Chapter 10 Flashcards
Language
Aphasia
Loss of the ability to produce and understand language.
Sentences
coherent sequences of words that express the intended meaning of a speaker.
Morphemes
Smallest language units that carry meaning.
Phonemes
Smallest unit of sound that can serve to distinguish words in language.
Voicing (Voiced Sounds)
Sounds that result in vibration on your throat. Vocal folds vibrating, like the “z” sound as opposed to the “s” sound.
Manner of Production
Way in which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound.
Place of Articulation
Position at which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound. “b” sound from the lips, “d” sound from the roof of the mouth.
Speech Segmentation
Process through which a stream of speech is sliced into its constituent words and into phonemes.
Coarticulation
Trait of speech production in which the way a sounds is produced is altered slightly by the immediately preceding and immediately following sounds. Blending of phonemes at word boundaries.
Phonemic Restoration Effect
Pattern in which people hear phonemes that actually are not presented but that are highly likely in the context.
Categorical Perception
People are better at hearing the differences between categories of sounds than they are at hearing the variations within a category of sounds.
Generativity
The capacity to create an endless series of new combinations, all built from the same set of fundamental units.
Syntax
Rules governing the sequence of words in a phrase or sentence.
Phrase Structure Rules
Stipulations that list the elements that must appear in a phrase and specify the sequence of those elements.
Tree Structure
Style of depiction often used to indicate hierarchical relationships, such as relationships among the words in a phrase or sentence.
Prescriptive Rules
Rules describing how language is supposed to be.
Descriptive Rules
Rules characterizing the language as it is ordinarily used by fluent speakers and listeners.
Parsing
Each word’s syntactic role.
Garden-Path Sentences
Being led to one interpretation but then this interpretation then turns out to be wrong.
Extralinguistic Context
Physical and social setting in which you encounter sentences.
Prosody
Pattern of pauses and pitch changes that characterize speech production. Used to emphasize elements of a spoken sentence, to highlight sentence structure, and to signal the difference between a question and an assertion.
Pragmatics
Knowledge of how language is ordinarily used.
Broca’s Area
Area in the left frontal lobe of the brain. Usually results in nonfluent aphasia. Speech production.
Nonfluent Aphasia
Have adequate verbal comprehension but are unable to produce language.
Wernicke’s Area
Area in the left frontal lobe of the brain. Usually results in fluent aphasia. Speech recognition.
Fluent Aphasia
Disruption of language caused by brain damage in which they are able to produce speech but the speech is not meaningful, and they are not able to understand what is being said to them.
Specific Language Impairment
Those with this disorder have normal intelligence and no problems with the muscle movements needed to produce language.
Overregularization Errors
Error where a person perceives or remembers a word or event as being closer to the norm than it really is.
Semantic Bootstrapping
Process in language learning in which a person uses knowledge of semantic relationships as a basis for figuring out the syntax of the language.
Linguistic Relativity
Proposal that language that we speak shapes our thought, because the structure and vocabulary of our language create certain ways of thinking about the world.
Word
Smallest free form in a language.
Phonology
Study of sounds used in language. Sequence of phonemes that make up the word.
Orthography
How the word is spelled.
Semantics
What the word means.
Referent
What the word refers to (actual object, action, or event in the world that word refers to).
Linguistic Universals
Certain properties of language appear to be shared by every language that has ever been studied.
