16 - Cognitive Aspects of Language Flashcards
What three ways are words built individually? (Aspects Cognitive)
- Phonology
- Morphology
- Semantics
What is phonology? (Aspects Cognitive)
The smallest unit of meaningful sounds of language and how they combine
What is morphology? (Aspects Cognitive)
The smallest meaning-baring elements of language
What is semantics? (Aspects Cognitive)
What a word means
What two ways are words put together? (Aspects Cognitive)
- Syntax
- Pragmatics
What is syntax? (Aspects Cognitive)
How words are combined to make meaningful sentences
What is pragmatics? (Aspects Cognitive)
How context and prior knowledge contribute to meaning
What is a simplex word? (Aspects Cognitive)
- Free morpheme
- Its own lexical unit
- One basic meaning
- e.g. dog
What is a complex word? (Aspects Cognitive)
- A free morpheme and a bound morpheme
- e.g. dogs
What can bound morphemes not do? (Aspects Cognitive)
Stand alone
What does the wug test do? (Aspects Cognitive)
Analyses how words are stored
How did the wug test explain that children learn phonology? (Aspects Cognitive)
Children would call a young wug a ‘little wug’ instead of ‘wuglette’
What does the mental lexicon believe? (Aspects Cognitive)
There is an underlying system to build words
How does the mental lexicon explain storage? (Aspects Cognitive)
Words must be looked up in the lexicon as a whole
How does the mental lexicon explain computation? (Aspects Cognitive)
Words must be decomposed into smaller elements
What are the two characteristics of the mental lexicon? (Aspects Cognitive)
Storage and computation
What did Pinker (1991) suggest in regards to the mental lexicon? (Aspects Cognitive)
- Idiosyncratic (irregular) words must be stored (e.g. find = found)
- Fully transparent words can be computed (e.g. walk = walked)
What does the dual route model suggest? (Aspects Cognitive)
- Both storage and computation are necessary
- Reliance is on the frequency (how often it appears in language)
- More frequent words have a quicker lexicon reaction time
What is processing a word and what is the effect? (Aspects Cognitive)
- Breaking down one word into pieces
- Takes more time
What is reaction time seen as? (Aspects Cognitive)
An index of lexicalisation
What is a compound word? (Aspects Cognitive)
Two words that can stand alone, but also make sense combined e.g. treehouse
What does it suggest if response times change depending on whole compound frequency? (Aspects Cognitive)
The whole compound has been lexicalised
What does it suggest id response times change depending on constituent frequency? (Aspects Cognitive)
Constituents are accessed during processing
What did Andrews, Millier and Rayner (2004) find and what does it suggest? (Aspects Cognitive)
- P’s gaze was influenced by all frequencies of compounds
- Evidence for both lexicalisation and decomposition
What is parsimony? (Aspects Cognitive)
The willingness to excessively use resources
What is Occams Razor? (Aspects Cognitive)
Avoiding multiplying entities necessarily, creating efficiency (too much efficiency creates ambiguity)
What does linguistic ambiguity allow us to do? (Aspects Cognitive)
Maximise expression with the smallest form of ambiguity
What is global ambiguity? (Aspects Cognitive)
Impossible to determine the ‘correct’ reading
What is local ambiguity? (Aspects Cognitive)
The sentence only having one reading
What are garden path sentences? (Aspects Cognitive)
The ‘default’ reading of the ambiguous section doesn’t turn out to be the right reading by the end of the sentence
