Match the following word-recognition theories and theoretical propositions

Theories	Propositions
Motor model	Guesses about the word are made until the word is comprehended
Logogen model	Many words come to mind before the target word is understood
Cohort model	Hidden articulation movements help comprehend the words

Exploratory task 2.1

Lexical ambiguity can be the result of the "near synonyms". Match these words with the element of lexical meaning that makes every synonym differ from others

Synonyms	Features
Ability Capability Talent Gift Capacity Aptitude Faculty Genius Knack Aptness	Manual skill Inclination Forte or strong point Power of intellect Academic ability Inherent power Inherited skill Ability of absorbing Meeting standards Having resources

Metaphorical ambiguity

A metaphor is a figure of speech when a meaning is shifted to a dissimilar word. Metaphors operate as a result of human cognitive processes that produce new insights into the meaning and into the ways, in which we use and comprehend the words. The metaphor is the way to describe the world and to add to the description one's inner self (Lakoff, G and M.Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press). This is how we come to use and recognize metaphors such as "windbag" (a ruder word for "chatterbox"), "deadwood" (useless material), "guts" (courage), "bed of roses" (pleasant and carefree life), "to laze" (to have pleasure), "as a rake" (very thin), “as a belfry” (very tall) etc. "Snail-mail" (ordinary mail by Post) is often used to contrast the speed of "e-mail" (sending messages via Internet). "Packed like herrings" implies the way people feel in a crowded place. “Junk food” is the food of little health value such as “fast food”. "Spitfire of a wife" adds to the person an essential character trait. Metaphorical ambiguity can exist in idiomatic phrases sometimes obscuring the lexical meaning. E.g. "To be out in the cold" (to be a loser), "Coffee and cakes" (modest salary), "A bad lot" (a bad sort of a person). Some can be very misleading in meaning. E.g. "a fat chance" (Amer.) is a very little chance. "To send good money after bad" is to waste money.

Exploratory task 2,2 Match the given metaphorical and idiomatic phrases with their meaning intepretation

Idioms	Meaning
Cliff hanger Coach potato Cutting edge Junk mail All thumbs	Locked in from of TV New technology Clumsy person Endless story Advertisements

Input reading 3 Theories of sentence comprehension

Warming-up discussion 3.1

Take a look at the picture and give at least two possible interpretations of the reversible image. What makes the picture ambiguous? What can make a sentence ambiguous?

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Comments

There are several theories of sentence comprehension. Parsing theory stipulates that the sentence meaning can't be understood without understanding the functions of words in the sentence as subject, predicate, object etc. "Sausage machine" model pictures the text as divided into links of "sausage" in the process of comprehension. Every “link of sausage” signifies the next bit of information received by the reader or listener in the process of the language perception. Garden-path model suggests that readers or listeners can be mislead or led "up the garden path" by ambiguous sentences (seeking the correct place in the sentence for a pause or a comma to get the meaning). An illustrative example of the sentence, which most definitely takes the reader “up the garden path” is “The football player kicked the ball kicked it” - “When a football player was thrown the ball, he kicked it”. Another example is "The person who cooks ducks out of washing the dishes". The sentence becomes clear with the verb “to duck” meaning “to wriggle free from” (Parsing theory by Kimball, “sausage machine theory” by Fodor and ”garden-path model” by Rayner are cited from Aitchison, J. 1999. The Articulate Mammal. An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. L. N.Y. P. 204). In many cases, in order to get the meaning of the sentence, the language users perform the necessary sentence transformations. Transformation theory proclaims that the more transformations we need to do, the more difficult it is to process the sentence. An extreme example is “The cat the dog the man the baby tripped up hit scratched collapsed (The baby tripped up the man, the man hit the dog, the dog scratched the cat and the cat collapsed) (Aitchison, J. 1999. The Articulate Mammal. An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. L. N.Y. P. 200). Context-guided processing theory attributes much significance to the contextual meaning. E.g. a sentence such as "Breeding dogs could be a problem" can be understood only in the context. Without a context either to breed dogs could be a problem for the people who impose this trouble upon themselves, or the dogs that are being bred could pose problems to the people who breed them (more information on sentence processing you can find in Eysenck and Keane, 1995. P.303-305). The amount of information in the sentence is related to processing memory (working memory) in sentence comprehension. There is only a certain amount of information that human beings can cope with simultaneously. E.g. "Take the third turning on the left past the fourth pub just before the second supermarket next door to the second church". Before the speaker goes to the end, the hearer is likely to have forgotten the beginning of it. The process of sentence comprehension becomes difficult if there is a need for backward processing of the sentence. We normally move rightward when we process the sentence. Yet, sometimes it is necessary to backtrack for the lost grains of meaning. E.g. "Paul, John and Peter play respectively the piano, the flute and the tambourine". Another reason for backtracking is "left extension" of the sentence, when it is necessary to get back to the elements of meaning "leftward" to comprehend the whole sentence. E.g. My brother's secretary's husband's limousine's color is beige". Comprehension process can be influenced by the level of information redundancy. Redundant text abounds in a great deal of known information with a bit of the “new”.