Republic of the Philippines

CARAGA STATE UNIVERSITY

Bayugan City External Campus
Graduate Studies
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UTTERANCE COMBINED AND INTERPRETED: A WRITTEN

REPORT ON SENTENCE PROCESSING

In partial fulfilment of the requirements in

Introduction to Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics

Submitted by:

RICHARD ALFEO B. ORIGINAL

MAEd-ELT Student

Submitted to:

JULIUS M. NUÑEZ, PhD

Professor

FIRST SEMESTER
A.Y. 2019-2020
 Utterance Combined and Interpreted: A Written Report on Sentence Processing

Gleason (1993), as cited in the study of Alwan (n.d.) on sentence processing, posits that
the power of language as a tool of communication comes when words are joined into sentences
and collections of sentences. Understanding speech at the sentence level is called sentence and
gain access to the meaning of a sentence as a whole. It is the means by which the words of an
utterance are combined to yield an interpretation (Crocker, n.d.).

The goal of sentence processing is to arrive at the meaning of the sentence. To achieve
this, the listener should analyze the acoustic information arriving at his ear in order to access the
lexicon. Studies of sentence processing suggest that under ordinary circumstances, we strive to
comprehend the meaning of a sentence as quickly as possible, and then we discard the surface
structure to retain the meaning only. It’s is to extract meaning as quickly as possible and the
primary focus of the memory system is the conceptual representation of an utterance (Gleason,
1993:211-213).

The Structure of language can be defined in terms of sets of rules, that show how words
string together to make a sentence and convey meaning. In order for the listener to understand a
speaker, he should share him a common knowledge and the same set of rules (Alawan, n.d.).
Listeners must know a lot about the structure of their language. The speech we hear has an
intonation pattern and rhythm that can give the listener hints about what is to be heard.

It has been suggested that language comprehension is supported by four principal types
of processing. These are: phonetic, lexical, syntactic and semantic. Phonetic processing involves
the segmentation of the acoustic wave form into phonemes. The lexical processing identifies a
string of phonemes as a word. The syntactic processing uses parts of speech and other syntactic
information to recover the grammatical relations expressed in the sentence. The semantic
processing is responsible for constructing the meaning of the whole sentence.

Some theorists claim that syntactic structure and semantic analysis are conducted
independently, while others claim that they occur at the same time. (Clark and Clark 1977:223)
believe that speakers of a language plan where to start, what to include and what to omit.
Speakers talk in order to have some effect on their listeners. They may assert things or ask

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questions to get some information. So listeners may make use of these facts and then have better
chances to comprehend utterances.

In understanding sentence processing, it is an important point to have the distinction

between deep structure and surface structure. It shows that sentence processing is conducted on
two levels in which the listener analyzes the surface structure and uses his information for the
detecting of the deep structure. It is the deep structure that conveys the meaning of a sentence
which is the main goal of communication (Gleason, 1993:206). As for competence and
performances, Foss and Hakes (1978:16-18) argue that the rules we know about the language
decide the possible sentences in our language. These rules compose the linguistic competence of
the speaker of a language .One of the major tasks of linguistics is to state the nature of these
rules, and to develop a theory of linguistic competence, of the speakers of a language. It is that
hidden knowledge which enables the speaker of a specific language make judgments about
grammatical and ungrammatical utterances.

Moreover, a theory of additional knowledge is about linguistic performance. This theory

describes the psychological processes involved in using our linguistic competence in all ways
that lead to producing or understanding different utterances.

Linguistic performance does not always reflect the speakers’ intention and so hearers
sometimes misunderstand what they hear. Valian in Cooper (1979:3) states that if competence
refers to knowledge, and a linguistic theory is one claim about the nature of that knowledge,
performance refers to how this knowledge is used. A complete theory of sentence processing
should take into consideration both competence and performance.

We may expect the two theories (of competence and performance), to be closely related
to each other, though not in a simple or straightforward way. Liles (1971:7) states that “all
speakers occasionally stammer, make false starts, use wrong words, get words out of order and
change constructions in midcourse ". In addition to that, the speaker may fall under the effect of
different factors and his speech may be affected by physical surroundings, emotions, memory
span or other distractions such as chewing a gum or smoking a cigarette. So the listener should
take such extraneous factors into consideration when he or she listens to someone speaking.

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 Bever (1970) in Cooper (1979:10) suggests that the distinction between competence and
performance is “artificial”. But in fact this is not always the case. The difference between the two
concepts is quite distinct. Competence represents an abstract level, whereas performance
represents the concrete level of language i.e. the actual use of language in different daily
communications.

It is a basic linguistic assumption that sentences are not mere strings of words, but they
are structured strings of words consisting of hierarchical units. This fact of constituents has been
brought to the psychological laboratory by Foder, Bever and Garret. They devised a technique to
reveal the presence of phrase boundaries when one perceives a sentence. It is assumed that a
perceptual unit tends to resist interruption.

The comprehension of sentences involves much more than the decoding of sounds, letters
and lexical meaning. It also involves the untangling of the semantics of sentences. These rules
are capable of creating a variety of surface structures by re-arranging, deleting, adding and
substituting words which are found in the deep structure. Akmajian (1996:406-8) adds that the
hearer, having heard an utterance spoken by a speaker, must recover its meaning(s). A serious
problem with this view is that: in actual speech, sentences are physically continuous streams of
sounds, not broken down into discrete units that we call words. Although a lot of interesting
work on speech perception has been done in the last 25 years, the problem of how speech signals
are converted into meaning units remains unsolved.

This is because of the ambiguity that occurs in syntactic and semantic domains as well as
in lexical domain: For one, the term local ambiguity is used to describe cases where the syntactic
function of a word becomes clarified as we hear the rest of a sentence. If the listener remains
uncertain for long, sentences will be hard to understand. On the other hand, a pausing strategy
that keeps memory load to a minimum would run the risk of making many passing errors at
points of local syntactic ambiguity. Second, the term “standing ambiguity” refers to sentences
that remain syntactically ambiguous even when all the lexical information has been received or
heard. The intended boundary can be marked by using such prosodic features as stress,
intonation, and pauses. These features can also be used to resolve local or temporary ambiguity.
So we notice that prosodic cues can operate effectively at the early stages of parsing and

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interpretation of sentences which finally leads to the comprehension of sentences (Gleason,
1993:226-227).

It is not hard to find theories about the possible effects of intonation on ambiguities. The
layman will almost always assume that intonation can indicate which meaning of an ambiguous
sentence is intended by the speaker but psycholinguists seem less ready to attribute such
syntactic function to intonation, though they do not deny the role of intonation in modifying the
meaning of a certain sentence.

Akmajian (1996:411) wonders whether the memory limitations or time limitation, or the
arrival of some structural units (such as the end of a clause) that causes a certain meaning of a
word to be selected by the listener. In some cases the speaker can help the hearer to decide on a
certain meaning. The process of communication needs a kind of cooperation on the part of the
speaker. Interaction can never take place or be effective if there is no desire to continue it by one
of the two side of the equation: the speaker and the listener. This is, in fact, emphasized by most
sociolinguistic studies which focus on the importance of social context or context of situation
(See Hudson, 1980).

In general, sentence processing is a complex and sometimes vague expression that it does
not yield itself to a precise definition. This is due to lack of evidence to support studies in this
respect. Some theorists believe that sentence processing is an active process in which the
perceptual system attempts to determine the structure and meaning of the sentence as it is heard.
Others see that early levels of sentence processing may be conducted independently of
knowledge potentially available from prior linguistic context. It shows that these auditory
phonetic and phonological processes are not enough. Instead, there may be an active process that
makes speech perception consistent with rhythm and intonation as well as with the way speech is
to be interpreted and utilized.

Finally, we can say that a sentence cannot be understood as a separate unit. It should be
related to its context. This context may make things clearer. This is in line with the view that the
listener often holds and waits for more information to help him to comprehend what he heard
previously. Moreover we can say that the listener already has his own conceptions about the
reality of things in the world around him. So he weighs his interpretation and comprehension of
sentences against what is there around him in the real world.

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