Questions tagged [psycholinguistics]
Questions that are about the neurobiological and psychological factors that affect the acquisition, comprehension and utilisation of the language in human beings.
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34 views
Why are the organization of mental lexicon and lexical access interdependent?
I read in Carroll ("Psychology of Language") that how the mental/internal lexicon is organized and how we access lexical information are interdependent issues.
However, he does not really ...
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31 views
What are some more examples of doubly centre embedded clauses?
Hey guys I am a uni student doing psycholinguistics and currently studying doubly centre embedded clauses for a study on comprehension.
For example a phrase such as: "The man the boy the cat ...
0
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1answer
49 views
Term for Regional “Words per Minute”
Is there a term for the variation in how many words per minute is spoken on average by people in various regions of the country/world? A focus group mentioned they wished our Tech Support personnel ...
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0answers
29 views
Relationship between the complexity of text analysis and the dependency distance
According to (Liu, 2008), a text is more complex if it has longer dependency distance. Does this automatically mean that complex text analyses entail relating different words at a greater dependency ...
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0answers
20 views
What are the differences between Frames and Image Schemata?
I know there are several schema based theories in cognitive sciences, including psychology and linguistics. I am also aware that they mostly share a lot in common, as, for instance, Rumelhart (1981) ...
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0answers
19 views
PcIbex Online experiments - Judgement task
I was wondering if anyone has some experience working with the PCIbex for creating experiments? In particular, I'm trying to get the "addtable" command to work with a csv file of my test ...
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1answer
48 views
Phonological parallel of a Lexical Decision Task
Lexical Decision Tasks have been used in psycholinguistics for long. It basically asks the participant if the word shown is meaningful (e.g. GIRL) or not (e.g. GISL) (ref: link).
But does a test like ...
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2answers
100 views
Why is research on grammatical gender important?
I was wondering why is research on grammatical gender important? Why is exploring this area of linguistics of any interest to linguists? What can it tell us about language (especially with regards to ...
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0answers
15 views
Does anyone know where to download the expanded MRC Psycholinguistics Database with Imageability Ratings?
I've been reading a journal entitled 'Automatic Expansion of the MRC Psycholinguistic Database Imageability Ratings ' and would like to use the expanded dataset for my research. Does anyone know where ...
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36 views
What is the phenomenon that each word variation is regarded equally, not a variation of the root?
This is a thing that I remember that I read in a cognitive psychology book, but I can't find it out. For example, the word cats has two morphemes: cat + s. So we usually regard cats as a morphological ...
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0answers
65 views
What is shallow semantic processing?
What exactly is "shallow semantic processing", and how is it related to syntactic analysis?
Is it correct to say that syntactic processing of a text is the preliminary step for shallow semantic ...
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0answers
33 views
Does the lexical path get slower with more entries
The lexical path of the dual-route hypothesis of reading states that people recognize whole words from memory. Does this theory assume the search time becomes greater with more words in the lexicon?? ...
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1answer
161 views
Why is there pressure to change seemingly neutral words that some consider 'offensive' to their more 'neutral' synonyms?
Clearly, there is now pressure to stop using words such as whitelist/blacklist (which are now considered racist) and instead replace them with allowlist/denylist; master/slave terminology in tech is ...
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1answer
59 views
Term for conversational actions meant to influence emotional state
Is there a term for the set of conversational actions/tools that instead of exchanging direct information, seek to instead affect a certain emotional state?
Examples of such actions would include ...
3
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0answers
93 views
Linguistic overview/critique of the Tomatis method
Some advertisements for language training material (like this and this) have a dubious claim that each language has its own frequency range of sounds, or a "pass band", so that listening to sound, ...
6
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3answers
294 views
A distance on words
I am not an expert in linguistics at all; more of a physicist instead. So I don't know if there are any defined distances on words D(W1, W2) that really represents how the human memory works; for ...
5
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1answer
170 views
Do humans differ from other animals by being able to push and pop memory?
The Chomsky hierarchy of types 0,1,2,3 grammars correspond, as he showed, to the abstract automata classified in accordance with their use of memory. The type 2 grammars, the context free phrase ...
0
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2answers
194 views
How did Proto-Indo-Europeans view the world? [closed]
I was watching a video about Proto-Indo-European culture by Xidnaf at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErXa5PyHj4I. It said that Proto-Indo-Europeans probably had most or all of these philosophical ...
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1answer
65 views
Are there any studies on complete or partial language loss due to brain injuries?
Several years ago, I read about certain cases of complete or partial language loss in patients (mostly soldiers) who had previously suffered certain brain damage.
The research included several cases, ...
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0answers
60 views
Could certain languages encourage different models of sentence processing?
I'm gonna be frank: I'm a high school student who has limited experience with linguistics. I've never studied it, I've just read a textbook and a handful of seminal studies. Recently, though, I was ...
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0answers
67 views
Carrying a mistake in a sentence until contradiction
I am new to the field of linguistics so please forgive any ignorance or naivety, but there is something I have been thinking about recently and cannot find anything about it online. I suppose there ...
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1answer
2k views
What are External and Internal language?
I would like to know about External and Internal language.
Suppose I was talking about a person who was not either good or great. I was praising him in my speech as he was my superior though I felt ...
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0answers
63 views
Sociolinguistics/Psycholinguistics: Does imitation play any role in child language acquisition?
Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics: Does imitation play any role in child language acquisition?
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5answers
473 views
Word meaning as function of the composition of its phonemes
tl;dr
Linguists like to claim that the mapping from sounds to word meanings is mostly arbitrary. Can you point out research that supports this claim? Specificllay I am looking for hard evidience in ...
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0answers
112 views
Accidentally speak Japanese on reflex
There is one time I woke up late and accidentally speak in Japanese "yabai" which means "oh no" or "this is bad", when I came around after finishing getting ready I then realized I've just spoken in ...
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2answers
36 views
Where can I find a set of Spanish-English comparable texts? ***(Not translations)***
This is my very first post, I hope I'm making myself clear.
What I'm asking for is a set of texts that are equivalent in both languages in terms of difficulty, word frequency and register (i.e. two ...
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2answers
119 views
What factors determine the numeral coming to numbers such as -1, 0, 0.5, 100% in a language which has and only has contrast in singular and plural?
I have searched by corpus and found variant results for the same number above. People also hesitate with these numbers and make different sortation. Is there any research about any psycolinguistical ...
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1answer
2k views
What's the difference between 'concept' and 'meaning'?
Like in the title, are concepts expressed only by some parts of the speech:
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs ? In sentence: The cat ate food - all words are concepts or only the noun ? All those ...
3
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2answers
271 views
How can we use the same word in multiple different ways and distinguish the senses so easily?
Say for example some plant names. We have an orange which we easily know is a fruit, but is also a color. We have green which is a color, and greens which is plants, or money, or I could imagine it ...
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1answer
106 views
Can we use the reverse of mental priming to get out of the 'Mary's Room' problem? [closed]
So there is this semantics/psycholinguistics concept called mental-priming, which says for a concept called 'red' nearby concepts like apple, color, danger etc. 'light up' . Can we teach Mary, what ...
13
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1answer
275 views
Selective fluency - is it a thing?
I speak 4 languages, and I have the least exposure to my native language, since I have never lived in the region where it's spoken. My only exposure to it is speaking to my parents, and some TV. I ...
3
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3answers
224 views
Precise timing measurement in Praat / .wav files
When analyzing .wav files in Praat, total time duration and target speech segments are represented down to 6 decimals. For example: 154.900000 seconds (borrowed from a Google image screenshot). ...
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1answer
174 views
Why is [la] widely used as a substitution for singing? Is it a worldwide phenomenon?
When people sing without knowing or using the text, they often sing as lalalala...
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113 views
How is a meaningful sentence or paragraph constructed?
I don't have a formal background of linguistics, but I'd like to know how a sentence or paragraph becomes meaningful to a reader, and how one can construct that. I think it falls to the areas of ...
2
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1answer
84 views
Linguistic theory of “signs”
First of all thank you all for taking the time to read me.
I have been entrusted in the language course of the career I am studying to read the theory of the sign of Ferdinand de Saussure. My ...
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0answers
111 views
Research on development of language of modality in children 8-12?
Let me quickly introduce myself to provide a context for my questions. My PhD research focuses on ways that we can teach primary school children (9-12) ways of handling complex, contradictory and ...
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0answers
347 views
Is there any “standard” definition of “linguistic input”?
Recently, I've started wondering how to characterize "linguistic input" and realized that the notion is very rarely unpacked. It seems as if everyone takes it to be obvious, and immediately goes to ...
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1answer
119 views
Evidence proving lingustic perception of speech in brain?
Is there any evidence that speech is perceived linguistically, meaning is there evidence that shows that speech in the brain is perceived as phonemes, morphemes, and so on?
I was thinking whether ...
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0answers
113 views
What only native speakers and native writers (?) know
Even after many years, even after getting proficient in a foreign language, non-native speakers won't lose their foreign accent.
Is there an equivalent to this for non-native writers? Will be ...
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0answers
156 views
Can a child learn a second language only by hearing it over the telephone?
Hi! This question is really important to me personally and I would love to hear from children-learning-experts as well as anybody who made a relevant experience in this area. Some background first: My ...
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52 views
dealing with those responses before target offset in a priming experiment
We conducted a priming lexical decision experiment, and the response time was calculated from the target onset. However when we cleaned the data, we found that some responses were given before the ...
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3answers
278 views
How would a trained linguist describe this hypothesis of Symbolic Leverage
Context
Two economics students are attempting to describe a concept of language, but do not know of any formally-recognized terms or research that explain this concept.
They believe there is an ...
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0answers
150 views
Are there any good individualistic measures of linguistic conservatism?
I am currently examining how differing levels of genderisation across languages (French, Finnish, and Norwegian) affects self-perception and the social perception of others through the utilisation of ...
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1answer
272 views
Does capitalizing nouns improve readability?
In German, one capitalizes the nouns in a sentence. In the video Life in Germany - Ep. 42: English vs. German, an American claims that capitalizing the nouns makes it easier to understand a sentence.
...
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5answers
4k views
Are there languages with no first person?
Fiction is rife with characters who always speak in third person. Often, such characters are portrayed as having a native language or culture that lacks the concept of a first person, and hence they ...
3
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1answer
144 views
Experiment of creating an artificial language by cycles of memorizing errors
Once I saw an experiment on a documentary which a simple artificial language (just a set of ten words or something like that) was artificially created by a recurring process of memorizing errors of ...
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1answer
728 views
How and when do French children learn to select between masculine and feminine forms of words when referring to themselves?
I am interested in what knowledge we have regarding the process by which a young child acquiring French as a first language learns to choose correctly between the masculine and feminine forms of ...
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1answer
13k views
Reading a word wrong, but reading it correctly after trying again
In several occasions, while reading, it has happened to me that when re-reading a sentence, I find out I read it wrong the first time; every time it is only one letter the one that I get wrong, but I ...
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0answers
175 views
Saying words aloud to confirm/disprove accuracy of written language
I had a really interesting thought the other day:
Is oral language dominant/superior in some way to written language?
I bring this up because every time I need to correct or edit my written words (I ...
2
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2answers
2k views
What does “psychological reality of sound” mean ?
I am taking an introduction course about linguistics.
When my teacher was trying to explain the difference between phonetics and phonology she said something like:
"PHONETICS is study of physical ...
