LANGUAGE

COMPREHENSION

Topic presenters;
DIDICAN , DIVINA
MATEO, NICOLE Joy
WHAT IS LANGUAGE ?
-a system of conventional spoken, manual
(signed), or written symbols by means of which
human beings, as members of a social group and
participants in its culture, express themselves.

HOW ABOUT
COMPREHENSION ?
-The understanding and
interpretation of what is read.
 LANGUAGE
COMPREHENSION
-The way people understand and interpret the
written and spoken gestured or signed
versions of language .
-Language comprehension is a complex
process that occurs easily and effortlessly by
humans.

-It develops along with the “brain” and is able

to be enhanced with the use of gestures .
LANGUAGE AREAS IN THE BRAIN

Named after two 19th Century

Physicians
PAUL BROCA
&
CARL WERNICKE
WERNICKE’S AREA

Located in the left

temporal lobe

Accountable for
comprehension of sounds
and words .
 BROCA’S AREA

-Located in the left

Frontal Lobe

-Responsible for
articulated language
(Speech production )
MODULAR THEORY

• Compehension as a whole is result

of many different modules

• Parsing is performed initially by a

syntatic module
 INTERACTIVE THEORY

• Syntax and semantics interact during the comprehension

process

• Parsing is performed initially by syntatic , lexical

discourse as well as non –linguistic contextual
information
 PERCEPTION OF
LANGUAGE

1. Spoken Language Perception

-The processes by which humans are
able to interpret and understand the
sounds used in language .

-Input reaches the listener

sequentially over time
2. WRITTEN LANGUAGE
PERCEPTION
-Processes by which humans are able
to interpret and understand the
written words used in the language
STEPS OF THE AUDITIVE PERCEPTION

1. FILTERING

2. ANALYSIS OF PHONETIC &

PHONOLOGICAL DETAIL

3. FINDING WORD BOUNDARIES

4. UNDERSTANDING
1. FILTERING

-The speech signal is filtered from other

surrounding background noises .
Example : Cars driving by

-Abstraction from individual differences

between speakers
3. FINDING WORD BOUNDARIES

• Analysis with the help of prosodic markers such

as stress patterns
Example : “I scream and “ ice cream )

4.UNDERSTANDING

• Understanding of semantic content of words or words

combinations
• Results may change as analysis happens during
speech perception
COHORT MODEL THEORY

• Proposed by Marslen –Wilson & Welch , 1978

• Specifically for spoken word recognition
 • Speakers can recognize a word very
rapidly

• Recognition point (uniqueness point )

Three Stages or word recognition

1. Activate a set of possible candidates
2. Narrow the search to one candidate
3. Integrate single cadidate into semantic and synattic context .
 THE MENTAL LEXICON

Defined as dictionary that conatins information regarding

a word's meaning, pronunciation, syntactic
characteristics

It includes phonological , morphological ,

semnatic and synatatic –that speakers have
about individual words and morphemes
The MENTAL LEXICON FACTS....

• Not organized alphabetically like a dictionary

• Meaning must be taken into consideration as
well because humans fairly often confuse
words with similar meanings .
• A speaker can mentally find the word taht
he/she wants in less than 200 milleseconds .
LEXICAL DESICION TASK

• Participants in this task are required to

respond as quickly and accurately as
posssible to a string of letters presented
on a screen to say if the string is a non-
word or a real word .

• Primming -How the words are linked in our mids +

how the mental lexicon is structured
SENTENCE PROCESSING & MEMORY
SENTENCE PROCESSING

-the processes of recognizing words and appreciating their

meanings and syntactic features, constructing syntactic and
prosodic representations, and assigning thematic roles, focus and
other aspects of propositional and discourse-level semantics.
THEORIES OF SENTENCE PROCESSING

1. GARDEN PATH MODEL OF SENTENCE PROCESSING

• Proposed by Frazier and Fodor in 1978

• The theory suggests that, when encountering ambiguous
sentences, only one meaning is initially processed. Then,
upon reaching the end of, or a key point within, the
sentence, if the meaning ascribed does not work the
sentence is reparsed until a satisfactory meaning can be
ascribed
• “While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods”
While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods

Frazier and Fodor proposed that it was the words ‘the

deer’ that presented the processing difficulty. When the
word ‘ran’ is encountered the initial attachment of ‘the
deer’ as an object of ‘hunted’ can be recognized as
wrong. Therefore, rather than being attached to the
subordinate clause, as would be normal, instead it is
stolen by the matrix verb ‘ran’ in order to become the
theme of the sentence.
 TWO MAIN PRINCIPLES
• Late closure
- processing keeps options open for as long as possible,
and if a word was attached to a clause that had
already been processed, it would no longer be
available for later clauses.

• Minimal attachment
- the longer the unclear phrase is, the more difficult
processing is. If the error signal for a sentence is
close to the head of the mis-analysed phrase it is
easier to recognize, rather than if it's a few more
words.
- “While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods”
is easier to reanalyze than “while the man hunted the
deer that was brown with speckles ran into the
woods” because of the distance between deer and ran
in the second example.
2. CONSTRAINT – BASED MODEL
THEORY

- All possible ways of interpreting a sentence are

analyzed at the same time, and the one with the
most support ‘wins' in terms of the output of the
sentence's meaning.
- Unclear sentences are comprehended through
the application of multiple probabilistic and
predictive constraints, such as the processing of
all possible meanings of a sentence throughout
and at the conclusion of meaning.
MEMORY

According to Matlin and Mclead (2013) memory is

the process of maintaining information over time .
THREE GENERAL PHASES OF THE MOST CURRENT &
GENERALLY ACCEPTED MEMORY MODEL

1.SENSORY MEMORY
- Requires the storage os
sensory events those that are
experienced in real time by
each of the five senses.
2.SHORT –TERM MEMORY
-Stores information recently processed and is limited in terms
of the amount of information it may retain at any given time .
It’s role is primarily to keep data active and readily available .

3. LONG –TERM MEMORY

-Refers to the storage of information over an extended period.
If you can remember something that happened more than just a
few moments ago, whether it occurred just hours ago or decades
earlier, then it is a long-term memory.
DISCOURSE LEVEL
COMPREHENSION &
MEMORY

CONNECTED DISCOURSE
- how we comprehend and remember units of language
larger than the sentence.
BURDEN ON MEMORY
How do you get an elephant into refrigerator?

How do you get a giraffe into a refrigerator?

All of the animals are going to a meeting held by the king of the
jungle. Only one animal does not come, which one is it?

How do you get across a river where dozens of crocodiles live?

These four riddles make up a single set which derives its effect from
the reader’s inclination to treat each riddle as a referring to a separate
situation. To answer them as they were intended, the riddles must be
treated as a connected discourse.
 COMPREHENSION OF DISCOURSE
LOCAL AND GLOBAL DISCOURSE STRUCTURE

• Comprehension of connected discourse depends less on

the meanings of the individual sentences than on their
arrangement .

• LOCAL STRUCTURE- aka “microstructure” is the

relationship between individual sentences in the
discourse.

• GLOBAL STRUCTURE – or “macrostructure” is our

knowledge of the structure corresponding to the
subjects that enables us to comprehend and remember
the shorter passage about that particulat subject .
COHESION
Cohesive relations are relations between two or more
elements in a text that are independent of the structure. e.g.
John and he

A semantic relation of this kind may be set up either within

a sentence with the consequence that when it crosses a
sentence boundary it has the effect of making the two
sentences cohere with one another.

A discourse is coherent if there are semantic relationships

between successive sentences

HALLIDAY & HASAN (1976) –They define cohesion as

reffering to the “range of possibilities for linking something
with what has gone before”.
 CATEGORIES OF COHESION
REFERENCE – specific items within a text/discourse which cannot be “interpreted
semantically in their own right”, but “make reference to something else”
e.g. John goes fishing every other week. He is a very good fisherman.
- In the second sentence “he” refers back to the subject of the first sentence “John”

SUBSTITUTION – it is the process in which one item within a text or discourse is

replaced by another
e.g. Jack’s car is very old and ugly. He should get a nicer one.
- This shows this cohesive relation in which “one” substitutes the word “car”.

ELLIPSIS – simply characterized by “the omission of an item”

e.g. Mary ate some chocolate chip cookies, and Robert [blank] some gummi bears.
- In the given example the predicator “ate” is left out in the second half of the
sentence and is presupposed because it already occurred before.
CONJUNCTIVE COHESION – we express a relationship between phrases or sentences by
using conjunctions such as and, or, but, yet and so on.

LEXICAL COHESION – a tie is made between one sentence or phrase and another by
virtue of the lexical relationships between certain words in the sentence.
e.g.
John caught a snake underneath a bucket.

Repetition The snake is going to suffocate if it stays there very long.

Synonym The serpent is going to suffocate if he does not let it go.

Hyperonym (superordinate) The animal is going to suffocate if he does not let it go.

General word The poor thing is going to suffocate if he does not let it go.

- In these five main types of cohesion, ''the interpretation of a discourse element, is

dependent on another element that can be pointed out in discourse.‘’.
 ANAPHORIC AND CATAPHORIC REFERENCE
When we use an expression to refer back to something previously
mentioned in discourse, the referring expression is called anaphor, and the
previous referent is called an antecedent.

e.g. The woman lost track of her little boy at the mall. She became very
worried.

- Sometimes we use referring expressions to point forward, which is called

cataphoric reference.

e.g. When he arrived, John noticed that the door was open.

- So to understand a simple pair of sentences, we must hold the antecedent

in working memory long enough to link it with the anaphor.

- The use of anaphors also illuminates the role of communicative

conventions in discourse.
 GIVEN/NEW STRATEGY by Clark and Haviland

1. Identify the given and new information in the current

sentence.

Direct matching
- the given information in the target sentence directly matches an
antecedent in the context sentence.

e.g. Ben hopped into a waiting car and sped around the corner. He
swerved to avoid the parked car and smashed into a building.

= Ben hopped into a waiting car and sped around the corner. The old
car lost a wheel and smashed into a building.
2. Finding an antecedent for the given information

Bridging
- We do not have a direct antecedent for the given information but can still tie
the sentences together.

e.g. Last Christmas Eugene went to a lot of parties.

This Christmas he got very drunk again.

= Last Christmas Eugene got absolutely smashed.

= This Christmas he got very drunk again.

3. Attaching the new information to the memory location

- When a sentence refers to something or someone already introduced but

no longer in the foreground, the comprehender must reinstate the
information that is to be matched with the target information.
SUMMARY
A discourse is coherent if its elements are easily related to one
another. At the local or microstructural level, coherence is achieved
primarily through the appropriate use of cohesive ties between
sentences. New sentences are easier to integrate when they have a
clear relation to prior material while presenting new information.

The given/new strategy specifies a three-stage process of

comprehending sentences in discourse: identifying the given and
new information in the current sentence, finding an antecedent for
the given information, and attaching the new information to the
memory location defined by the antecedent. Comprehension is
impeded when there is no antecedent, forcing us to form a bridging
inference, or when the antecedent was not recent, forcing us to
reinstate the antecedent
 MEMORY FOR DISCOURSE
Comprehension and memory are closely related, much of the work needed to
remember a passage is accomplished when we understand it well

Memory for discourse exists on three distinct

levels

SURFACE REPRESENTATION

PROPOSITIONAL
REPRESENTATION

SITUATIONAL
REPRESENTATION
 • We remember the exact words
that we encountered .

PROPOSITIONAL REPRESENTATION

• We construct a propositional representation of the discourse,

which specifies the meaning apart from the exact words used

SITUATIONAL REPRESENTATION

• Situational models represent the state of affairs that a text refers to. The assumption is
that as we comprehend the propositions of a text, we construct a mental or situational
model of the world as described by a text.
REFERENCES
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/sentence-processing
• https://www.academia.edu/32543890/Language_Discourse_Comprehension_and_
Understanding
• https://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/docs/publications/15283468484f3405c27016
a.pdf
• https://www.pitt.edu/~perfetti/PDF/Graesser%20Millis%20&%20%20Zwaan.pdf

• https://www.essay.uk.com/free-essays/psychology/garden-path-model.php

• https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.slideserve.com%2FT
homas%2Fmental-lexicon&psig=AOvVaw1VqTsFLUqvJrflU73c3rSl&ust=1622726596
206000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=2ahUKEwjLhPnjhfnwAhXzNKYKHdyLAS8QjRx
6BAgAEAc

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2649675/?fbclid=IwAR3wDmbg7Y
W_V9KwmlGgQx4Lh_7eM13Jw9Cxz7YH7n-RRD3MT0FjbugRmbQ
• https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-long-term-memory-2795347
• https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1075455.pdf

• https://www.linguistics-journal.com/2014/01/08/does-visual-and-auditory-word-p
erceptions-have-a-language-selective-input-evidence-from-word-processing-in-sem
itic-languages/
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KEEP SAFE