Context is Key. A guest post by Danielle Sugrue.

In our cognitive psychology class last week we had been informed that we had to give a presentation regarding language.  We were each assigned a question that we had to present for one minute on one slide.  My question was “what is speech segmentation?”  Speech segmentation is the ability to recognize words in a conversation; it is the break or pause in between each word we say.  But when you hear a language you have never heard before it becomes very difficult to distinguish where the pauses are when that person is speaking. Therefore, speech segmentation is not only the ability to perceive words in conversations but it is also aided by the context provided by the words and sentences that make up the conversation. 

            All of the presentations were very well explained and helped broaden my understanding of language.  I did enjoy the idea of practicing presenting in front of a class; however, I did not like how short the presentations had to be.  Trying to meet the minute requirement made me nervous.  I did not feel very confident once I finished because I was focusing more on the time rather than the information I had practiced to present.

            In addition, it was nice to mix things up and have the students teach the class instead of our professor.  It was fun and it was nice to see how supportive and respectful our classmates were. 

            The information provided by the students was informative and sparked my interest in language and how much there is to it.  One question that stood out to me was lexical ambiguity.  This refers to the fact that a word can have more than one meaning and that the word’s meaning in a sentence may not be clear.  Lexical priming experiments show that all meanings of a word are activated immediately after the word is presented but then context quickly determines the appropriate meaning.  For example the word bug can refer to insect, or a hidden listening device, or even being annoyed.  When these ambiguous words appear in a sentence we normally use the context of the sentence to determine which definition applies. 

            This topic was interesting to me because I never actually thought about how a word can mean something else if someone did not finish their sentence.  Take for example: “Amanda believed the senator…” This could mean a number of things, which then ties into semantics and syntax.  It is important to understand the meaning of the word and the rules for combining words in order to carry on a conversation and prevent serious misunderstandings.