Short Written Assignment

Psycholinguists study the cognitive processes that underlie the human ability to speak and understand language. What is this ability really like? Much can be learned by examining the ways in which people really use language. Your first assignment is aimed at providing you with a first-hand sense of what language use is like, and with the experience of studying naturally-occurring language.

Assignment: tape-record a three minute conversation. This could be, for example, in the cafeteria during mealtime, or in the dorm. Try to record people who are having a real conversation, and who aren’t “performing” for the tape. You have to tell people that you’re recording them, which will make them self-conscious, so you might have to let the tape run for awhile until they have forgotten about it, and choose three minutes from the end of the tape. Try to choose a situation without too much extraneous noise, because that will make it harder to transcribe.

Methods of recording:

- tape-record

- digitally record onto your computer

- video record

Transcribe exactly what people are saying. Include things like “uhh…”, or “hmm…”, or partial words, like “Put tha- put, um, put that over there.”

What does your language sample suggest about how people use language? Make a written list of things you observe.

Here are some questions to get you started

1) Do people speak in full sentences?

2) What kinds of things do speakers have to do to in order to say what they are saying?

- how do they choose their words?

- How do they put them in the order they do?

3) In order to understand the speaker, what do the listeners need to do?

- do they just need to know English words?

- Do they need to share community-specific knowledge?

- Do they have to know something special about the particular person who is speaking?

- Do they have to make inferences across different parts of the conversation?

4) Are there any AMBIGUITIES in the conversation? An ambiguity is something where there is potentially more than one interpretation of a word, part of a word, a phrase, or a sentence. (It is not something that is confusing, necessarily).

Examples of ambiguities:

- partial word ambiguities, e.g. the word “candle” could be the word “candy” halfway through the word.

- Lexical ambiguities. E.g., bear (the animal) vs. bear (to support). Remember that some words sound the same even if they aren’t spelled the same, so “read’ and “red” are ambiguous in spoken language.

- Syntactic (phrase) ambiguities – “She put the button on her coat in her pocket”.

Try to find at least a few ambiguities. Remember that they probably won’t jump out at you, because people are really good at understanding language and quickly finding the right interpretation. But ambiguity is pervasive. For example, the word “people” is temporarily ambiguous and could be interpreted as the word “pea” (or “pee”). But you probably didn’t think of this when you read the word at the beginning of this paragraph.

Is there any indication that the listener(s) had any trouble understanding the ambiguity? What information did they need to access in order to find the right interpretation of the word?

5) Did any speaker make a speech error, that is say one thing when they clearly meant to say something else? Speech errors occur regularly, but are rare enough that they probably won’t occur in every 3-minute language sample.

6) Did speakers ever show any indication that they were having trouble planning or producing the thing they are saying? E.g., did they produce any disfluencies (um, uh, repeating words, repairing a word), or phrases like “I mean”, “I think”, “that is,”, etc.? What do you think caused them to say things like this – was it just trouble speaking, or something else?

Turn in your typed transcript and typed list of observations.

The assignment is due in class, on Wednesday Jan. 22, and is worth 5% of your grade.