Ch. 11 - Language

Question 1

___: a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences

Answer 1

Language

Question 2

___ Nature of Language: the idea that language consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units. For example, words can be combined to create phrases, which in turn can create sentences, which themselves can become components of a story

Answer 2

Hierarchical

Question 3

___-Based Nature of Language: The idea that there are rules in a language that specify the permissible ways for arranging words and phrases.

Answer 3

Rule

Question 4

___: the field concerned with the psychological study of language

Answer 4

Psycholinguistics

Question 5

___: a person’s knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words.

Answer 5

Lexicon

Question 6

___: the meanings of words and sentences

Answer 6

Semantics

Question 7

___ Semantics: the meaning of words

Answer 7

Lexical

Question 8

Word Frequency: the relative ___ of words in a particular language. For example, in English, “home” has a higher word frequency than “hike”

Answer 8

usage

Question 9

___ Frequency Effect: the phenomenon of faster reading time for high-frequency words than for low-frequency words

Answer 9

Word

Question 10

___ Segmentation: the perception of individual words even though there are often no pauses between words

Answer 10

Speech

Question 11

___ Ambiguity: When a word can have more than one meaning. For example, “bug” can mean an insect, a listening device, to annoy, or a problem in a computer program.

Answer 11

Lexical

Question 12

Lexical Priming: priming that involves the ___ of words

Answer 12

meaning

Question 13

___ Priming: priming occurs when the same word is repeated

Answer 13

Repetition

Question 14

___ Dominance: some meanings of words occur more frequently than others

Answer 14

Meaning

Question 15

___ Dominance: when a word has more than one meaning, and one meaning is more likely

Answer 15

Biased

Question 16

___ Dominance: when a word has more than one meaning and all meanings are equally likely

Answer 16

Balanced

Question 17

___: the rules for combining words into sentences

Answer 17

Syntax

Question 18

___: the mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases. The way a sentence is parsed determines its meaning

Answer 18

Parsing

Question 19

___ Path Sentences: sentences which begin appearing to mean one thing but then end up meaning something else

Answer 19

Garden

Question 20

___ Ambiguity: a situation in which the meaning of a sentence, based on its initial words, is ambiguous because a number of meanings are possible, depending on how the sentence unfolds. “Cast iron sinks quickly rust” is an example of a sentence that creates temporary ambiguity

Answer 20

Temporal

Question 21

Garden Path Model of Parsing: a model of parsing that emphasizes ___ principles as a major determinant of parsing

Answer 21

syntactic

Question 22

___: a “rule of thumb” that provides a best-guess solution to a problem

Answer 22

Heuristics

Question 23

The Principle of ___ Closure: states that when a person encounters a new word, the person’s parsing mechanism assumes that this word is part of the current phrase, so each new word is added to the current phrase for as long as possible

Answer 23

Late

Question 24

___-Based Approach to Parsing: an approach to parsing that proposes that semantics, syntax, and other factors operate simultaneously to determine parsing

Answer 24

Constraint

Question 25

___ World Paradigm: in experiments on language processing, determining how subjects are processing information in a scene as they respond to specific instructions related to the scene

Answer 25

Visual

Question 26

Non-Linguistic Information: information provided by the ___

Answer 26

scene

Question 27

Subject-Relative ___: a sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is also the subject in the embedded clause, as in the sentence, the senator who spotted the reporter shouted

Answer 27

Construction

Question 28

___-Relative Construction: a sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is the object in the embedded clause, as in this sentence: the senator who the reporter spotted shouted

Answer 28

Object