Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics combines the study of psychology and linguistics to investigate and describe the psychological processes that make it possible for humans to acquire, use, and understand language.
Psycholinguistics
Among the many things that psycholinguists are fascinated by is how we understand what are termed garden-path sentences. Here garden path refers to the saying “to be led down the garden path,” which means to be deceived or tricked. Psycholinguists use it to refer to a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader’s most likely interpretation will be incorrect. In other words, the reader is lured into interpreting the sentence in a way that ultimately turns out to be a dead end or yields an unintended meaning. Garden-path sentences are ambiguous. After reading the first few words, you may think the sentence will mean one thing, but by the time you get to the final words, you go back to the beginning and reinterpret and realize it means something else. Here is an example of a garden-path sentence:
The man whistling tunes pianos.On first interpretation, the word “tunes” appears to be a noun, but later it turns out to be a verb. It makes sense then that the man who is whistling is the person who tunes pianos.
Here is an example of a clear, unambiguous, sentence:
The corn is grown in Iowa.In this lab activity, you will complete 10 trials. On each trial, you will read a sentence and press the spacebar on your keyboard when you have finished reading it and are sure of its meaning. By measuring the time to press the spacebar, your results and results from others should reveal whether ambiguous garden-path sentences take longer to understand meaning compared to unambiguous clear sentences.
The Immediacy Principle
It takes people longer to understand garden-path sentences compared to clear unambiguous sentences. The increased time to understand garden-path sentences supports the immediacy principle, which states that people interpret the meaning of a word as soon as they see or hear it. The immediacy principle reduces memory load, but it can mean that some sentences do not make sense when they are first read or heard. Another example of the immediacy principle is that “The man who hunts ducks out on weekends” is more difficult to understand than “The man who hunts often goes away on weekends”. Immediacy means “ducks” is a noun but when you encounter “out on weekends” it becomes clear that “ducks” is a verb. One alternative to the immediacy principle is that people interpret sentences after they hear them. This raises the problem that if the person has to wait until the end of a sentence to interpret it, they may have forgotten parts of the sentence. An example of technology and the immediacy principle is that to save time some cell phones have algorithms that predict the next word to be texted based on what has been typed so far. Sometimes the predictions make no sense. That is because rather than taking into account the intended meaning of the whole sentence, the choice of the next word is determined by the frequency with which one word follows the other.