Chapter 4

COMPREHENSION:
UNDERSTAND WHAT WE HEAR
AND READ
GROUP 3:
1. Lê Kim Tiền
2. Trần Kim Trâm
3. Lê Thị Bổn
 Chapter 4
COMPREHENSION: UNDERSTAND
WHAT WE HEAR AND READ
The comprehension of sounds

The comprehension of words

The comprehension of sentences

The comprehension of texts

THE COMPREHENSION OF
SOUNDS
Take examples:
(1) It was found that the _eel was on the axle.
→ wheel
(2) It was found that the _eel was on the shoe.
→heel
(3) It was found that the _eel was on the orange.
→peel
(4) It was found that the _eel was on the table.
→meal
 THE COMPREHENSION OF
SOUNDS
 The insertion of a different missing sound
(phoneme) to create a separate but
appropriate “eel” word in each sentence→
phoneme restoration effect.

 Listeners don't accurately record what they

hear, they report what they expected to hear
from the context, even if it means they must
add a sound that was never actually spoken at
the beginning of the target word.
THE COMPREHENSION OF SOUNDS

 People don't necessarily hear each of words

spoken to them→ comprehension(Comp) isn't
the passive recording of whatever is heard or
seen; listeners are not tape recorders nor
readers video cameras.
 Comp is strongly influenced by even the
slightest of changes in discourses which the
listener is attending to.
 Comp isn't a simple item by item analysis of
words in a linear sequence
THE COMPREHENSION OF SOUNDS

 Listeners & readers process chunks of information

and somtimes wait to make decisions on what is
comprehended until much later in the sequence.

 We don't seem to listen to each word individually &

comprehend its meaning in isolation.

 We seek contextual consistency & plausibility, even

if it comes to adding a sound or inventing a word
that wasn't actually spoken.
THE COMPREHENSION OF SOUNDS

 We don't hear vowels & consonants as isolated

sounds, we can measure acoustic information
extremely precisely with the help of machines.
/p/- “pool”: is pronounced with puckered lips .
/p/- “peel” or “ spring”: with the lips spread.

→ these details may seem trivial to a native speaker

of English but they are significant enough
acoustically to be heard as contrasting phonemes in
other languages.
THE COMPREHENSION OF SOUNDS

 Phoneticians have been unable to explain how

this variation is processed by the mind or how
all the phonetic differences which occur among
all the many languages of the world can be
accounted for in terms of the common,
universal process of perception.

 Psycholinguists have come up with some

explainations for this most fundamental level
of comp:
THE COMPREHENSION OF WORDS

＋The main feature which english speakers

attend to is the voice onset timing (VOT) of the
initial consonant.

＋The most significant acoustic difference

between English consonants like /b/ & /p/ is the
length of time it takes between the initial puff
of air that begins these sounds & the onset of
voicing in the throat that initiates any vowel
sound which follow the consonants
THE COMPREHENSION OF SOUNDS

 Humans are actually born with the ability to focus

in on VOT diferences in the speech sounds they
hear.
 People tend to categorize these minute phonetic
difference in a non-continual, binary fashion.
 When subjects heard sounds with a VOT of
25mlseconds, they rarely judged the sound to be
50% voiceless & 50% voiced, they classified it as
one sound or the other→ categorical perception
THE COMPREHENSION OF WORDS

 The comp of words is indeed a very

complex psycholinguistic process.
 One model that psycholinguists have

adopted to account for this complexity is

Parallel Distributed Processing(PDP).
 Psycholinguists use several separate but
simultaneous & parallel processes when
they try to understand spoken or written
language.
THE COMPREHENSION OF WORDS

hear a stimulate an Logogens+individual

word or individual neurons in a
see logogen/ lexical gigantic neuronal
detection device network

logogens are
COMPREHENSION( activated + work in
comp) parallel & in concert
with other logogens

**how we access the words stored in our mental

lexicon → logogen model of comp.
THE COMPREHENSION OF WORDS

 An example of the usefulness of a PDP approach to

the comp of words is an experience manu of us
encounter on an almost daily basis, psycholinguists
term the Tip of the tongue(TOT) phenomenon.

 We can't recall a word from our long-term memory

storage & instantly recognize the word when it is
presented to us→ on the tip of our tongue.

 Psycholinguists have discovered intriguing aspects

of the TOT phenomenon:
THE COMPREHENSION OF WORDS

＋ The momentarily lost word isn't always

completely forgotten.

＋ Parts of the word are often subject to

recall.

＋ Most commonly, these remembered

fragments are the first letters/ first syllable.
THE COMPREHENSION OF WORDS

 Often we have vague memories of the

beginning & the ending of TOT terms but not
the middle, which is submerged→ Bathtub
effect.
EX: to recall an obscure word, it refers to the belief
that everything that happens to us has already been
ordained by God ( that's means “ predestination”)→
have some TOT memory of how the word
“predestination” begins:
＋ a polysyllabic word begins with “pre-”
＋ end with an “-ion”
＋ “-destinat-”submerged→ “bathtub effect”
THE COMPREHENSION OF WORDS

Bathtub effect allows us to search for words in

a dictionary because:
＋ since memory of the beginning of the missing
word allows us to access alphabetical files

＋conversely,the memory of how the word ends

allows us to use rhyming as one strategy to
confirm the word.
→ recognize the word instantly if it is presented to
us => partial recollection, remember the word.
THE COMPREHENSION OF WORDS

 Schematic knowledge(SK), based on all of our

life experiences, assist the lexical search process.
Ex: to recall an obscure word, it refers to the belief
that everything that happens to us has already been
ordained by God ( that's means “ predestination”)
＋ we may see a word “ Presbyterian”→ rejected
this word bcs of the capital letter( the word we were
trying to retrieve was not a proper noun)→ we
looked at morphological word => SK.
THE COMPREHENSION OF WORDS

 Spreading activation networks: the more you think

about the missing term & the more you contrast it with
similar → the more pieces of knowledge you activate.
Ex: to recall an obscure word, it refers to the belief that
everything that happens to us has already been
ordained by God ( that's means “ predestination”)
list of words: “prestidigitation, pretension, predilection”
→don't fit the lexical network you have established→
depending on yr linguistic + SK → help accelerate of
lexical relationships→ the target word you are searching
for is reached.
 THE COMPREHENSION OF
SENTENCES

Comprehension

The decoding of sounds, letters, lexical meaning

The untangling of the semantic of sentence

THE COMPREHENSION OF
SENTENCES

Chomsky’s model
All sentences were “generated” from
phrase structure skeleton which was
then fleshed out into everyday
utterances by a series of
transformational rules.
(Transformational-Generative grammar
(TG))
 THE COMPREHENSION OF
SENTENCES
Transformational – Generative Grammar
 Transformations are plenteous and powerful
 Transformations create many varieties of “surface
structure” by rearranging, deleting, adding, or
substituting words which was found in the “deep
structure” of original PS skeleton
 THE COMPREHENSION OF
SENTENCES

E.g: (1) The dog is chasing the cat. SURFACE STRUCTURE

A sentence that has
TRANSFORMATION run through one or
Necessary changes more transformations
applied to the deep (performance)
DEEP structure in order to
STRUCTURE produce a surface
A sentence structure
produced by
PS skeleton.
(competence) negative -passive -interrogative
(2) Isn’t the cat being chased by the dog?
 (1) is easy to comprehend and remember than (2)
 Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC)

Difficulty in comprehension was derived from the number of

transformations that were added on to the original phrase
structure of the sentence.

Affirmative • You are a student.

Negative • You are NOT a student.

Interrogative • Are you a student?

Interrogative - Negative • Aren’t you a student?

 Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC)
Subjects were given a random assortment of sentences and
asked to recall both sentences
Example: (1) The dog is chasing the cat
=> plus an additional transformation- the negative
(2) The dog isn’t chasing the cat.
=> plus two additional transformations- the passive, the interrogative
(3) Is the cat being chased by the dog?
=> plus three additional transformations- the passive, the
interrogative and the negative
(4) Isn’t the cat being chased by the dog?
=> The number of words remembered at the end of each sentence
seemed to correlate inversely with the number of transformations
required to generate each of sample sentences
Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC)

Unexplainable exceptions:
 Sentences, which had undergone only one transformational

change, into the negative, often took just as much time to

match as sentences with two or three transformations,
which are much more complicated than the negative rule.
E.g: The dog isn’t chasing the cat.
 Is the cat being chased by the dog?

 Passive sentence takes less time to recall than negative

sentences.
E.g: The cat is being chased by the dog.
=> The dog isn’t chasing the cat.
 THE COMPREHENSION OF
The semantic factors
SENTENCES
 It takes less time for semantically plausible sentences.
E.g: (7) The struggling swimmer was rescued by the lifeguard.
(8) The struggling swimmer rescued the lifeguard.
 Passive sentences like (7 took less time to process than
active sentences like (8) because they were semantically
more plausible.
 Negation is grammatically simple, but semantically
difficult to comprehend.
E.g: The struggling swimmer was rescued by the lifeguard.
The struggling swimmer was not rescued by the
lifeguard.
 The semantic factors

 It takes less time for semantically plausible sentences.

E.g: (7) The struggling swimmer was rescued by the lifeguard.
(8) The struggling swimmer rescued the lifeguard.
 Passive sentences like (7) took less time to process than
active sentences like (8) because they were semantically
more plausible.
 Negation is grammatically simple, but semantically
difficult to comprehend.
E.g: (11) It’s not true that Wednesday never comes after a day
that’s not Tuesday.
 THE COMPREHENSION OF
Ambiguity
SENTENCES
 Sentences which contain more complex information in
the clause preceding the target phoneme will create a
correspondingly greater lag in reaction time.
/b/
E.g: (12) The men started to drill before they were ordered
to do so. ambiguous
using an instrument or rehearsing marching formations
(14) The men stared to march before they were ordered
to do so. not ambiguous
 The subjects took several tens of milliseconds longer to hit
the button when they heard the /b/ for sentence (12)
because of the ambiguity of the words ‘drill’, which
immediately preceded the target sounds
 THE COMPREHENSION OF
Garden-pathing
SENTENCES
 The linear left-to-right unfolding of sentence structure
helps the listener/reader anticipate the next word or words
which will follow.
E.g: (16) Since Jay always jogs a mile ________seems like a
short distance to him.
 ‘mile’ follows ‘jogs’ - Noun + Verb + Noun => we expect for
simple sentences
 ‘seems’ – confusion => we chose the wrong path of
comprehension
 slightly modify => to remove any ambiguity about the
direction of the sentence
(17) Since Jay always jogs a mile this seems like a short
distance to him.
 The comprehension of text

• Psycholinguistic research into the comprehension of

texts has demonstrated that the presence or absence of
background information can dramatically affect the way
we remember a piece of discourse.
With hocked gems financing him, our hero bravely defied
all scornful laughter that tried to prevent his scheme. Your
eyes deceive you, he had said, an egg not a table correctly
typified this unexplored planet. Now three study sisters
sought proof, forging along sometimes through calm
vastness, yet more often over turbulent peaks and valleys.
 The comprehension of text
Days became weeks as many doubters spread fearful
rumors about the edge. At last, from nowhere, welcome
winged creatures appeared, signifying momenrous
success.
• Not only did you probably experience difficulty in
recalling the exact wording and the sequence of
sentences in this seemingly incoherent account, you
may also have wondered what it was all about.
• In the psycholinguistic experiment that contrasted
subjects’ ability to recall paragraphs, those who were
given an appropriate title first demonstrated much more
accurate recall than those who were not.
The comprehension of text

• This suggests that top-down information, which provides

general background knowledge about a text, is useful in
the comprehension of larger units of language because
it helps activate mental associations which then assist in
overall comprehension and recall.
Comprehension concluded
• In the comprehension of speech sounds, we see further
evidence that some parts of human language are innate
and do not have to be learnt.
• The research into the comprehension of words has
shown that we are very much affected by contexts and
that our understanding is both facilitated and
complicated by the different pieces of knowledge we
possess.
• The grammatical structure of a sentence might initially
influence the garden path we choose in trying to
understand it but the greatest influence on sentence
comprehension is meaning.
Comprehension concluded

• Comprehension of larger units of language also

indicates the importance of meaning. Text that fits into a
context which we understand and expect are
comprehended more quickly and remembered more
readily than ones which are presented to us without a
context.