Profesorado

Prof. Dr. José Luis Berbeira Gardón

Situación

Prerrequisitos

Esta asignatura es semipresencial. Para cursarla, los alumnos han de
darse de alta en el Aula Virtual.

Contexto dentro de la titulación

Esta asignatura trata sobre la actividad lingüística y sobre el papel
del lenguaje como instrumento cognitivo y sus relaciones en los
procesos mentales. Constituye, así pues, la base psicológica para
todas aquellas asignaturas del itinerario de lingüística que se
centran, desde un punto de vista cognitivo, en el estudio del
significado lingüístico y la comunicación verbal (Semántica
y Pragmática, Pragmática de la lengua inglesa, etc.).

Competencias

Competencias transversales/genéricas

•  Capacidad de análisis y síntesis
•  Capacidad de aplicar los conocimientos en la práctica
•  Planificación y gestión del tiempo
•  Conocimientos generales básicos sobre el área de estudio
•  Conocimientos básicos de la profesión
•  Comunicación oral y escrita en la segunda lengua
•  Habilidades de investigación
•  Capacidad de aprender
•  Habilidades de gestión de la información
•  Capacidad crítica y autocrítica
•  Capacidad de adaptarse a nuevas situaciones
•  Capacidad para generar nuevas ideas (creatividad)
•  Resolución de problemas
•  Toma de decisión
•  Trabajo en equipo
•  Habilidades personales
•  Capacidad de trabajar en un equipo interdisciplinar
•  Capacidad para comunicarse con personas no expertas en la
materia
•  Apreciación de la diversidad y multiculturalidad
•  Habilidad para trabajar en un contexto internacional
•  Conocimiento de culturas y costumbres de otros países
•  Habilidad para trabajar de forma autónoma
•  Diseño y gestión de proyectos
•  Iniciativa y espíritu emprendedor
•  Preocupación por la calidad
•  Motivación de logros

Competencias específicas

• Cognitivas(Saber):

  •  Dominio instrumental de la segunda lengua
  •  Conocimiento de las técnicas comunicativas en el ámbito
  laboral, empresarial e institucional
  •  Conocimientos teóricos y metodológicos para el análisis e
  interpretación lingüística de textos
  •  Conocimiento de los mecanismos pragmáticos que interactúan
  en los actos de habla
  •  Conocimiento de la estructura cognitiva del lenguaje
  •  Conocimiento de los fundamentos teóricos del acto y de los
  sistemas de comunicación
  
  
  

• Procedimentales/Instrumentales(Saber hacer):

  •  Capacidad de asesoramiento lingüístico en el ámbito
  comercial, jurídico y técnico-profesional
  •  Capacidad de mediación lingüística desde el punto de vista
  intercultural, empresarial e interprofesional
  •  Dominio de las destrezas comunicativas en los ámbitos
  laboral, empresarial e institucional
  •  Capacidad de elaborar recensiones
  •  Capacidad para localizar, manejar y sintetizar información
  •  Capacidad de análisis de los procesos de comprensión y
  producción del lenguaje
  •  Capacidad para comunicar y enseñar los conocimientos
  adquiridos
  •  Capacidad para realizar análisis y comentarios lingüísticos
  
  

Objetivos

Esta asignatura trata sobre la actividad lingüística y sobre el papel del
lenguaje como instrumento cognitivo y sus relaciones en los procesos
mentales.
Los objetivos fundamentales son (1) que el alumno integre a su formación
académica y profesional aquellos elementos y conceptos teórico-
metodológicos de la psicología que conciernen al papel del lenguaje como
instrumento cognitivo y regulador del comportamiento humano; (2) la
aplicación de tales conocimientos al estudio de la lengua inglesa.

Programa

UNIT 1: Introduction to psycholinguistics.
UNIT 2: Language comprehension I: word recognition.
UNIT 3: Language comprehension II: comprehension of sentences and
discourse.
UNIT 4: Language comprehension III: comprehension of text and discourse.
UNIT 5: Language production I: word access in spoken language production.
UNIT 6: Language production II: generation of sentences in spoken language
production.
UNIT 7: Language production III: written language production.
UNIT 8: Language comprehension and language production: two different but
related processes.

Actividades

1. Lecciones magistrales en las que el profesor explicará los contenidos
básicos de cada tema (clases teórico-prácticas).
2. Comentario y debate en clase de las lecturas obligatorias (clases
práctico-teóricas).
3. Actividades obligatorias en el Aula Virtual.

Distribución de horas de trabajo del alumno/a

Nº de Horas (indicar total): 4

• Clases Teóricas:  
• Clases Prácticas:  
• Exposiciones y Seminarios:  
• Tutorías Especializadas (presenciales o virtuales):
  • Colectivas:  
  • Individules:  
• Realización de Actividades Académicas Dirigidas:
  • Con presencia del profesorado:  
  • Sin presencia del profesorado:  
• Otro Trabajo Personal Autónomo:
  • Horas de estudio:  
  • Preparación de Trabajo Personal:  
  • ...
     
• Realización de Exámenes:
  • Examen escrito: 4  
  • Exámenes orales (control del Trabajo Personal):  

Criterios y Sistemas de Evaluación

La evaluación de esta asignatura en las convocatorias de febrero, junio y
septiembre se basará en un examen escrito.

Recursos Bibliográficos

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

1.  Basic references (required readings)

BEREITER, C. and SCARDAMALIA, M. (1987), The Psychology of Written
Composition. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Chapter 4 (“The role of production
factors in writing ability”)
This book explores the notion that various writing strategies involve
different kinds of thinking, which ultimately affect the written product.
The first part presents concepts central to the writing process, including
two models of this process, an integrative schema for studying it, and a
discussion of the transition from conversation to composition. The second
section addresses the basic cognitive factors in composition, including
the role of production factors in writing ability, the information
processing load of composition, and how children cope with the processing
demands of coordinating ideas in writing.
The third section presents perspectives on the composing strategies of
immature writers, including knowledge telling and the problem of "inert
knowledge,"the development of planning in writing, and links between
composing and comprehending strategies. The fourth section discusses
factors involved in promoting the development of mature composing
strategies, including fostering (1) self-regulation; (2) evaluative,
diagnostic, and remedial capabilities; (3)reflective processes; and (4)
children's insight into their own cognitive processes. The concluding
section addresses the psychological and educational implications
of "knowledge-telling" and knowledge-transforming differences. Required
reading for Unit 7.

BOCK, K. and J. HUITEMA (1999), "Language production", in Sanford, S. and
M. Pickering (eds.), Language Processing. Hove: Psychology Press.
In this chapter, Bock and Huitema discuss evidence from speech errors and
disfluencies that has traditionally formed the basis of models of
production.
They then discuss a model of language production that incorporates message-
level (roughly semantic), syntactic, and phonological processing. They use
this model to illustrate recent experimental work on language production
that considers the time-course of processing in detail. Required reading
for Unit 6.

CROCKER, M. W. (1999), "Mechanisms for sentence processing", in Garrod, S.
and M. Pickering (eds.), Language Processing. Hove: Psychology Press.
This article provides an account of the computational mechanisms that
underlie syntactic processing. Crocker begins with a theoretical
discussion about the relationship between grammars and parsers, and
assumes that the parser makes use of grammatical knowledge in its
operations; this is known as the “competence hypothesis”. The chapter then
considers various mechanisms that might be employed in the construction of
syntactic analyses, and relates these to the problem of ambiguity in
parsing. It then provides a computational perspective on accounts of
syntactic ambiguity resolution. Required reading for Unit 3.

FIELD, J. (2003), Psycholinguistics. A Resource Book for Students. London,
Routledge. Sections A1, B1, C1 and D1.
This book is a comprehensive introduction to psycholinguistic theory. It
covers the core areas of the field: language as a human attribute,
language and the brain, vocabulary storage and use, language and memory,
comprehension and production. It draws on a range of real texts, data and
examples, including a Radio Four interview, an essay written by a deaf
writer, and the transcript of a therapy session addressing stuttering. The
required sections are introductory to psycholinguistics studies. Required
reading for Unit 1.

GARROD, S. and M. PICKERING (eds.), Language Processing. Hover: Psychology
Press.
This volume presents pedagogical texts for university students of
psycholinguistics written by an international team of leading scientists.
It gives an account of developments from the last decade both as they
relate to experimental studies of processing and as they relate to
computational modelling of the processes. Most of the required readings
for this course are chapters from this book.

GERNSBACHER, M. A. and J. A. FOERTSCH (1999), "Three models of discourse
comprehension", in Garrod, S. and M. Pickering (eds.), Language
Processing. Hover: Psychology Press.
Gernsbacher and Foertsch begin with a general review of theories about the
integration of sentence interpretations into the broader discourse
representation. One of the key issues raised here is the extent to which
processing at these deeper levels is specific to language and the extent
to which it reflects more general cognitive processes that are used in the
understanding of, for example, pictorial representations or films.
Gernsbacher and Foertsch emphasize some of the general cognitive
constraints that apply to higher level comprehension of language. In
particular, they argue that the processor makes use of principles that
they call structure building, conceptual enhancemet, and suppression.
Required reading for Unit 4.

MILLER, G. A. (1968), The Psychology of Communication: Seven Essays.
Hadmodsworth: Penguin. (“The psycholinguists”, pp. 74-86).
This text is a shortened version of an important article written in the
early days of psycholinguistics. The issues it outlines are still very
much the concern of the field today. Among the points it makes, note the
concept of “levels of processing”. This assumes that readers and listeners
achieve understanding by taking language through a series of stages,
starting with perception and ending with evaluation. Required reading for
Unit 1.

MOSS, H. E. and M. G. GASKELL (1999), “Lexical semantic processing during
speech recognition”, in Garrod, S. and M. Pickering (eds.), Language
Processing. Hove: Psychology Press.
This article concentrates on the special nature of words in relation to
speech processing. In reading, a whole word may normally be processed as a
result of a single eye fixation. This is not the case in listening: spoken
words are encountered as part of a transient speech stream with the
component sounds heard in a temporal sequence. So a central issue in
understanding the efficiency of spoken language comprehension is
determining how processing synchronizes with the temporal sequence in
which the information occurs.
This problem led to the formulation of what is called the cohort model of
spoken word recognition. The basic idea is that all words consistent with
the pattern of speech segments encountered so far are activated.
Recognition only occurs when this cohort is reduced to one, and all other
words have been eliminated.
This account raises interesting questions about the time-course of
semantic interpretation. In a truly modular system we would not normally
expect to find evidence of activation of the meanings of all the words in
the initial cohort (that is, all those words consistent with the first
segment or two of the speech pattern) before the word itself has been
recognized. However, in an interactive system that has access to higher
levels of linguistic representation, meaning (and context) may also be
activated before the word has been recognized. In other words, one would
expect not just the forms but also the meanings of the cohort models to be
available during the course of speech comprehension. The evidence tends to
support this interactive view, according to Moss and Gaskell. Required
reading for Unit 2.

PICKERING, M. (1999), "Sentence comprehension", in Garrod, S. and M.
Pickering (eds.), Language Processing. Hove: Psychology Press.
Pickering provides a general overview of sentence comprehension. He begins
by discussing the clear evidence that sentence comprehension is generally
extremely incremental. In other words, both syntactic analysis and
associated semantic interpretation normally take place as soon as every
new word is encountered. Pickering then considers the question of how the
processor chooses which analysis to favour, and provides an overview of
the sources of information that appear to be relevant to this question. He
then considers current accounts of sentence processing in detail. The
basic constrast is between unrestricted accounts, in which all sources of
information can be used immediately, and restricted accounts, in which
initial parsing decision are based on some sources of information but not
others. Pickering explores the distinction with reference to a number of
different types of syntactic ambiguity. Required reading for Unit 3.

TREIMAN, R., C. CLIFTON, Jr., A. S. MEYER and L.WURM (2003), “Language
comprehension and production”, in Heale, A. F. and R. W. Proctor (eds.),
Comprehensive Handbook of Psychology, Vol. 4: Experimental Psychology. New
York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 527-548.
In this chapter, Treiman et al. describe current views of the
comprehension and production of spoken and written language by fluent
language users. Their focus in on core processes such as parsing and word
retrieval. Required reading for Unit 8.


2. Additional readings

STEINBERG, D. D. (1993), An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. London:
Longman.
This book is a thorough introduction to psycholinguistics, which shows how
the area relates to psychology, linguistics, philosophy and education. The
book is divided into four parts. The first part focuses on acquisition,
Part two (“Language and mind”) on sentence processing, the relationship of
language to thought and culture and the brain, as wellñ as whether
language develops from intelligence or innate ideas. The final section
draws on concepts and findings introduced in the other two sections and
consider second language acquisition processes and teaching methods.

SWINNEY, D. A. (1979), “Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)
consideration of context effects”. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal
Behavior 18 (6): 645-659
This is the original paper on the multiple and context-independent access
of word meanings during sentence comprehension. In this paper, Swinney
carried out two experiments with a total of 228 undergraduates and
examined the effects of prior semantic context on lexical access during
sentence comprehension. In both studies, subjects comprehended auditorily
presented sentences containing lexical ambiguities and simultaneously
performed a lexical decision task on visually presented letter strings.
Lexical decisions for visual words related to each of the meanings of the
ambiguity were facilitated when these words were presented simultaneous
with the end of the ambiguity (Exp I). This effect held even when a strong
biasing context was present. When presented 4 syllables following the
ambiguity, only lexical decisions for visual words related to the
contextually appropriate meaning of the ambiguity were facilitated (Exp
II).
Arguments are made for autonomy of the lexical access process, and a model
of semantic context effects is offered.

KINTSCH, W. and E. F. MROSS (1985). Context effects in word
identification. Journal of Memory and Language 24 (3): 336-349.
In this paper, Kintsch and Mross hypothesized that sense activation in
word identification is affected by associative relationships among words,
but not by the thematic context of a discourse. Exp I employed a cross-
modal lexical decision task. 347 undergraduate Subjects listened to a
discourse containing a target word and made a word/nonword decision to a
visually presented test string. Results demonstrate that if the target
word was a homograph, test words that were associates of the homograph
were primed irrespective of the thematic context. Thematically appropriate
test words that were not associatively related to the target word were not
primed. This result was confirmed in ExpII, where the text was presented
visually at a rapid rate. In contrast, when Subjects were given enough
time to process each word in Exp III, only thematically appropriate
associates were primed. No priming effects at all were obtained in Exp IV,
which employed a rapid presentation rate where the test word was separated
from the target word by two other interfering words. It is concluded that
sense activation functions as a module independent of thematic context.

ONIFER, W., and D. SWINNEY (1981). “Accessing lexical ambiguities during
sentence comprehension: Effects of frequency of meaning and contextual
bias”. Memory & Cognition 9 (3): 225-236.
This paper examines the exhaustive access and the terminating ordered
search hypotheses of the nature of lexical access in 2 studies using a
cross-modal lexical priming task. 104 undergraduates listened to sentences
biased toward the primary interpretation (a meaning occurring 75% or more
of the time) or a secondary interpretation (a meaning occurring less than
25% of the time) of a lexical ambiguity that occurred in each sentence.
Simultaneously, Subjects made lexical decisions about visually presented
words. Decisions were facilitated when presented immediately following
occurrence of the ambiguity. However, when presented 1.5 sec following
occurrence of the ambiguity, only visual words related to the contextually
relevant meaning of the ambiguity were facilitated.
Results support the exhaustive access hypothesis. It is argued that
lexical access is an autonomous subsystem of the sentence comprehension
routine in which all meanings of a word are momentarily accessed,
regardless of the factors of contextual bias or bias associated with
frequency of use.

SEIDENBERG, M. S., M. K. TANENHAUS, J. M. LEIMAN, and M. BIENKOWSKI
(1982), “Automatic access of the meanings of ambiguous words in context:
Some limitations of knowledge-based processing”. Cognitive Psychology 14
(4): 489-537
188 undergraduates processed ambiguous words in sentences in 5
experiments. Two classes of ambiguous words (noun-noun and noun-verb) and
two types of context (priming and nonpriming) were investigated using a
variable stimulus onset asynchrony priming paradigm. Priming contexts
contain a word highly semantically or associatively related to one meaning
of the ambiguous word; nonpriming contexts favor one meaning of the word
through other types of information (e.g., syntactic or pragmatic). In
nonpriming contexts, Subjects consistently accessed multiple meanings of
words and selected one reading within 200 msec. Lexical priming
differentially affected the processing of subsequent noun-noun and noun-
verb ambiguities, yielding selective access of meaning only in the former
case. Results suggest that meaning access is an automatic process that is
unaffected by knowledge-based ("top down") processing. Whether selective
or multiple access of meaning is observed largely depends on the structure
of the ambiguous word, not the nature of the context.

VAN PETTEN, C. and M. KUTAS (1988), “Tracking the Time Course of Meaning
Activation”, in Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Perspectives from
Psycholinguistics, Neuropsychology, and Artificial Intelligence. Edited by
Steven L. Small and Garrison W. Cottrell and Michael K. Tanenhaus. San
Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

VAN PETTER, C. and M. KUTAS (1987), “Ambiguous words in context: An event-
related potential analysis of the time course of meaning activation”.
Journal of Memory & Language 26 (2): 188-208
Presented 75 Subjects (aged 18-25 yrs) with sentences using words with a
single spelling and pronunciation but at least 2 distinct meanings
(homographs) terminating sentences of moderate contextual constraint.
Target words were (1) related to the contextually biased meaning of the
homograph, (2) related to the unbiased meaning, or (3) unrelated. The
stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between homograph and target was short
(200 msec) or long (700 msec). The naming latencies in Exp I and the event-
related potentials elicited in Exp II showed a similar pattern of priming
at the long SOA. At the short SOA, the priming effect had a later onset
for contextually inappropriate than appropriate targets, indicating that
both meanings were not activated at the same time.

VAN PETTEN, C. and M. KUTAS (1991), “Electrophysiological evidence for the
flexibility of lexical processing”, in Understanding Word and Sentence.
Series Advances in Psychology 77. Edited by Greg B. Simpson. Amsterdam:
North-Holland. 129-174.
An interesting paper which addresses the question of "backward priming"
(i.e. asks whether there may have been a flawed methodology in these earl
studies): TANENHAUS, M. K., C. BURGESS and M. SEIDENBERG (1988), “Is
Multiple Access an Artifact of Backward Priming?”, in Lexical Ambiguity
Resolution: Perspectives from Psycholinguistics, Neuropsychology, and
Artificial Intelligence. Edited by Steven L. Small and Garrison W.
Cottrell and Michael K. Tanenhaus. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. 311--
330.

A partial rebuttal:

JONES, J. L. (1989), “Multiple access of homonym meanings: An artifact of
backward priming?”, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 18 (4): 417-432.
42 undergraduates participated in a color-naming task to determine whether
multiple homonym meanings are accessed independently of context. Subjects
heard sentences ending in homonyms, then, either 0 or 200 msec later, saw
target words that were appropriately related, inappropriately related, or
unrelated to the preceding homonym. Results support the prediction that
color-naming responses to both appropriate and inappropriate targets would
be inhibited relative to unrelated targets at the 0-msec interstimulus
delay. Within 200 msec, inappropriate targets were no longer inhibited,
indicating that context had acted to select the appropriate meaning.
Because the color-naming task eliminates backward priming, the multiple
access effect obtained in this study cannot be an artifact of backward
priming.

SIMPSON, G. B. (1994), “Context and the Processing of Ambiguous Words”, in
Handbook of Psycholinguistics. Edited by Morton Ann Gernsbacher. San
Diego, CA: Academic Press. 359-374.
This paper provides an updated review of recent literature in (lexical)
ambiguity (the retrieval of meanings in multiple meaning words), some
discussion of methodological issues, and a perspective on the future of
the area; argue that the box score approach (placing studies old and new
into an appropriate column) to the modularity debate (on how ambiguous
words were processed) has outlived its usefulness, and that researchers in
this area need to move beyond this basic question to discuss issues
concerning the nature of context and a person's interaction with it, and
how these may affect processing... review some of the issues that were
raised in the earlier discussion of the literature; consider the bearing
of recent research on those issues; discusses the nature of context and
suggests that further progress will be possible only by viewing context
more comprehensively than has typically been the case, considering not
only local sentence context but also the context of the experimental
situation itself.

McKOON, G. and R. RATCLIFF (1992),  “Inference during reading”,
Psychological Review 99 (3): 440-466.
Most current theories of text processing assume a constructionist view of
inference processing. In this article, an alternative view is proposed,
labelled the minimalist hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, the only
inferences that are encoded automatically during reading are those that
are based on easily available information, either from explicit statements
in the text or from general knowledge, and those that are required to make
statements in the text locally coherent. The minimalist hypothesis is
shown to be supported by previous research and by the results of several
new experiments. It is also argued that automatically encoded minimalist
inferences provide the basic representation of textual information from
which more goal-directed, purposeful inferences are constructed.

GRAESSER, A., K. K. MILLIS, and R.A. ZWAAN (1997), “Discourse
comprehension”, Annual Review of Psychology 48: 163-189.
This paper discusses the meaning representations that are constructed when
adults read written text, such as literary stories, technical expository
text, and experimenter-generated "textoids." Three phenomena that have
been extensively investigated by discourse psychologists are examined: the
processing of referring expressions, the connection of statements in text,
and the encoding of knowledge-based inferences. Readers execute these
processes in an effort to achieve coherence at local and global levels and
to explain why information is mentioned in the text. These three phenomena
are discussed in relation to multiple levels of discourse representation,
psychological mechanisms in theories of comprehension, referring
expressions, and knowledge-based inferences.