Chapter 10: Language Flashcards
Sentence
Sequence of words that conforms to syntax rules
Morpheme
Smallest unit of meaning
(E.g. “Eating” has 2 morphemes: “Eat” and “ing”)
Phoneme
Smallest unit of sound
(E.g. [P] is a phoneme in the word “peg”)
Voicing
One of the properties that distinguishes different categories of speech sounds
A sound is “voiced” if the vocal folds vibrate while the sound is produced
“Unvoiced” if the vibrating starts after the sound begins
Manner of production
The way in which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound
Place of articulation
Speaker’s position at which air flow is momentarily obstructed from the lungs to produce a speech sound
Speech segmentation
Process through which a stream of speech is “sliced” into words and phonemes within words
Coarticulation
Trait of speech production in which the way a sound is produced is slightly altered by the immediately preceding and following sounds
“Overlap” varies the acoustic properties of each speech sound
Phonemic restoration effect
Pattern in which people “hear” phonemes that actually are not presented but are highly likely in that context
Categorical perception
Pattern in which speech sounds are heard merely as members of a category
Perceivers are less sensitive to acoustic contrasts distinguishing sounds within a category
Generativity
Trait enabling someone to combine and recombine basic units to create (generate) new and complex entities
Linguistic rules are generative - limited set of words produce a vast # of sentences
Syntax
Rules governing the sequences and combinations of words in the formation of phrases and sentences
Phrase-structure rules
Constraints that govern what elements must be contained within a phrase and, in many languages, what the sequence of those elements must be
Tree structure
Style of depiction often used to indicate hierarchical relationships
Such as that of words in a phrase/sentence
Prescriptive rules
Describe how things are supposed to be and not how they are
“Normative” rules
Descriptive rules
Descrbie the regularities in a pattern of observations with no commentary on whether the pattern is “proper,” “correct,” or
desirable”
Parse
To divide input into its appropriate elements
(E.g. dividing the stream of incoming speech into its constituent words)
Can involve determining each element’s role within the sequence
Garden-path sentence
Sentence that initially leads the reader to one understanding of how the sentence’s words are related but then requires a change in this understanding to comprehend the full sentence
Extralinguistic context
Social and physical setting in which an utterance is encountered; usually, cues within this setting guide the interpretation of the utterance
Prosody
Pattern of pauses/pitch change that characterize speech production, many uses
Pragmatic rules
Principles describing how language is ordinarily used
Listeners rely on these to guide interpretation of what they hear
Common ground
Set of (unspoken) beliefs and assumptions shared by conversational partners
Speakers and listeners count on this as a basis for making inferences about points not explicitly mentioned in conversation
Basis for interpreting elements of the conversation that would otherwise be unclear/ambiguous
Broca’s Area
In the left frontal lobe
Damage typically causes nonfluent aphasia
Nonfluent aphasia
Disruption of language caused by brain damage (Broca) in which person loses ability to speak/write fluently
Wernicke’s area
In temporal lobe, where it meets the parietal lobes
Damage causes fluent aphasia (typically)
Fluent aphasia
Disruption of language caused by brain damage (Wernicke) in which individuals can produce speech but it is not meaningful and in which individuals cannot understand what is said to them
Specific-language impairment SLI
Disorder in which individuals have normal intelligence but have trouble learning language rules
Overregularization error
Error in which a person produces a form consistent with a broad pattern that does not apply to the current utterance
(E.g. “foots” instead of “feet”)
Linguistic relativity
Proposal that the language people speak shapes their thought, because languages vary in their structure/vocabulary
