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Winter99, Exam 3 |
Part 1: Multiple Choice. Circle the letter corresponding to the correct answer. Only one answer is correct for each question. (1 point each)1. MacWhinney, Bates, and Kliegl's (1984) animacy strategy suggests that the agent of
the pseudo-sentence _____ is _____. 2. If Slobin (1966) had found that non-reversible active sentences (e.g., "The
burglar noticed the alarm.") are understood more quickly than non-reversible passive
sentences (e.g., "The alarm was noticed by the burglar."), then the _____ would
have been supported. 3. The goal of _____ is to formulate a small set of rules that can generate all the
grammatical sentences of a language, and no non-sentences. 4. Garden path sentences like _____ are locally ambiguous syntactic structures whose
ultimate resolution is toward an unfavored syntactic representation. 5. Which of the following models explicitly assumes that the structures and processes
underlying language comprehension are independent of the structures and processes that
mediate other cognitive abilities? 6. According to _____ sentences have to be "de-transformed" during
comprehension and the representation of a sentence in memory consists of a simple active
"kernel" plus a list of transformations. 7. According to Grice's (1975) Maxim of _____, speakers should say all that is
necessary but no more. 8. Warrington and Shallace (1984) found that some patients with brain injuries are able
to name objects that belong to biological categories (for example, "dog" or
"flower") but not human artifacts (such as "hammer" or "light
bulb") while others show exactly the opposite pattern. This is an example of _____. 9. A(n) _____ consists of a single predicate and one or more arguments. 10. Chomsky's Transformational Generative Grammar is formulated at the level of
analysis that Marr refers to as the _____. Part 2: Definitions. In just 1 or 2 sentences, give an operational definition for each of the following concepts. Your definition may come from an experiment you are familiar with or you may make up your own definition (as long as it accurately defines the concept and is operational). (2 points each)Grading Criteria:
11. Reversible versus Nonreversible Sentences To classify sentences (e.g., "The television program frightened the child.") as reversible or nonreversible, I would present them to a native speaker of the language (English in this example) with the agent and object reversed (e.g., "The child frightened the television program.") and ask him or her to indicate whether or not each sentence "makes sense". Those for which the answer is "yes" would be classified as reversible, those for which the answer is "no" would be classified as nonreversible. 12. Psychological Distance Between Two Words in a Sentence To measure the psychological distance between two words in a sentence I would present the sentence to a group of participants along with several other sentences then ask them to make speeded recognition judgements (by pushing a YES or NO button as quickly as possible in response to words presented on a computer screen). I would measure recognition time for the second word in the sentence under two conditions, when it is predeeded by a the first word and when it is preceeded by a word from a different sentence, and use the difference between these two times as my measure of the psychological distance between the two words in the sentence. 13. Similarity of Two Sentences To assess the similarity of two sentences I would include one of them in a list of to-be-remembered sentences, then ask a group of participants to choose between them in a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test. The similarity of the two sentences could then be defined as the percentage of participants who incorrectly choose the sentence that was not on the study list. 14.Sentence Verification Time As in a typical sentence verification experiment, I would ask show participants some sentences on a computer screen and ask them to indicate whether each is true or false by pressing a YES or NO button as quickly as possible. Sentence Verification Time could then be defined as the time that elapses between the presentation of a sentence, and a correct button press. 15. Word Frequency I would begin by collecting a very large sample of naturally occurring language such as all the magazines with a circulation of more than 10,000 published in the U. S. in January, 1999. To determine the frequency of a given word, I would then calculate the number of times it occurs (per million words) in my sample. Part 3: Answer each of the following questions. Use no more than half a page for each answer and be sure to use examples were they are appropriate. (5 points each)16.In class we discussed the importance of converging operations, using multiple experimental procedures to test the same theory or hypothesis (this is also discussed in Stanovich). Give an example from the psychology of language where psychologists were led astray because they failed to make use of converging operations. Give another example where converging operations were used successfully. Be sure to explain your examples. Grading Criteria:
Example Answer: An excellent example of what happens when psychologists fail to use converging operations can be found in the literature on semantic memory. Between the time of Collins and Quillion's (1969) hierarchical network model and McCloskey and Glucksberg's (1979) feature based model, virtually all research in this area made use of the exact same experimental procedure, the sentence verification task. Unfortunately, the success of McCloskey and Glucksberg's model makes it clear that the differences in reaction time observed in this task are determined by the complexity of the decision task that follows retrieval from semantic memory. As a result, these experiments tell us little, if anything, about how information is represented in, and retrieved from semantic memory. At the other end of the spectrum, we find research on the psychological reality of propositions. Here psychologists have used a variety of experimental procedures such as free recall, cued recall, measures of reading time, and priming in a probe recognition procedure. Because all of these procedures lead us to the conslusion that propositions are used to represent the meaning of a sentence (or text) in memory, this conclusion is now widely (though not universally) accepted. 17. According to Slobin (1966) non-reversible passive sentences (e.g., "The bagel was eaten by the boy.") are easier to understand than reversible passive sentences (e.g., "The girl was chased by the boy."). Design an experiment that uses the tradeoff between processing complexity and the storage capacity of short-term memory to test this hypothesis. Be sure to describe your independent and dependent variables, using operational definitions and/or examples where they are appropriate. What pattern of results would you expect if the hypothesis is true? What pattern of results would you expect if the hypothesis is false? [Hint: You may wish to use a methodology similar to that employed by Savin and Perchonock (1965) in their test of the Derivatioinal Theory of Complexity.] Grading Criteria:
Example Answer: I would present participants with a list of unrelated sentences. Each sentence would be followed by a list of eight randomly selected digits. Participants would be required to repeat back each sentence verbatim, then repeat back as many of the eight digits as they could remember. All of the sentences would be passive sentences taken from Slobin (1966) except for some filler sentences that would not be scored. The dependent variable would be the number of randomly selected words recalled correctly (0 - 8). The independent variable would be the reversibility of the sentences (as in Slobin, 1966). Half of the passive sentences would be reversible, meaning that the subject and object could potentially reverse roles (as in, "The girl was chased by the boy."). The other half would be non-reversible, meaning that the subject and object could not change roles (as in, "The bagel was eaten by the boy."). If the hypothesis is true, I would expect more digits to be recalled when the sentence is non-reversible. If the hypothesis is false, I would expect to find no difference between the reversible and non-reversible sentences. |
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