Test: Thinking - 2 - Humanities/Arts MCQ

Mnemonics are techniques used to improve memory and therefore are not a component of natural language use. Syntax, pragmatics, semantics and discourse represent the different components of natural language use.

Psycholinguistics has been especially concerned with how people parse sentences – that is, how they break them down into their correct grammatical structures. This has to be done because, otherwise, it would be impossible to interpret a sentence at all. Consider the following: “The horse raced past the barn fell”.
Is this an acceptable English sentence? What does it mean? In fact, it is a classic illustration of the problem of parsing. People normally find this a hard sentence to understand, because the parsing mechanism treats ‘The horse’ as an NP and ‘raced’ as the main verb, so it then expects more information consistent with the noun phrase. But the sentence actually contains what is called a reduced relative clause. Here it is in its unreduced version: “The horse that was raced past the barn fell.” By missing out the words ‘that was’, the relative clause is reduced. So, in fact, the structure of the sentence is: “NP: The horse (that was) raced past the barn VP: fell”.
The difficulty in understanding such sentences is ascribed to an initial misinterpretation, and is called a ‘garden path’ (see Frazier, 1987). A large amount of time and effort has gone into studying the human parsing mechanism because it is central to language comprehension and production. By misparsing the sentence above, there is a resultant failure in comprehension at all levels.

The modular view is that word meanings are stored in a way that is not context sensitive. When we encounter a string of letters that represents a word, we automatically look up and retrieve the meaning. If the string (such as ‘bank’) represents more than one word, then both meanings should be retrieved. The modular view is attractive because it keeps the mechanisms of looking up word meaning separate from context, and so is computationally simpler.

The findings of Gibbs show that the applicability of the standard comprehension model (Glucksberg & Keysar, 1990) is at best limited, although it is worth noting that the comprehension of sentences in stories and actual interactions in dialogue are very different situations, so we must guard against simplistic conclusions. Nevertheless, work on indirect speech-act comprehension reinforces the view that literal interpretation is not always necessary. Similar findings have been obtained for metaphor comprehension.

In the sentence ‘Harry drove to London’, there may be a default representation of the fact that a car was used. Subsequent mention of a car would not be a problem, because its default is already in the representation resulting from the sentence. This is what Garrod and Sanford (1982; 1983) found to be the case. In a fuller theory, Sanford and Garrod (1981; 1998) argued that we automatically relate what is being said to background knowledge, and that background knowledge is organized in long-term memory about specific situations.
They called these structures ‘scenarios’, and argued that the basic, most fundamental operation of understanding is to recognize the situation in which the message is set. So, because we are retrieving further situation information from memory, sentences can lead to representations that go beyond their content. Garnham (1979) required participants to try to remember sentences they had seen previously: e.g. ‘The housewife cooked the chips.’ Garnham found that participants remembered this sentence better if they saw the cue ‘fried’ than if they saw the cue ‘cooked’, even though ‘cooked’ is actually part of the original sentence. According to the scenario theory, this is because cooking chips has been implicitly represented as a situation in which frying is taking place. Of course, another possibility is that the word ‘fried’ simply provided more information, in terms of a cue for remembering.

If I ask you, ‘What is 6 + 6?’, unless you are a young schoolchild, you will be able to retrieve the answer 12 straight from memory. On the other hand, if I ask you, ‘What is 37 + 568?’, you have to do some problem-solving. Being numerate means that you know how to solve this problem: it calls for a standard application of arithmetic procedures, and these procedures can be drawn from memory. This kind of problem-solving is called simply routine problem-solving. In contrast, creative problem-solving cannot be done according to a formula because there are no standard procedures in memory. As we experience the same problem type over and over again, what was at first creative may become routine, of course.

What two-word phrase can be made out of these letters ‘SPROGOLIBVELM’? What strategies would you employ to solve it? The simplest is blind search, in which you just move the letters around blindly until a phrase appears. The possibilities here are enormous, so blind search is clearly not a very smart way to proceed. But how do we constrain the search? There are some sequences of letters in English that are legal and commonplace (like ‘pro’), some that are rare (like ‘goli’), and some that are downright impossible (like ‘blvm’). So a smarter strategy is to try constructing fragments from common grammatically legal combinations, then trying sequences that are more and more rare. Fragments will serve to cue word possibilities that you know, which will help speed up the search.
With practice, people who like anagrams in crosswords develop a number of ways to constrain the search space. All problems can be construed in terms of search spaces, though this is more obvious with some problems than with others. In their classic book Human Problem-solving, Newell and Simon (1972) illustrated the problems of search space more thoroughly than anyone had before.

An example of the representativeness heuristic is that people are more likely to attribute a case of heartburn to spicy food than bland food. This heuristic is used to decide that something is likely by determining how well it corresponds to an idea of what is typical in a situation; it leads to ignoring base-rate information. The alternative answers all represent examples of the availability heuristic, which is used to decide that something is likely based on how quickly and easily it comes to mind.

The research mentioned in the question above can be explained by the hindsight bias. This bias involves falsely overestimating the probability with which we would have predicted an outcome after we know it has already occurred. The alternative answers are not terms used to refer to this cognitive bias.

The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is the temporary inability to retrieve a word that is well-known to us. The recency effect refers to the better recall of the last few items of information encountered. Wernicke’s aphasia refers to permanent problems with comprehending the speech of others whereas Broca’s aphasia refers to permanent problems in the production of language. Acquired dyslexia refers to impairments in reading as a result of brain damage.