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Winter 99, Final |
Part 1: Multiple Choice. Circle the letter corresponding to the correct answer. Only one answer is correct for each question. (1 point each)1. Which of the following models assumes that text comprehension is primarily a
bottom-up process? 2. According to Grice's Maxim of _____ speakers should tell the truth as they know it
or acknowledge the uncertainty of what they are telling you. 3. _____ are deductions or guesses based on evidence in a text or derived from a
person's preexisting knowledge. 4. Which of the following models uses distributed representations of words? 5. _____ models of lexical access assume that lexical entries are always accessed in
order of decreasing frequency. 6. Which of the following symptoms is often associated with damage to the right
cerebral cortex? 7. _____ is formulated at the level of analysis that Marr referred to as the hardware
implementation. 8. If Slobin (1966) had found that non-reversible active sentences (e.g., "The
fish swallowed the hook.") are understood _____ non-reversible passive sentences
(e.g., "The hook was swallowed by the fish."), then the derivational theory of
complexity would have been supported. 9. The goal of a generative grammar is to formulate a small set of rules that can
generate _____ of a language. 10. The initial "construction" phase of processing in Kintsch's (1988)
Construction-Integration model of discourse understanding is _____. 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. 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 TRUE or FALSE 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. 12. Reversible versus Nonreversible Sentences To determine if sentences are reversible or nonreversible I would present them to a group of participants and ask them to judge whether they still make sense when the agent and object are reversed (e.g., "The dog ate the bone." --> "The bone ate the dog."). Those for which a majority responded "yes" could then be classified as reversible while those for which a majority responded "no" could be classified as nonreversible. 13. Psychological Distance Between Two Events in a Story To measure the psychological distance between two events in a story I would present the story to a group of participants along with several other stories then ask them to make speeded true/false judgements by pushing a TRUE or FALSE button as quickly as possible in response to test sentences presented on a computer screen. I would measure the reaction time for the second of the two events under two conditions, when it is preceeded by a the first event and when it is preceeded by an event from another story, and use the difference between these two times as my measure of the psychological distance between the two events. 14. Word Frequency I would begin by collecting a very large sample of naturally occurring language such as all the magazines with a circulation of greater than 10,000 published in the U. S. during 1998. To determine the frequency of a given word, I would then calculate the number of times it occurs (per million words) in my sample. 15. Memorability of a Text I would first ask a group of 20 participants to read the text at their own normal reading speed, then try to recall it in writing. I would score the number of propositions correctly recalled by each participant (giving credit only when the predicate and all its arrguments are explicitly mentioned) and then use the average (mean) number of propositions recalled as my measure of the memorability of the text. Part 3: Short Essay. Answer each of the following questions in half a page or less. Be sure to use operational definitions and/or examples were they are appropriate. (5 points each16. Describe the difference between symbolic and subsymbolic processing and give an example of each from the psychology of language. Grading Criteria:
Example Answer: In a symbolic process the meaningful symbols that we are interested in (e.g., letters, words, setences, story events) are represented locally and these representations are directly manipulated by the process. Lexical access in Forster's (1981) model provides an example of a symbolic process. In this model each word has its own local representation (lexical entry) and these representations are directly accessed by a search process that compares each one to a perceptual input. In a subsymbolic process the meaningful symbols that we are interested in are represented in a distributed fashion and the process does not directly manipulate them. Instead, it manipulates the bits and pieces which combine to form our distributed representations of these symbols. Seidenberg and McClelland's (1989) model of word recognition and naming provides a good example of subsymbolic processing. In this model, activation and inhibition spread among a set of subsymbolic orthographic and phonological processing units which can be combined to create distributed representations of words. 17. Mandler and Johnson (1977) found that narrative events categorized as "settings" or "beginnings" are recalled better than "outcomes" or "attempts", which in turn are recalled better than "endings" or "reactions". They interpret this result as evidence for the psychological reality of their story grammar which makes use of these categories. Propose an alternative explanation for this finding and design an experiment to determine which explanation is correct. 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 Mandler and Johnson are correct? What pattern of results would you expect if your alternative explanation is correct? Grading Criteria:
Example Answer: One potential alternative is that the classification of an event is confounded with the number of causal connections it has to other story events, and that is why some types of events are recalled better than others. To find out, I would design a set of stories in which the endings (which are usually recalled poorly) have more causal connections than the beginnings (which are usually recalled well). I would then ask a group of participants to read and recall the stories. The dependent variable would be the probability of recalling the statements classified as endings or beginnings. The independent variable would be the category of the statement (ending or beginning). If Mandler and Johnson are correct, the beginnings will be recalled better than the endings. If the alternative hypothesis is correct, the endings will be recalled better than the beginnings. 18. What are context effects and whay are they important? Give two examples of context effects from the psychology of language. Grading Criteria:
Example Answer: Context effects occur when the processing that occurs at one level of representation is facilitated by a meaningful context at a higher level of representation. The word supperiority effect, in which letters are identified more quickly in the context of a word than when they are presented alone, is one example of a context effect. Context effects also occur in lexical access. Words are identified more quickly when they are presented in a meaningful sentence than when they are presented alone. Context effects are important because they provide evidence (even though that evidence is sometimes disputed) that processing is interactive rather than strictly bottom-up. 19. Describe two important limits of the human memory system and explain how each of them effects our ability to create a coherent mental representation of a discourse. Grading Criteria:
Example Answer: A great deal of research on human memory and comprehension suggests that readers are unable to perceive a relationship between two ideas unless those ideas co-occur in short-term memory. Because of this the limited capacity of short-term memory ( 7 plus-or-minus 2 chucks) and the relatively long times required to conduct a systematic search of long-tem memory impose important limits on our ability to create a coherent mental representation of a discourse. If short-term memory had an unlimited capacity, we could be simultansously aware of all the ideas in a discourse and instantly perceive the relationships between them. Because short-term memory is not unlimited, we are only able to keep (approximately) one state or event from earlier in the discourse in short-term memory as we read each new sentence. Any time that this event is not related to the new sentence we are required to search through long-term memory to maintain the coherence of our representation. If we could search long-term memory instantaneously, this would not be a problem. Because we cannot search long-term memory instantaneously, these reinstatement searches require time and effort that further limits our ability to create a coherent mental representation of the discourse. |
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