Ch. 11 - Language Flashcards
___: a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences
Language
___ 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
Hierarchical
___-Based Nature of Language: The idea that there are rules in a language that specify the permissible ways for arranging words and phrases.
Rule
___: the field concerned with the psychological study of language
Psycholinguistics
___: a person’s knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words.
Lexicon
___: the meanings of words and sentences
Semantics
___ Semantics: the meaning of words
Lexical
Word Frequency: the relative ___ of words in a particular language. For example, in English, “home” has a higher word frequency than “hike”
usage
___ Frequency Effect: the phenomenon of faster reading time for high-frequency words than for low-frequency words
Word
___ Segmentation: the perception of individual words even though there are often no pauses between words
Speech
___ 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.
Lexical
Lexical Priming: priming that involves the ___ of words
meaning
___ Priming: priming occurs when the same word is repeated
Repetition
___ Dominance: some meanings of words occur more frequently than others
Meaning
___ Dominance: when a word has more than one meaning, and one meaning is more likely
Biased
___ Dominance: when a word has more than one meaning and all meanings are equally likely
Balanced
___: the rules for combining words into sentences
Syntax
___: the mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases. The way a sentence is parsed determines its meaning
Parsing
___ Path Sentences: sentences which begin appearing to mean one thing but then end up meaning something else
Garden
___ 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
Temporal
Garden Path Model of Parsing: a model of parsing that emphasizes ___ principles as a major determinant of parsing
syntactic
___: a “rule of thumb” that provides a best-guess solution to a problem
Heuristics
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
Late
___-Based Approach to Parsing: an approach to parsing that proposes that semantics, syntax, and other factors operate simultaneously to determine parsing
Constraint
___ 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
Visual
Non-Linguistic Information: information provided by the ___
scene
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
Construction
___-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
Object
