CH 9 Flashcards
What’s Language?
A system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules of grammar and that convey meaning.
What’s Grammar?
A set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to produce meaningful messages.
What’s Phonemes?
The smallest units of sound that are recognizable as speech rather than as random noise.
What are Phonological Rules?
That indicate how phonemes can be combined to produce speech sounds. For example, the initial sound “ts” is acceptable in German but not in English.
What are Morphemes?
The smallest meaningful units of language. For example, your brain recognizes the d sound you make at the beginning of dog as a speech sound, but it carries no particular meaning. The morpheme dog, on the other hand, is recognized as an element of speech that carries meaning. Adding s to dog (dogs) changes the meaning of the word, so here s functions as a morpheme.
What’s Morphological Rules?
Indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words.
What are Syntactic Rules?
Indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences.
What’s Fast Mapping?
The process whereby children map a word onto an underlying concept after only a single exposure, enables them to learn at this rapid pace
What’s Telegraphic Speech?
Devoid of function morphemes and consist mostly of content words. Ex, “my shoe wet.”
What’s Nativist Theory?
Language development is best explained as an innate, biological capacity.
What’s Universal Grammar?
A collection of processes that facilitate language learning.
What’s Genetic Dysphasia?
A syndrome characterized by an inability to learn the grammatical structure of language despite having otherwise normal intelligence.
What’s Aphasia?
Difficulty in producing or comprehending language.
Where is the Broca’s Area Located?
Located in the left frontal cortex and is involved in the production of the sequential patterns in vocal and sign languages
What happens when the Broca’s area is damaged?
Individuals with damage to this area, which results in Broca’s aphasia, understand language relatively well, but they have increasing comprehension difficulty as grammatical structures get more complex.
Where is the Wernicke’s area located and what does it do?
Located in the left temporal cortex, is involved in language comprehension (whether spoken or signed).
How does Wernicke’s aphasia differ from broca?
Individuals with Wernicke’s aphasia differ from those with Broca’s aphasia in two ways: They can produce grammatical speech, but it tends to be meaningless, and they have considerable difficulty comprehending language.
What’s Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis?
The idea that language shapes the nature of thought.
What’s Concept?
Mental representation that groups or categorizes shared features of related objects, events, or other stimuli. A concept is an abstract representation, description, or definition that designates a class or category of things.
What’s Necessary Condition?
Is something that must be true of the object in order for it to belong to the category. For instance, suppose you were trying to determine whether an unfamiliar animal was a dog. It is necessary that the creature be a mammal; otherwise it doesn’t belong to the category dog because all dogs are mammals.
What’s Sufficient Condition?
Is something that, if it is true of the object, proves that it belongs to the category. Suppose someone told you that the creature was a German shepherd and you know that a German shepherd is a type of dog. German shepherd is a sufficient condition for membership in the category dog.
What’s Prototype Theory?
Is based on the “best” or “most typical” member of a category.
What’s Exemplar Theory?
We make category judgements by comparing a new instance with stored memories for other instances of the category (Medin & Schaffer, 1978). Imagine that you’re out walking in the woods, and from the corner of your eye you spot a four-legged animal that might be a wolf or a coyote but that reminds you of your cousin’s German shepherd.
What’s Category Specific Deficit?
An inability to recognize objects that belong to a particular category, although the ability to recognize objects outside the category is undisturbed.
What’s Rational Choice Theory?
We make decisions by determining how likely something is to happen, judging the value of the outcome, and then multiplying the two. This means that our judgements will vary depending on the value we assign to the possible outcomes.
What’s Availability Bias?
Items that are more readily available in memory are judged as having occurred more frequently.
