Ch. 5 - Words Flashcards
What is a word?
The minimal unit of meaning that can stand alone.
What is a concept?
-The mental representation of a statistical regularity in our experience
-Representations of classes of objects or events
What do concepts provide to us?
-they provide us with expectations, guide our responses to new instances of these objects or events
What are the forms of the dual nature of words?
-Phonological form- how it sounds
-Semantic representation- what it means
What are the two types of words?
1) Content words
2) Function words
What are content words? Examples?
- words that are labels for concepts
- nouns (represent objects), verbs (represent events), adjectives (describe)
Content words are an __________ _________ of words.
open-class; inviting new words all the time
What are function words? Examples?
- Words that serve grammatical purposes
- prepositions (of, at, in, to, from), determiners (the, a, some), conjunctions (and, but, because)
What is a lemma? (naked)
the most basic from of a word.
What is a lexeme? (how you can dress them up)
the set of all forms a word can take
Words in _________ are composed of one or more syllables. Elephant example?
isolation; “It’s an elephant”
Within ___________, phonemes regroup to form syllables across word boundaries. Elephant and going to example?
utterance; “It-sa-NEL-ephant” “Gonna”
What is the onset of a syllable?
the initial consonantal portion of a syllable; trying to make alliterations (the bold and the beautiful; then and there)
Match onsets of syllables to ____________. Examples?
alliterate; “the bold and the beautiful,” “then and there”
What is the rime of the syllable?
it is a vowel (nucleus) and final consonantal portion (coda) of a syllable
Match rimes to ___________. Examples?
rhyme; cash, dash, stash
What is the onset, rime, nucleus, and coda of the word “speech”
Onset: SP
Rime: EECH
Nucleus: EE
Coda: CH
What are Phonotactic Rules? Example of a violation of phonotactic rules?
the rules for combining phonemes into sequences to form words
(“sealed letter” is possible but not “seal dletter”)
What do phonotactic rules distinguish?
1) possible words: treb, fleen, gorp
2) impossible words: tber, fneel, gpor
Phonotactic rules vary from language to language.
Tski is _____ in Japanese but not in English
Street is _______ in Japanese, but it is in English
legal; illegal
Words are symbols.
Where do we look to figure out where the meaning of a symbol came from?
the traditional cognitive approach
What is the traditional cognitive approach? Example?
- that symbols acquire meaning through relationships with other symbols
- the dictionary defines words with other words
What is the Symbol Grounding Problem (Searle, 1980)?
The “Chinese Room Argument”
Say you land at the Beijing Airport and you are trying to read the signs. A Chinese dictionary won’t help you understand the meanings because ????????
(Symbol Grounding Problem)
What are semantic primes?
innately meaningful concepts used to define all other concepts
(Symbol Grounding Problem)
There is no consensus about how many _________ ________ there are, or which __________ are basic.
semantic primes; concepts
(Symbol Grounding Problem)
What are embodied representations? What supports it’s exsistence?
- symbols understood in terms of the perceptual and motor experiences it evokes
- support from neuroimaging studies (envisioning a brown of steak, showing a green steak evokes N400 anomaly)
(Symbol Grounding Problem)
What is embodied cognition and metaphor?
concrete concepts understood in terms of sensorimotor experiences
Abstract concepts are understood in terms of __________ based on __________ experiences
metaphors; sensorimotor
(“We’ve hit a rocky patch”
talking about the quality of the relationship by how
easily or not it is to physically walk down this path)
What is arbitrariness of the signal?
an observation that the sound of words gives virtually no information about meaning and is considered the universal property of language
Systematic sound symbol patterns are frequent:
enlighs onset gl (light): glow, gleam, glitter, glisten, glossy, glare
What is an onomatopoeia?
a word that represents a sound - thud, bang, animal noises
Onomatopoeias are not the same in different ____________. Pigs go _____ in English but ______ in Japanese
languages; oink oink; bubu
What is the Bouba-Kiki effect?
Kiki looks sharp and jagged and Bouba is soft and fluffy
3 main parts of the S-shaped learning curve
-until 18 months, word learning is slow
-vocab spurt during preschool years
-word learning tapers off somewhat later in childhood
4 Reasons for preschool vocab spurt
1) naming insight
2) mastery of phonology
3) improved memory
4) increased social engagement
Learning a word involves…
1) Constructing a concept
2) Learning a phonological word form
3)Associating a concept with word form
What is receptive vocabulary?
A set up of words a person recognizes and understands the meaning of (no necessarily important to produce it in the correct context/ language comprehension)
What is productive vocabulary?
A set of words a person produces in the appropriate context.
What is fast mapping?
The ability to learn a new word after only one or a few exposures (may not be producing it in the context yourself)
What is referential uncertainty?
man saying “gavagai” and pointing to a running rabbit picture
No direct link between the word and the object or event it refers to
MAKE NEW SLIDES vvvvvv
when presented with a new word, people assume it applies to a whole object, the thing being pointed at
there’s nothing in the speech stream that a new word or utterance represents a piece or a whole of the thing it’s referring to.
What is whole object assumption?
new words refer to entire objects and not just part of it
What is taxonomic assumption?
new words extend to other similar referents
(“doggie means similar animals in general)
What is mutual exclusivity assumptions?
no two words mean exactly the same thing
assume the word tail doesn’t mean doggie but rather something about the dog
What is slow mapping?
learning words gradually over multiple exposures
What is cross-situation word learning?
Associating novel words with novel objects by tracking co-occurrence statistics (hearing dog with family dog and hearing dog at the dog park)
What is joint attention?
A situation in which all participants focus attention on the same object or event and reduces referential ambiguity (parent grocery shopping w/ kid… pointing and direct eye gazing at same object)
What is syntactic bootstrapping? Example?
The use of syntactic information to infer the meaning of verbs
(John is gorping vs. John is gorping the cat)
___________ of word forms affect how easily they’re learned
Chracteristics
What is word frequency?
How often a word in all forms occurs in a language
What is neighborhood density?
How many other words differ from a word by substitution of a single phoneme
What is phonotactic probability?
The likelihood that a sequence of phonemes will occur in a language
(Phonological Forms)
What is the mental lexicon?
The storage of information about words in long-term memory
Initially, we thought word forms are stored as a set of ___________.
Evidence from speech errors:
- Keep your feet moving -> _______ _________
- Take my bike -> ______ ___ ________
Phonemes; foot meeving; bake my bike
Others think only the most basic word form (_________) is stored.
Can generate plurals and past tenses for __________.
- Dax -> daxes OR blick -> blicked
Irregular forms: separate entries or by analogy
- Foot -> feet but factiously moose -> meese
Lemma; Nonwords
Why are inflectional suffixes added to a word?
They are added for purposes of grammar
(ex. toy, toys; play, plays, played, playing)
Why are derivational suffixes added to words?
It changes the meaning and grammatical category
[ex. agree (verb) —> agreement (noun) or agreeable (adjective)]
What is the base frequency effect?
The frequency effect of base for extends to inflected forms
also added to derived forms if no change in pronunciation
no base frequency effect with changes in pronunciation
What are thematic relationships?
the relationship between words based on frequency of co-occurence
(ex. coffee-creamer)
What are taxonomic relationships?
the relationship between words based on category membership
(ex. coffee-redbull: both belonging to the category of things to drink when you need a pick me up)
What is the word-association task?
-a participant produces one or more words in response to a prompt
Younger children have more ____________ relations with the word association task while older children and adults have more _____________ relations.
thematic; taxonomic
What is the network model? (Collins & Quillian, 1969)
-the mental lexicon as a network of concepts connected by semantic links
Example of semantic links…
ex. a canary IS A bird, bird HAS wings
- thus, a bird has wings
What is the semantic priming task ?
- experimenter presents a pair of words in a sequence
- participant performs lexical decision task on second word
What are semantic priming effects?
-target words are recognized faster when presented with related than unrelated prime
(ex.DOCTOR, NURSE - FAST RT
DOCTOR, SPOON - SLOW RT)
What is the picture-word inference task?
- a picture and word appear
-participant instructed to ignore word and name the picture as quickly as possible
-when the word is categorically related to the picture, RT is delayed (cat, horse)
-When thematically related, there is a faster RT
What did the semantic interference task find?
- taxonomical relations yield slower RTs
- categorical words compete for selection
What is the dual lexicon model (Gow 2021)?
- dorsal sound-to-action stream stores phonological word forms
- ventral sound-to-meaning stream links word form with semantic representations stored elsewhere
What is the supramarginal gyrus? What word forms are stored in this area?
-region of inferior parietal lobe, adjacent to the lateral fissure
-phonological word forms may be stored in this area
The left hemisphere is related to _______ relation semantic processing: acorn-squirrel
direct
The right hemisphere is related to _______ relation semantic processing: lion-stripes (by way of tiger)
indirect
What is word recognition?
-linking word forms in the speech stream to the semantic representation in the mental lexicon
What is word production?
-finding word forms in the mental lexicon to express underlying semantic representation
What is lexical access?
-matching the acoustic signal of the speech stream to candidate phonological representations in the mental lexicon
-the speech stream is ambiguous, so multiple candidates are considered
What is lexical selection?
- choosing the best-fitting word match to acoustic input
- context and expectation have influence at this point
What is lexical integration?
-linking selected word form to overall semantics and syntax of utterance
-understanding not just individual words of utternace!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What is the top-down process?
-being influenced by context or expectations
What is the sentence superiority effect?
- we have an improved ability to identify words within a sentence as opposed to isolation
What is the word frequency effect?
-common words are recognized more quickly than less common words
What is the visual world paradigm?
- participants interact with objects or pictures according to spoken instructions
-object names are from the same cohort - older adults are more likely to select higher frequency items when lower frequency item is named
What is lexical selection?
- going from a particular concept to abstract word form (lemma)
What is phonological encoding?
-going from an abstract word form (lemma) to phonological representation
(ex. p-uh-p-ee)
What is the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon?
-lexical selec!!!!!!!!!
What is the Levelt Feedforwardf model?
- each process is performed in a serial fashion (step-by-step in a specific order)
-6 stages
-after progressing thru the stages, you get some feedback through self-monitoring at the end of production
-support comes from reaction time experiments
Steps of the Levelt Feedforward Model
1)___________ ____________ –> lexical concept (expressed by word): <BABY>
2)\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ --> lemma (basic word form): KITTEN
3) \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ --> adding inflectional morphemes as needed: KITTEN-S
4)\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ --> convert to phoneme string: K-I-T-UH-N-Z
5) \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ --> gesutral score (motor commands to articulators)
6) \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ --> sound wave :speech string</BABY>
Self monitoring –> feedback from sound wave back to conceptual preparation.
1) conceptual preparation
2) lexical selection
3) morphological encoding
4) phonological encoding
5) phonetic encoding
6) articulation
What is the Dell Interactive Model?
accounts for speech errors in healthy and brain-damaged populations
as obtained!!!!!!!!
What is the semantic layer of the dell interactive model?
-concepts are distributed across a network of feature nodes
What are semantic neighbors? (Dell model)
(concepts with related meanings) have overlapping feature nodes
What is a word layer? (Dell)
one node for each lemme (abstract word form)
What is the phoneme layer (Dell)?
one node!!!!!!!!!!!
