Introduction to Cognitive Psychology - Department of Psychological ...

Professor Greg Francis 1/2/13Building phrase treesYou create a sentence with ideas in your headThose ideas are converted into appropriate words andphrase trees to convey those ideasSometimes two different ideas can give rise to thesame sentence leads to ambiguous sentences the parser does not work in the same way as the creatorAmbiguous sentencesConsider the followingYoko Ono will talk about her husband John Lennonwho was killed in an interview with Barbara Walters.Two cars were reported stolen by the Purdue policeyesterday.Tonights program discusses stress, exercise, nutrition,and sex with former Celtic forward Scott Wedman, Dr.Ruth Westheimer, and Dick Cavett.Purdue UniversityPurdue UniversityAmbiguous sentencesAmbiguous sentencesThe writer had in mind a phrase tree likeBut a reader/listener could interpret it likeVdiscussVPNPNsexwithPPNPDick CavettVdiscussVPNPNwithsexPPNPDick CavettNo photoPurdue UniversityPurdue UniversityMentaleseThat two different internal thoughts cangive rise to the same language statementis interesting it suggests that we think in some way that isdifferent from languageParsingParsing is something like building aphrase tree in reverseLets parse through a simple sentenceword by word The dog likes ice cream.S a mentalese, if you willNPVPPurdue Universitydet N Vthe dog likesNPNPurdue Universityice creamPSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2