Ambiguity in Sentence Processing Introduction Numerous psycholinguistic research suggests that human language comprehension is incremental. In other words, once the sentence is being heard, listener start parsing the sentence by building structures. The sentence processing will not wait until the whole sentence is being heard. Processors apply different strategies, such as minimal attachment and late closure, to comprehend the sentence. However, the fast and instant sentence processing may sometimes lead to ambiguity. This paper is aimed to explore different types of ambiguity and how ambiguity affects sentence processing by providing examples and explanations. Ambiguity in Sentence Processing According to Lobner (2013), ambiguity takes …show more content…
The sentence is ambiguous because of the verb raced. When the listeners hear the sentence fragment The horse raced past the barn…, they parse the sentence in the simplest way. They assign a category to the ambiguous word in the unambiguous form, which is simply categorized raced as a verb and no strategy was picked to deal with the ambiguous word. But soon, when it gets to the word fell, processors have to reanalysis the sentence again because the previous analysis is incorrect. The local syntactic ambiguity slows down the processors’ speed of comprehension. (5) I read that the bodyguard of the governor retiring after the troubles is very rich. The example (5) is a case of global syntactic ambiguous (McRae & Matsuki, 2013). Unlike local ambiguity, global ambiguity does not resolve even by the end of the sentence. Considering the relative clause retiring after the troubles, it could be used to modify either the bodyguard or the governor. However, since there is no disambiguating information, it is hard for processors to pick one analysis from multiple analysis and attach the relative clause to any of the noun phrases. As a result, it causes confusion and thus processors’ speed of comprehension slow down.
This will impact his reading if this does not get fixed because he will always put a word to fill in the spot. This will also change the meaning of the sentence, they will have misinformation on what is going on in the story because the miscue altered the entire sentence.
Ambiguity is when a word is used in a sentence but it has an unclear or unfixed meaning. An example of this is in “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger, in one scene Holden says “I ran all the way to the main gate, and then I waited a second till I got my breath. I have no wind, if you want to know the truth. I’m quite a heavy smoker, for one thing—that is, I used to be. They made me cut it out. Another thing, I grew six and a half inches last year. That’s also how I practically got tubby and came out here for all these goddam checkups and stuff. I’m pretty healthy though.” This is an example of ambiguity because the words “they” and “here” used by the speaker are ambiguous. But the readers are allowed to presume from the context that “they” might be the professionals helping out Holden and “here” might be a rehabilitation center.
His father was a well paid clerk in the Navy and his family were well
Throughout American history, the federal government has consistently found new ways to strengthen its powers while limiting the states’ influences. Due to circumstantial reasons under intense situations, America’s national government has gradually expanded its power over time, claiming to do what it sees best for all of the United States citizens. Following the constitution, the federal government continues to use certain clauses within the document to its advantage, further expanding its role in Americans’ daily lives.
My biggest improvement in this English 111 class was my writing. Writing tasks that were assigned greatly strengthened my overall performance throughout the course, preparing me for the future classes. The environment made me feel at ease, helping me evolve as a student, and as a person. The environment made me feel at ease, preparing me for future classes. Another large achievement of mine that I displayed in the class, was my ability to talk comfortably with the other students. The variety of group activities we did allowed me to openly speak my opinion, leading to a better overall performance with my work and papers. The English 111 class enabled me to have better participation in and out of class and allowed
The meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the one or the other….there is no way that the content of the proposition will reveal the structure of its positionality; no way that context can be mimetically read off from the content. (Bhabha 1994,
reader creates “supplementary meaning” to the text by unconsciously setting up tension, also called binary opposition. Culler describes this process in his statement “The process of thematic interpretation requires us to move from facts towards values, so we can develop each thematic complex, retaining the opposition between them” (294). Though supplementary meaning created within the text can take many forms, within V...
Since the age of 2, children are capable to follow the object label and shift their focus to a particular part of an object via the grammar structure (Waxman & Markow, 1995). Brown (1957) described the pre-school child were successful in recognising the linguistic nature of verb and noun when hearing a novel word from a sentence. For instance, the students were able to illustrate the novel noun (e.g. “Give me a capa.”) as a visible object, and understand the new verb (e.g. “Do you like capaing”) as indicating an action. Moreover, labels can be formed when several objects are believed to possess commonalities within the same category, even when the word itself does not have any semantic meaning (Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004; Waxman & Markow, 1995; Waxman & Hall, 1993). Thus, a non-word that is pronounceable but yet meaningless can be used as a label in object categorisation
misinterpretation can happen from the time an action is made to the time when we
By showing the thoughts of what Chomsky and Adler said, I will show how many others have a different idea about language. Words have been given a belief to have a true meaning to them, but in reality not so many words have a true meaning. In order to find their true meaning we have to look at how they are used and then come up with the true meaning. But what sometimes ends up happening is that the word can mean a so many things in many situations, which gets confusing. Rather they have many different meanings, which can only be found through text has to found through knowledge. Sometimes the meaning of words is so vague it is difficult to understand their meaning at all. Unless we are aware of the exact context in which it is being used, we would probably not agree on the subtle differences. Knowledge plays into affect by adding a whole new view to looking at a word. With knowledge, the interpretation of words can be figured out faster and more efficient. The way of interpreting the human language makes this method an efficient one.
This paper will explain the process we, as humans usually follow to understand a certain text or utterance. This explanation would be achieved through the analysis of two journal articles from semantics and pragmatics perspective, taking into account a range of techniques associated with each of the two concepts including:
Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) was developed in the 1970s by a linguist John Grinder and by a mathematician Richard Bandler. Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a therapy that deals with one’s perceptions of the world by their experiences, beliefs, values, assumptions, and sensory systems. NLP was developed by studying and examining the modeling pattern of human internal and external behaviors of the world. According to NLP website, “NLP investigates the inner functions of the human mind: how we think, how we develop our desires, goals and fears and how we motivate ourselves, make connections, and give meaning to our experiences” (NLP Comprehensive, 2013). NLP entails various collections of psychological practices that target to improve peoples’ lives. Mainly, it is a therapy of motivating the conscious mind by acting upon the unconscious mind; the experience is subjective to the person.
Coming from a Spanish speaking household having to learn a new language can always be difficult. While, I was a child learning a second language was difficult. It was difficult for me to put words to use in the correct way. And use terms that make sense with one another term. It was difficult for me because some Spanish words sound the same as English words, and while learning I wanted to translate everything the way I say it in Spanish to English. For example, in Spanish “helo” means ice, but if you say it out loud it sounds like “yellow”. Little things like that will be a big issue to me. I have to put up with many looks from others and hear all sorts of criticism around me. Learning a new language at a young age was a struggle with reading
Pragmatics focuses on language use within a given social environment, analysing how people interpret the various meanings language conveys. Yet, miscommunication arises due to situational contexts and thus, pragmatists “focus on what is not explicitly stated”, instead emphasising “what is communicated by the manner and style of utterance” (Finch, 2000). Consider a sign saying “Garage sale.” Naturally, without further information, we understand that there is a sale within an individual’s garage, rather than actual garages being sold. The example highlights how pragmatics furthers the understanding of an interpretation that is found past the words. This deep-seated meaning is transparent not by the reason of the semantics of the words themselves, but due to the contextual knowledge that is widely known. Ultimately pragmatics is the study of the ambiguity of language, as it examines the multiple meanings each sentence may have, which may lead to confusion, conflict and ambiguity. Therefore a sound understanding of pragmatics, may lead to a reduction in conflicts betw...
Just, M.A., & Carpenter, P.A. (2010). The psychology of reading and language comprehension. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, Inc.