of Late Closure
First Try
Part of the Sentence Probable Reader’s Reaction
(a) Because he always jogs This is about a man who jogs.
(b) a mile He jogs a mile.
(c) seems like This doesn’t make sense. How does “seem like” fit
in here?
(d) a short distance to him. OK. I read the sentence incorrectly the first time.
I’ll try again.
Second Try
Part of the Sentence Probable Reader’s Reaction
Because he always jogs The man jogs.
a mile seems like a short distance to him. He is in good shape so a mile doesn’t seem like much.
372 Chapter 10
like (c) and after reading a short distance to him (d), you realize that there is another
way to read the sentence (see “Second Try,” Table 10.1). Because this sentence has led
the reader “down the garden path” (down a path that seems right, but turns out to be
wrong), this sentence is called a garden-path sentence (Frazier & Rayner, 1982).
We can see how this sentence illustrates the principle of late closure by focusing
on the words a mile. According to the late-closure principle, the parser assumes that
a mile is a continuation of the phrase because he always jogs. However, in reality, a mile
is the beginning of a new phrase. Late closure (so named because it proposes to keep
adding new words to the current phrase, so it delays closing off the phrase for as long
as possible) leads to the wrong parse—the phrase needed to be closed after jogs, so the
new phrase can begin. (Note that for this sentence, the correct phrasing could be indicated
by inserting a comma after jogs. However, there are other garden-path sentences,
such as “The student knew the answer to the question was wrong,” that cannot be made
easier to understand by adding a comma.) Because application of the syntactic rule of
late closure results in a garden-path sentence, the syntax-first approach to parsing has
also been called the garden-path model (Frazier & Rayner, 1982).
A number of experiments show that parsing is determined by late closure and other
syntactic principles (Frazier, 1987). Although the garden-path model of parsing focuses
on syntax, it doesn’t ignore semantics. It states that if analysis in terms of syntax doesn’t
make sense, then semantics is used to clear up the ambiguity. Thus, according to this
approach to parsing, syntax is used first, then semantics is called on, if needed, to make
sense of the sentence (as it did in the “Second Try” in Table 10.1).
We can draw a comparison between this process of determining how words in a
sentence are grouped into phrases and how parts of a visual scene become perceptually
grouped into objects. Remember our example from Chapter 3 of how the Gestalt
principles of organization help us guess that the scene shown in Figure 10.8a might be a
(a) (b)
■ Figure 10.8 (a) What lurks behind this tree? (b) It is not a creature!
373Language
creature hiding behind a tree. As it turns out, further information provided by looking
behind the tree proves that guess to be wrong and so we revise our assessment of the
situation from “creature hiding behind a tree” to “strange tree trunks behind a tree”
(Figure 10.8b).
We used this example in the perception chapter to illustrate the idea that the Gestalt
laws of organization are heuristics—rules of thumb that are “best-guess” rules for
determining our perceptions. Most of the time, these rules result in perceptions that
provide accurate information about what is “out there,” and they have the advantage of
being fast, which is essential because our very survival depends on quickly reacting to
objects and events in the environment.
A similar process occurs when our language system uses a rule such as the principle
of late closure to provide a “best guess” about the unfolding meaning of a sentence. Most
of the time, this rule leads to the correct conclusion about how the sentence should be
parsed. However, in some cases, such as when psychologists create garden-path sentences
like the one about the jogger, the rule results in an incorrect parsing, which has
to be corrected when more information becomes available at the end of the sentence.
Thus, just as ambiguous visual scenes help perception researchers understand the
processes involved in visual perception, garden-path sentences help language researchers
determine the processes involved in understanding language. Garden-path sentences
accomplish this by showing us what guesses the parser makes, as in the sentence
about the jogger (Fodor, 1995).
The Interactionist Approach to Parsing An indication of the role of semantics in understanding
sentences is provided by comparing “The spy saw the man with the binoculars” to “The
bird saw the man with the binoculars.” We have seen that the sentence about the spy has
two meanings: The spy could be looking at a man through the binoculars or could be
looking at a man who has a pair of binoculars. However, by changing spy to bird, we create
a sentence with only one reasonable meaning because we know the bird wouldn’t be
looking at the man through binoculars. Thus, in this sentence, our knowledge of birds
makes it clear that the man is the one with the binoculars, and not the bird.
According to the interactionist approach to parsing, semantics can influence processing
as the person is reading the sentence. All information, both syntactic and semantic,
is taken into account as we read a sentence, so any corrections that need to occur in
the processing of a sentence take place as the person is reading the sentence (Altmann,
1998; Altmann & Steedman, 1988; MacDonald et al., 1994). Thus, the crucial question
in comparing the syntax-first and interactionist approaches is not whether semantics is
involved, but when semantics comes into play. Is semantics activated only after syntax
has determined the initial parsing (syntax-first approach), or does semantics come into
play as a sentence is being read (interactionist approach)?
Recently, a number of studies in which readers’ or listeners’ eye movements have
been measured while they are reading or listening to a sentence have helped answer this
question (see Method: Eye Movements, page 120). In one study, Michael Tanenhaus
and coworkers (1995) used eye movements to study how people process the informaFor
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374 Chapter 10
tion in sentences. They presented a picture that illustrated the objects mentioned in
the sentence and then determined where participants looked while they were trying to
understand the sentence. One of the sentences was
Put the apple on the towel in the box.
The beginning of this sentence (Put the apple on the towel) sounds like a straightforward
request to put an apple on a towel. But after hearing the last part of the sentence (in the
box), two possible meanings emerge: The sentence could be about where to put the apple
(put it on the towel that’s inside the box; Figure 10.9a), or about which apple (pick the
apple that is on the towel to put in the box; Figure 10.9b).
Tanenhaus reasoned that in most real-life situations we hear sentences while we
are interacting with the environment. Thus, the purpose of this experiment was to see
how the environmental context that accompanies a sentence can influence how a person
moves their eyes to fixate on particular objects in the environment. Tanenhaus used
two pictures. The picture in Figure 10.10a is the “two-apple condition,” in which one
apple is shown on a towel and the other is on a napkin. Figure 10.10b is the “one-apple
condition,” in which one apple is shown on a towel.
The eye movements for participants looking at the two-apple condition, indicated
by the arrows, shows that when participants heard “Put the apple,” they moved their
eyes to the apple on the napkin (arrow A). When they heard “on the towel,” they moved
their eyes to the apple on the towel (B), and when they heard “in the box,” they looked
at the box (C).
Participants in the one-apple condition responded differently. After hearing “Put
the apple,” they moved their eyes to the apple (A). After “on the towel,” they looked at
(a) Put the apple on the towel in the box (b) Put the apple on the towel in the box
■ Figure 10.9 These two pictures indicate two meanings of the sentence “Put the apple on the towel
in the box,” which was used in Tanenhaus et al.’s (1995) eye-movement study. (a) The apple goes on
the towel that’s inside the box. (b) The apple on the towel goes in the box.
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375Language
the other towel (B). However, upon hearing “in the box,” they apparently realized that
the sentence was asking them to move the apple not to the other towel, but to the box,
so they quickly moved their eyes back to the apple (C) and then to the box (D).
In this experiment, the participants’ eye movements provided information about
what they were thinking. We can summarize the two conditions as follows: When there
were two apples, participants initially thought “On the towel means I should pick the
apple that is on the towel.” (They are thinking which apple to pick). But when there was
+
+
B
C
D
A
B
A
C
on the towel (B)
in the box (C, D)
Put the
apple (A)
on the
towel (B) in the box (C)
Put the apple (A)
(b) One-apple condition
(a) Two-apple condition
■ Figure 10.10 The results of Tanenhaus et al.’s (1995) eye-movement study. The way participants
moved their eyes to different parts of the pictures depended on the information provided by the picture.
Note how the eye movements differ in (a) the two-apple condition and (b) the one-apple condition.
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376 Chapter 10
just one apple, participants initially thought “On the towel means I should place the apple
on the towel.” (They are thinking where to place the apple). The important result of this
experiment is that in the one-apple condition, participants’ eye movements changed as
soon as they received information that indicated that they needed to revise their initial
interpretation of the sentence. This immediate responding supports the interactionist
idea that the reader or listener takes both syntactic and semantic information into account
simultaneously. (Also see Altmann & Kamide, 1999, for another demonstration
of how the eyes rapidly respond to the meaning of a sentence.)
Although the controversy regarding whether the syntax-first approach or the interactionist
approach is correct is still not resolved (Bever et al., 1998; Rayner & Clifton,
2002), evidence such as the results of the eye-movement study indicates that semantics
can be taken into account earlier than proposed by the syntax-first approach. Furthermore,
the result of the “apple in the box” experiment also shows that information in
addition to the words in the sentence help determine what a sentence means. This is
important, because in real life we rarely encounter sentences in isolation. Rather, we
encounter sentences while we are in specific environments, or as we are listening to
conversations or reading a story.
That sentences occur within a context is particularly important for reading, because
sentences are typically part of a larger text or story. Thus, when we read a particular
sentence, we already know a great deal of information about what is happening
from what we read before. This brings us to the next level of the study of language—the
study of how we understand text and stories (commonly called discourse processing or text
processing). As we will see, most research in text processing is concerned with how readers’
understanding of a story is determined by information provided by many sentences
taken together.
Test Yourself 10.1
1. What is special about human language? Consider why human language is unique
and what it is used for.
2. What events are associated with the beginning of the modern study of language in
the 1950s?
3. What is psycholinguistics? What are its concerns, and what part of psycholinguistics
does this chapter focus on?
4. What evidence supports the statement that “meaning makes it easier to perceive
letters in words, and words in spoken sentences”?
5. How do the frequency of words and the context of a sentence aid in accessing
words? How does Swinney’s experiment about “bugs” indicate that the meanings of
ambiguous words can take precedence over context, at least for a short time?
6. Why do we say that there is more to understanding sentences than simply adding
up the meanings of the words that make up the sentence?
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377Language
7. Describe the syntax-first explanation of parsing and the interactionist explanation.
What are the roles of syntax and semantics in each explanation? What evidence
supports the interactionist approach?
Understanding Text and Stories
Just as sentences are more than the sum of the meanings of individual words, stories are
more than the sum of the meanings of individual sentences. In a well-written story, sentences
in one part of the story are related to sentences in other parts of the story. Thus,
the reader’s task is to use these relationships between sentences to create a coherent,
understandable story.
The materials used in research on text processing are usually excerpts from narrative
texts. Narrative refers to texts in which there is a story that progresses from one
event to another, although stories can also include flashbacks of events that happened
earlier. An important property of any narrative is coherence—the representation of the
text in a person’s mind so that information in one part of the text is related to information
in another part of the text. Texts with coherence are usually easier to understand
than texts without coherence.
How Inference Creates Coherence
Most of the coherence in texts is created by inference. Inference refers to the process
by which readers create information during reading that is not explicitly stated in the
text. We have had a great deal of experience with inference from our study of memory
in Chapter 7. For example, on page 255 we described an experiment in which participants
read the passage “John was trying to fix the bird house. He was pounding the
nail when his father came out to watch him do the work.” We saw that after reading
that passage, participants were likely to say that they had previously seen the following
passage: “John was using a hammer to fix the birdhouse. He was looking for the nail
when his father came out to watch him.” The fact that they thought they had seen this
passage, even though they had never read that John was using a hammer, occurred because
they had inferred that John was using a hammer from the information that he was
pounding the nail (Bransford & Johnson, 1973). People use a similar creative process to
make a number of different types of inferences as they are reading a text.
Anaphoric Inference Inferences that connect an object or person in one sentence to an
object or person in another sentence are called anaphoric inferences. For example,
consider the following.
Riffifi, the famous poodle, won the dog show. She has now won the last three shows
she has entered.
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378 Chapter 10
Anaphoric inference occurs when we infer that She at the beginning of the second sentence
and the other she near the end both refer to Riffifi. In the previous “John and the
birdhouse” example, knowing that He in the second sentence refers to John is another
example of anaphoric inference.
We usually have little trouble making anaphoric inferences because of the way information
is presented in sentences and our ability to make use of knowledge we bring
to the situation. But here is an example of a quote from a New York Times interview
with former heavyweight champion George Foreman (who has recently been known for
lending his name to a popular line of grills), which puts our ability to create anaphoric
inference to the test.
What we really love to do on our vacation time is go down to our ranch in Marshall,
Texas. We have close to 500 acres. There are lots of ponds and I take the kids out and
we fish. And then, of course, we grill them. (Stevens, 2000)
Based just on the structure of the sentence, we might conclude that the kids were
grilled, but we know that the chances are pretty good that the fish were grilled, not
George Foreman’s children! Readers are capable of creating anaphoric inferences even
under adverse conditions because they add information from their knowledge of the
world to the information provided in the text.
Instrumental Inference Inferences about tools or methods are instrumental inferences.
For example, when we read the sentence “William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet while
he was sitting at his desk,” we infer from what we know about the time during which
Shakespeare lived that he was probably using a quill pen (not a laptop computer!) and
that his desk was made of wood. Similarly, inferring from the passage about John that
he is using a hammer to pound the nails would be an instrumental inference.
Causal Inference Inferences that result in the conclusion that the events described in one
clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous sentence are causal
inferences (Goldman et al., 1999; Graesser et al., 1994; van den Broek, 1994). For example,
when we read the sentences
Sharon took an aspirin. Her headache went away.
we infer that the aspirin caused the headache to go away (Singer et al., 1992). This is an
example of a fairly obvious inference that most people in our culture would make based
on their knowledge about headaches and aspirin.
Other causal inferences are not so obvious and may be more difficult to figure out.
For example, what do you conclude from reading the following sentences?
Sharon took a shower. Her headache went away.
You might conclude, from the fact that the headache sentence directly follows the shower
sentence, that the shower had something to do with eliminating Sharon’s headache. However,
the causal connection between the shower and the headache is weaker than the conFor
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379Language
nection between the aspirin and the headache in the first pair of sentences. Making the
shower–headache connection requires more work for the reader. You might infer that the
shower relaxed Sharon, or perhaps her habit of singing in the shower was therapeutic. Or
you might decide there actually isn’t much of a connection between the two sentences.
Causal inferences create connections that are essential for creating coherence in
texts, and making these inferences can involve creativity by the reader. Thus, reading a
text involves more than just understanding words or sentences. It is a dynamic process
that involves transformation of the words, sentences, and sequences of sentences into
a meaningful story (Goldman et al., 1999; Graesser et al., 1994; van den Broek, 1994).
Sometimes this is easy, sometimes harder, depending on the skill and intention of the
both the reader and writer.
We have, so far, been describing the process of text comprehension in terms of connecting
the meanings of sentences to create a story. Another approach to understanding
text comprehension is to look directly at the nature of the mental representation
that people form as they read a story. This is called the situation model approach to text
comprehension.
Situation Models
A situation model is a mental representation of what a text is about. This approach
proposes that the mental representation people form as they read a story does not indicate
information about phrases, sentences, or paragraphs, but, instead, includes a representation
of the situation in terms of the people, objects, locations, and events that are
being described in the story (Graesser & Wiemer-Hastings, 1999; Zwaan, 1999). The
situation-model approach also proposes that readers vicariously experience events that
are being described in a story and that this experience is often from the point of view of
the protagonist—the main character in the story or the character being described at a
particular point in the story.
For example, in a story about a man walking through a building, the reader would
create a map of the space through which the protagonist is walking and keep track of
the protagonist’s location in the building. According to the idea of situation models,
if specific objects are described in the story, then the reader will have better access to
information about objects that are near to the protagonist or are more visible to the
protagonist (Morrow et al., 1987).
This way of looking at how readers process stories predicts that information about
objects or events that are difficult for the protagonist to access will also be difficult for
the reader to access. An experiment by William Horton and David Rapp (2003) tested
this idea using short passages like the following:
1. Melanie ran downstairs and threw herself onto the couch.
2. An exciting horror movie was on television.
3. She opened a bag of chips and dug right in.
4. She watched a vampire stalk the helpless victim.
5. She had never seen this movie before.
380 Chapter 10
Participants are then presented with one of the following endings:
Blocked story continuation (Figure 10.11a):
6a. Melanie’s mother appeared in front of the TV.
7a. She told Melanie not to forget about her homework.
or
Unblocked story continuation (Figure 10.11b):
6b. Melanie’s mother appeared behind the TV.
7b. She told Melanie not to forget about her homework.
Participants read the story line by line from a computer screen. After sentence 7,
a warning tone sounded, which indicated that the target question was going to be presented.
The target question for the story above was “Was the victim being stalked by a
vampire?” The participant’s task was to answer “yes” or “no” as quickly as possible by
pressing the correct key on the computer keyboard.
The situation-model prediction is that participants who read the blocked story continuation
should react more slowly to the test question because the TV screen, which
Blocked story Unblocked story
(b)(a)
Timetoanswerquestion(ms)
Blocked Unblocked
1,700
1,500
1,600
0
(c)
■ Figure 10.11 Horton and Rapp’s (2003) experiment. (a) In the blocked condition, the story describes
Melanie’s mother as being in front of the TV. (b) In the unblocked condition, the story describes
Melanie’s mother as being behind the TV. (c) The results indicate that the reaction time to answer a
question about something happening on the screen is slower for the blocked condition.
381Language
contained the answer, was blocked, so Mary couldn’t see it. The result, shown in Figure
10.11c, confirms this prediction—responding was slower in the blocked condition.
This supports the idea that readers represent story events in a manner similar to actual
perception. That is, they experience a story as if they are experiencing the situation
described in the text.
Producing Language: Speech Errors
Up until now our emphasis has been on comprehending language—either reading text
or listening to another person speak. But speech is usually not a one-way street; we are
both listeners and speakers. This means we need to broaden our discussion to include
not only how listeners understand the meaning of what others are saying, but also how
speakers create meaning for others to understand.
Producing language is another one of those cognitive processes we achieve rapidly
and easily, but which is actually extremely complex. This complexity becomes apparent
when we consider that the act of speaking involves assembling strings of words that
have been retrieved from memory. This retrieval is rapid—more than 3 words per second
for normal conversation—and is drawn from a lexicon of more than 50,000 words.
Not only are the correct words rapidly retrieved, but they are produced in the correct
order and combined with other words to create a grammatically correct sentence (Dell,
1995; Levelt, 2001).
One technique for determining how we achieve this feat is to use a technique that
has proven valuable in understanding other cognitive processes—analyzing the types
of errors that people make. Speech errors, which are also called “slips of the tongue,”
were made famous by Sigmund Freud, who suggested that slips of the tongue reflected
the speaker’s unconscious motivations (Freud, 1901). According to this idea, introducing
a guest at a party by saying “It gives me great pleasure to prevent . . . ,” when the
speaker means to say “It gives me great pleasure to present . . . ,” might be revealing the
speaker’s distaste for the guest.
Although slips of this kind, which have been called Freudian slips, do occur, there
is little to support Freud’s idea that all slips are caused by unconscious motivation. For
one thing, of all the slips that occur in everyday speech, only a small fraction can be
linked to a person’s unconscious motivations. In addition, this kind of explanation not
only involves guessing as to what the unconscious motivation might be, but it is difficult
or impossible to make predictions of how a particular person’s unconscious motivations
might become translated into speech errors. Thus, stories such as the one about introducing
the guest, or the man who explained his excellent memory by saying, “I have
a pornographic memory” can be “explained” in terms of unconscious motivation, but
only after the fact (Dell, 1995).
Rather than focusing on unconscious motivation, speech researchers have used
speech errors to provide insights into basic mechanisms of language (Bock, 1995; Dell,
1995; Garrett, 1975, 1980). However, studying speech errors is complicated by the fact
382 Chapter 10
that they are very rare, occurring only about 1 or 2 times out of every 1,000 words in
normal conversation (Dell, 1995). Thus, one of the challenges of studying speech errors
is to identify them. Researchers have used a number of methods to do this.
Method
Identifying Speech Errors
One way to identify speech errors is to note them as they happen in everyday speech. This
requires great vigilance by the researcher, who must always be ready to write down an error
when it occurs, and also a great deal of patience, because errors happen so infrequently.
Another problem with this method is that it may result in a biased sample because errors
that are funny or bizarre (for example, switching first letters to create “Hissing his mystery
lecture”) are more likely to be noticed. One way to avoid this sampling problem is to
tape-record samples of speech and then carefully analyze the tapes for speech errors. When
Garnham and coworkers (1981) did this, they identified 200 errors in 200,000 words.
Speech errors have also been created in the laboratory by rapidly presenting word pairs
and using a tone to instruct participants to repeat the pair they just heard (Baars et al., 1975).
This technique has the advantage of increasing the error rate to about 10 percent and also
makes it possible to ask some specific questions about the conditions that result in speech
errors. For example, using this technique, Baars and coworkers (1975) found that slips that
create nonwords, like “beal dack” (when “deal back” was intended) are three times less likely
than ones that create meaningful words, like “real dead” (when “deal red” was intended). A
disadvantage of this laboratory technique is that it creates errors artificially. It is therefore
important to collect both laboratory-produced errors and errors that occur naturally.
Speech Errors and Language Mechanisms
What do speech errors tell us about the basic mechanisms of language? To answer this
question, language researchers focus on two aspects of speech errors:
1. Frequency of different types of errors. The most common errors indicate the
basic units of language production. For example, two of the most common
exchanges, which we will describe below, involve phonemes and words. The
high frequency of these types of slips, plus other evidence, have led to the
conclusion that phonemes and words are basic units of language (Dell, 1995).
2. Patterns of errors. Speech errors do not occur randomly. In many cases, researchers
have identified rules that govern speech errors. These rules provide
insights into mechanisms of normal language production. Phoneme exchanges
and word exchanges illustrate two rules of speech errors.
Phoneme Exchanges Phoneme exchanges, such as saying “fleaky squoor” instead of
“squeaky floor” (Fromkin, 1973), illustrate the consonant-vowel rule: Phonemes of the
same type replace one another. Consonants replace consonants and vowels replace vowels.
(This particular example involves the exchange of consonant clusters “sq” and “fl.”)
383Language
Word Exchanges The following are two examples of word exchanges:
1. “I have to fill up my gas with car” instead of “I have to fill up my car with gas”
(noun exchange).
2. “Once I stop I can’t start” instead of “Once I start I can’t stop” (verb
exchange).
Word exchanges such as these follow the syntactic category rule: When one word replaces
another, the same syntactic categories are used. Nouns slip with nouns (example 1),
and verbs slip with verbs (example 2).
These examples indicate that speech errors are far from random. Speech errors follow
rules that reflect the importance of specific sound units (consonants and vowels)
and parts of speech (nouns and verbs). Our final example of speech errors, word substitution,
illustrates how speech can be influenced by knowledge that a speaker brings to the
situation.
Word Substitutions An example of word substitution is when someone says “Liszt’s second
Hungarian restaurant” instead of “Liszt’s second Hungarian rhapsody.” This type
of error is probably caused by the fact that both “restaurant” and “rhapsody” are associated
with Hungarian. This is therefore an example of an error based on the speaker’s
knowledge of classical music and ethnic restaurants. This is also an example of the
syntactic category rule, because both restaurant and rhapsody are nouns. It also illustrates
substitution of one three-syllable word beginning with “r” with another threesyllable
word beginning with “r.” Clearly, speech errors are influenced by numerous factors,
related both to the basic structure of language and to a person’s prior knowledge.
Producing Language: Conversations
Although language can be produced by a single person talking alone, as when a person
recites a monologue or gives a speech, the most common form of language production
is conversation—two or more people talking with one another. Conversation, or
dialogue, provides another example of a cognitive skill that seems easy but contains
underlying complexities.
In a conversation, other people are involved, so each person needs to take what the
other people are saying into account (Pickering & Garrod, 2004). This is an impressive
accomplishment because we often do not know what the other person is going to say.
Nonetheless, we are usually able to respond to their statements almost immediately.
One way that people deal with these difficulties is that they coordinate their conversations
on both semantic and syntactic levels.
Semantic Coordination
When people are talking about a topic, each person brings his or her own knowledge to
the conversation, and conversations go more smoothly when the participants bring shared
knowledge to a conversation. Thus, when people are talking about current events, it
384 Chapter 10
helps when everyone has been keeping up with the news, and is more difficult when one
of the people has just returned from 6 months of meditation in an isolated monastery.
But even when everyone brings similar knowledge to a conversation, it helps when
speakers take steps to guide their listeners through the conversation. One way this can
be achieved is by following the given–new contract. The given–new contract states that
the speaker should construct sentences so they include two kinds of information: (1)
given information—information that the listener already knows; and (2) new information—information
that the listener is hearing for the first time (Haviland & Clark,
1974). For example, consider the following two sentences.
1. Ed was given an alligator for his birthday.
Given information ( from previous conversation): Ed had a birthday.
New information: He got an alligator.
2. The alligator was his favorite present.
Given information ( from sentence 1): Ed got an alligator.
New information: It was his favorite present.
Notice how the new information in the first sentence becomes the given information
in the second sentence. Susan Haviland and Herbert Clark (1974) demonstrated the
consequences of not following the given–new contract by presenting pairs of sentences
and asking participants to press a button when they felt they understood the second
sentence in each pair. They found that it took longer for the participants to comprehend
the second sentence in pairs like this one:
We checked the picnic supplies.
The beer was warm.
than it took to comprehend the second sentence in pairs like this one:
We got some beer out of the trunk.
The beer was warm.
The reason comprehending the second sentence in the first pair takes longer is that the
given information, that there were picnic supplies, does not mention beer. Thus, the reader
or listener needs to make an inference in the first case that beer was among the picnic
supplies. In contrast, this inference is not required in the second pair because the first
sentence includes the information that beer is in the trunk.
Syntactic Coordination
When two people exchange statements in a conversation, it is common for them to use
similar grammatical constructions. Kathryn Bock (1990) provides the following example,
taken from a recorded conversation between a bank robber and his lookout, which
was intercepted by a ham radio operator as the robber was removing the equivalent of a
million dollars from a bank vault in England.
385Language
Robber: “. . . you’ve got to hear and witness it to realize how bad it is.”
Lookout: “You have got to experience exactly the same position as me, mate, to understand
how I feel.” (from Schenkein, 1980, p. 22)
Bock has added italics to the statements to illustrate how the lookout has copied the form
of the robber’s statement. This copying of form reflects a phenomenon called syntactic
priming—hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the
chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction. Syntactic priming
is important because it can lead people to coordinate the grammatical form of their statements
during a conversation. Holly Branigan and coworkers (2000) illustrated syntactic
priming by using the following procedure to set up a give-and-take between two people.
Method
Syntactic Priming
In a syntactic priming experiment two people engage in a conversation, and the experimenter
determines whether production of a specific grammatical construction by one person
increases the chances that the same construction will be used by the other person.
Participants in Branigan’s experiment were told that the experiment was about how people
communicate when they can’t see each other. They thought they were working with another
participant who was on the other side of a screen (the left person in Figure 10.12a). In
reality, the person on the other side of the screen was a confederate who was working with
the experimenter.
The confederate began the experiment by making a priming statement, as shown on the
left of Figure 10.12a. This statement was in one of the following two forms:
1. “The girl gave the book to the boy.”
2. “The girl gave the boy the book.”
The participant had two tasks: (1) find the matching card on the table that corresponded
to the confederate’s statement, as shown on the right of Figure 10.12a; and (2) describe one
of the response cards to the confederate, as shown in Figure 10.12b. We can conclude that
syntactic priming has occurred if the form of the participant’s statement to the confederate
matches the form of the confederate’s original statement.
Branigan found that on 78 percent of the trials, the form of the participant’s statement
matched the form of the confederate’s priming statement. Thus, if the participant
heard the confederate say “The girl gave the boy the book,” this increased the chances
that the participant would describe a response card like the one shown in Figure 10.12b
as “The father brought his daughter a present” (instead of “The father brought a present
for his daughter” or some other construction). This supports the idea that speakers are
sensitive to the linguistic behavior of other speakers and adjust their behaviors to match.
This coordination of syntactic form between speakers reduces the computational load
involved in creating a conversation because it is easier to copy the form of someone
else’s sentence than it is to create your own form from scratch.
386 Chapter 10
(a)
(b)
Confederate reads statement.
Confederate listening
Participant picks matching
card that matches statement.
Participant picks response
card and describes picture
to confederate.
Response cards
The girl gave
the boy a book.
The father brought
his daughter a present.
Matching cards
■ Figure 10.12 The Branigan et al. (2000) experiment. (a) The participant, on the right, picks from the
matching cards on the table a card with a picture that matches the statement read by the confederate.
(b) The participant then picks a card from the pile of response cards and describes the picture on the
response card to the confederate.
387Language
Let’s summarize what we have said about conversations: Conversations are dynamic
and rapid, but a number of processes make them easier. On the semantic side, people take
other people’s knowledge into account (if they don’t, confusion can result). On the syntactic
side, people coordinate or align the syntactic form of their statements. This makes
speaking easier and frees up resources to deal with the tasks of alternating between understanding
and producing messages that is the hallmark of successful conversations.
Something to Consider
Culture, Language, and Cognition
According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which was proposed by anthropologist Edward
Sapir and linguist Benjamin Whorf, the nature of a culture’s language can affect
the way people think (Whorf, 1956). Although there was little evidence to support this
when Whorf made his proposal, recent research has provided evidence that favors the
idea that language can influence cognition. Debi Roberson and coworkers (2000; also
see Davidoff, 2001) demonstrated that language can affect the way people perceive colors,
by comparing color perception in British participants and participants from a culture
called the Berinmo from New Guinea.
Roberson had the British and Berinmo participants name the colors of 160 Munsell
color chips (small color chips similar to those found in paint stores, but scientifically
color-calibrated to be used in research). The results for the British and Berinmo are
shown in •Color Plate 10.1. These diagrams indicate the color names that each group
assigned to each of the chips. For example, chip 5B-9, indicated by the dot in the diagrams,
was called blue by the British participants and wap by the Berinmo participants.
One difference in the results for the two cultures was that the British used eight different
color names (blue, green, yellow, pink, red, brown, orange, and purple) and the
Berinmo used just five (wap, wor, mehi, kel, and nol). Another difference was that the
borders between the colors were different. For example, look at the area marked yellow
for the British, and compare this to wor for the Berinmo. The Berinmo gave one name
(wor) to many of the chips that the British called yellow, orange, green, and brown.
Having demonstrated differences in how participants in the two cultures assigned
names to the color chips, Roberson and coworkers did an additional experiment to determine
whether the two perceive colors differently. They accomplished this by doing a
categorical perception experiment.
Method
Categorical Perception
In a categorical perception experiment, participants are presented with pairs of stimuli and
are asked to indicate whether they are the same or different. For example, would you say
chips A and B in • Color Plate 10.2 are the same or different? How about chips B and C?
388 Chapter 10
It was probably easier to make the judgment “different” for chips B and C. This is because
most English speakers place chips A and B in the same category (green), but place B and C
in different categories (green and blue). Categorical perception occurs when stimuli that
are in the same categories (like A and B) are more difficult to discriminate from one another
than are stimuli that are in different categories (like B and C).
When Roberson and coworkers presented the British and Berinmo participants
with pairs of colors and asked them to indicate whether they were the same or different,
British participants discriminated more easily between blue and green chips than
the Berinmo, but the Berinmo discriminated more easily between nol and wor than the
British. This means that differences in the way names were assigned to colors (indicated
by the diagrams in •Color Plate 10.1) affected the ability to tell the difference between
colors. The fact that language has an effect on behavior supports the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
(see also Gentner & Goldwin-Meadow, 2003).
Although Roberson’s experiments show that language can affect color perception,
there is also evidence for similarities in color perception across different languages.
Terry Regier and coworkers (2005) provided this evidence by tabulating the color naming
data from speakers of over 100 different languages. Each participant was presented
with the chips in •Color Plate 10.3 and was asked to name the color of each chip. This
is what Roberson did, but in addition participants were asked to pick the best example of
each color. For example, English speakers would pick the best red, the best green, and
so on. Regier’s results, shown in • Color Plate 10.1c, indicate that the “best” colors
tend to cluster around the areas that English speakers call red, yellow, green, and blue.
Notice that there is some variation, but that there are four distinct “islands” that correspond
to the best examples of each color.
What do these results mean? Apparently, language can affect color perception, as
Roberson showed, but there are also limits to the effects of language, as Regier showed.
Other experiments have demonstrated differences in how Westerners and East Asians
think about objects (Iwao & Gentner, 1997), numbers (Lucy & Gaskins, 1997), and
space (Levinson, 1996). See If You Want to Know More on page 392 for more references
on the connection between language and thinking.
Test Yourself 10.2
1. Why do we say that understanding a story involves more than adding up the meanings
of the sentences that make up the story?
2. What is coherence? Inference? What are the different types of inference, and what
is their relation to coherence?
3. What are the assumptions behind the situation model, and what predictions does
this model make?
Categorical
Perception—
Identification
Categorical
Perception—
Identification
Categorical
Perception—
Discrimination
389Language
4. What are speech errors? Describe Freud’s ideas about speech errors and why modern
language researchers do not consider these ideas to be that important.
5. What aspects of speech errors provide information about language mechanisms?
What do phoneme exchanges and word exchanges tell us about language? What
does the example of word substitution that involves Hungarian restaurants indicate
about language mechanisms?
6. Describe how semantic coordination and syntactic coordination facilitate conversations.
Be sure you understand syntactic priming and what it demonstrates about
language production.
7. What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Describe experiments on color perception
that support this hypothesis. Also describe the evidence that indicates that some
aspects of color perception are the same across different languages.
ChapterSummary
1. Language is a system of communication that uses sounds or symbols that enables us
to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences. Human language can be
distinguished from animal communication by its creativity, hierarchical structure,
governing rules, and universality.
2. Modern research in the psychology of language blossomed in the 1950s and 1960s,
with the advent of the cognitive revolution. One of the central events in the cognitive
revolution was Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s behavioristic analysis of language.
3. All the words a person knows are his or her lexicon. Phonemes and morphemes are
two basic units of words.
4. The effect of meaning on the perception of phonemes is illustrated by the phonemic
restoration effect. Meaning, as well as a person’s experience with other aspects
of language, are important for achieving speech segmentation.
5. The ability to understand words is influenced by word frequency and the context
provided by the sentence.
6. Lexical ambiguity refers to the fact that a word can have more than one meaning
and that the word’s meaning in a sentence may not be clear. Lexical priming experiments
show that all meanings of a word are activated immediately after the word is
presented, but then context determines the eventual meaning of the word.
7. The meaning of a sentence is determined by both semantics (the meanings of words)
and syntax (rules for using words in sentences).
8. Parsing is the process by which words in a sentence are grouped into phrases.
Grouping into phrases is a major determinant of the meaning of a sentence. This
process has been studied by using ambiguous sentences.
9. Two mechanisms proposed to explain parsing are (1) the syntax-first approach and
(2) the interactionist approach. The syntax-first approach emphasizes how syntactic
principles such as late closure determine how a sentence is parsed. The interaction-
390 Chapter 10
ist approach states that both semantics and syntax operate simultaneously to determine
parsing. This approach is supported by eye-movement studies.
10. Coherence enables us to understand stories. Coherence is largely determined by
inference. Three major types of inference are anaphoric, instrumental, and causal.
11. The situation model approach to text comprehension states that people represent
the situation in a story in terms of the people, objects, locations, and events that are
being described in the story. Experiments support the idea that a reader often takes
the protagonist’s point of view in the story.
12. One of the major tools in the study of speech production is the determination and
interpretation of speech errors (slips of the tongue). Research showing that some
speech errors are more common than others and that speech errors often follow
rules have provided insights into the mechanisms of normal language production.
13. Conversations, which involve give and take between two or more people, are made
easier by two mechanisms of cooperation between participants in a conversation—
semantic coordination and syntactic coordination. Syntactic priming experiments
provide evidence for syntactic coordination.
14. There is evidence that a culture’s language can influence the way people perceive
and think. Experiments comparing color perception in Westerners and people in
the Berinmo culture have revealed differences in color perception related to language.
However, there is also evidence for some consistency in color perception
across different languages.
Think About It
1. How do the ideas of coherence and connection apply to some of the movies you
have seen lately? Have you found that some movies are easy to understand whereas
others are more difficult? In the movies that are easy to understand, does one thing
appear to follow from another, whereas in the more difficult ones, some things
seem to be left out? What is the difference in the “mental work” needed to determine
what is going on in these two kinds of movies? (You can also apply this kind of
analysis to books you have read.)
2. Next time you are able to eavesdrop on a conversation, notice how the give-andtake
among participants follows (or does not follow) the given–new contract. Also,
notice how people change topics and how that affects the flow of the conversation.
Finally, see if you can find any evidence of syntactic priming. One way to
“eavesdrop” is to be part of a conversation that includes at least two other people.
But don’t forget to say something every so often!
3. One of the interesting things about languages is the use of “figures of speech,”
which people who know the language understand but which nonnative speakers
often find baffling. One example is the sentence “He brought everything but the
kitchen sink.” Can you think of other examples? If you speak a language other than
391Language
English, can you identify figures of speech in that language that might be baffling
to English speakers?
4. Newspaper headlines are often good sources of ambiguous phrases. For example,
consider the following, which were actual headlines: “Milk drinkers are turning to
powder,” “Iraqi head seeks arms,” “Farm bill dies in house,” and “Squad helps dog
bite victim.” See if you can find examples of ambiguous headlines in the newspaper,
and try to figure out what it is that makes the headlines ambiguous.
5. People often say things in an indirect way, but listeners can often still understand
what they mean. See if you can detect these indirect statements in normal conversation.
(Examples: “Do you want to turn left here?” to mean “I think you should turn
left here”; “Is it cold in here?” to mean “Please close the window.”)
If You Want to Know More
1. Animal language. Can monkeys use language in a way similar to humans? This
is a controversial question, with some psychologists answering “yes” and others “no.”
Savage-Rumbaugh, S., & Lewin, R. (1994). Kanzi, the ape at the brink of the human mind.
New York: Wiley.
2. Indirect statements. People use indirect statements all the time (see preceding
Think About It). There is evidence that indirect statements are more prevalent in some
cultures than in others.
Holtgraves, T. (1998). Interpreting indirect replies. Cognitive Psychology, 37, 1–27.
3. Bilingualism. When people speak two or more languages, are these languages
stored together or separately? This question, as well as other questions about the mechanisms
involved in bilingualism, has been studied both behaviorally and physiologically.
Kroll, J. F., & Tokowicz, N. (2005). Models of bilingual representation and processing:
Looking back and to the future. In J. F. Kroll & A. M. B. De Groot (Eds.),
Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches (pp. 531–553). New York: Oxford
University Press.
Perani, D., & Abutalebi, J. (2005). The neural basis of first and second language processing.
Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 15, 202–206.
Petitto, L. A., Katerelos, M., Levy, B. G., Gauna, K., Tétreault, K., & Ferraro, V. (2001).
Bilingual signed and spoken language acquisition from birth: Implications for the
mechanisms underlying early bilingual language acquisition. Journal of Child Language,
28, 453–496.
Snow, C. E. (1998). Bilingualism and second language acquisition. In J. B. Gleason &
N. B. Ratner (Eds.) Psycholinguistics (2nd ed., pp. 453–481). Ft. Worth, TX: Harcourt.
392 Chapter 10
4. Psychology of reading. Much of our use of language involves reading. This involves
vision or touch (in the case of Braille) and demands on memory that are different
than for spoken language.
Price, C. J., & Mechelli, A. (2005). Reading and reading disturbance. Current Opinion in
Neurobiology, 15, 231–238.
Starr, M. S., & Rayner, K. (2001). Eye movements during reading: Some current controversies.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5, 156–163.
5. Language, culture, and the representation of space. Figure 10.13 indicates
three ways of expressing spatial relationships. Different cultures favor different systems,
and there is evidence that language plays an important role in this.
Majid, M., Bowerman, M., Kita, S., Haun, D. B. M., & Levinson, S. C. (2004). Can
language restructure cognition? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 108–114.
6. Culture and categories. Which two objects in Figure 10.14 would you place together?
Which two of the following words would you place together? Panda, Monkey,
Banana. Research has shown that Chinese and Americans sort these items differently
and that these differences may be related to language.
■ Figure 10.14 Which objects belong
together? (Based on Chiu, 1972.)
Relative: The fork is to the left of the spoon.
Absolute: The fork is to the west of the spoon.
Intrinsic: The fork is at the nose of the spoon.
■ Figure 10.13 Three ways of expressing spatial
relationships (Majid et al., 2004).
393Language
Chiu, L-H. (1972). A cross-cultural comparison of cognitive styles in Chinese and
American children. International Journal of Psychology, 7, 235–242.
Ji, L., Peng, K., & Nisbett, R. E. (2000). Culture, control, and perception of relationships
in the environment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 943–955.
7. Effect of brain damage on language. In the 1800s Paul Broca and Karl Wernicke
identified areas in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain that when damaged
cause aphasia—disorders of language. Modern researchers have identified many types
of aphasia.
Farah, M. J., & Feinberg, T. E. (2000). Patient-based approaches to cognitive neuroscience
(pp. 165–271). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
8. Language acquisition. Children usually begin learning language before they
can speak, produce their first words at about a year, and have mastered the basic linguistic
structures of language by about 3 years of age.
Carroll, D. W. (2004). Psychology of language (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Gleason, J. B., & Ratner, N. B. (1998). Language acquisition. In J. B. Gleason & N. B.
Ratner (Eds.), Psycholinguistics (2nd ed., pp. 347–407). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt.
Key Terms
Anaphoric inference, 377
Categorical perception, 388
Causal inference, 378
Coherence, 377
Consonant-vowel rule, 382
Freudian slip, 381
Garden-path model, 372
Garden-path sentence, 372
Given–new contract, 384
Inference, 377
Instrumental inference, 378
Interactionist approach to parsing, 373
Language, 357
Late closure, 371
Lexical ambiguity, 365
Lexical decision task, 364
Lexical priming, 366
Lexicon, 360
Morpheme, 361
Parser, 370
Parsing, 369
Phoneme, 361
Phoneme exchange, 382
Phonemic restoration effect, 361
Psycholinguistics, 359
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 387
Semantics, 368
Situation model, 379
Speech error, 381
Speech segmentation, 363
Syntactic ambiguity, 370
Syntactic category rule, 383
Syntactic priming, 385
Syntax, 368
Syntax-first approach to parsing, 371
Word exchange, 383
Word frequency, 363
Word-frequency effect, 364
Word substitution, 383
394 Chapter 10
To experience these experiments for yourself, go to http://coglab.wadsworth.com. Be
sure to read each experiment’s setup instructions before you go to the experiment itself.
Otherwise, you won’t know which keys to press.
Primary Labs
Word superiority How speed of identifying a letter compares when the letter is isolated
or in a word (p. 361).
Lexical decision Demonstration of the lexical decision task, which has been used to
provide evidence for the concept of spreading activation (p. 364).
Categorical perception—identification Demonstration of categorical perception
based on the identification of different sound categories (p. 388).
Categorical perception—discrimination Demonstration of categorical perception
based on the ability to discriminate between sounds (p. 388).
395
11Problem Solving
What Is a Problem?
The Gestalt Approach: Problem Solving
as Representation and Restructuring
Representing a Problem in the Mind
Insight in Problem Solving
Demonstration: Two Insight Problems
Obstacles to Problem Solving
Demonstration: The Candle Problem
Modern Research on Problem Solving: The InformationProcessing
Approach
Newell and Simon’s Approach
Demonstration: Tower of Hanoi Problem
The Importance of How a Problem Is Stated
Demonstration: The Mutilated-Checkerboard Problem
Method: Think-Aloud Protocol
Test Yourself 11.1
Using Analogies to Solve Problems
Method: Analogical Transfer
Analogical Problem Solving and the Duncker Radiation
Problem
Demonstration: Duncker’s Radiation Problem
Analogical Encoding
Analogy in the Real World
Method: In-vivo Problem-Solving Research
How Experts Solve Problems
Some Differences Between How Experts and Novices
Solve Problems
Creative Problem Solving
Demonstration: Creating an Object
Something to Consider: Sleep Inspires Insight
Test Yourself 11.2
Chapter Summary
Think About It
If You Want to Know More
Key Terms
Some Questions We Will Consider
How does the ability to solve a problem
depend on how the problem is represented
in the mind? (397)
Is there anything special about “insight”
problems? (398)
How can analogies be used to help solve
problems? (413)
What is the difference between how experts
in a field solve problems and how nonexperts
solve problems? (421)
•
•
•
•