Chapter 10: language

Question 1

Generativity of a language

Answer 1

capacity to generate endless series of new combinations built on the same (lexical) foundation.

Question 2

speech segmentation

Answer 2

slicing a audio stream of actual speech into appropriate segments. Mistakes in this can lead to ambiguity.

Question 3

coarticulation

Answer 3

phonemes overlap, so you mouth is getting ready for the next phone while producing another.

Question 4

phonemic restoration effect

Answer 4

A pattern in which people “hear” phonemes that actually are not presented but that are highly likely in that context. For example, if one is presented with the word “legislature” but with the [s] sound replaced by a cough, one is likely to hear the [s] sound anyhow. -> top-down is more powerfull/general

Question 5

Categorical perception

Answer 5

people are better in hearing differences between categories of sound than within a category of sounds. This happens in an abrupt shift (pag. 374), also shows indifference within a category of sounds.

Question 6

McGurk effect

Answer 6

visual information can overrule what you hear (lip movement)

Question 7

Prescriptive rules

Answer 7

describing how something is supposed to be (of particular group at particular time). Changes over time.

Question 8

Descriptive rules

Answer 8

Rules that simply describe the regularities in a pattern of observations, with no commentary on whether the pattern is “proper,” “correct,” or “desirable.”

Question 9

Garden path sentences

Answer 9

initially leading to one interpretation while this interpretation turns out to be wrong

Question 10

Temporary ambiguity

Answer 10

early part of a sentence is ambiguous, later part clarifies (ex. The old man the ships)

Question 11

Why do we parse sentences wrong?

Answer 11

• People seek the simplest phase structure that will accommodate the words heard so far.
• People assume they will be hearing/reading active-voice sentences rather than passive voice sentences
• Also influenced by various morphemes(ex. -ly)/function words

Question 12

When does parsing happen?

Answer 12

Happens as people hear sentences, trying to figure out each word’s syntactic role. Efficient but can lead to errors.

Question 13

Extralinguistic context

Answer 13

the physical and social setting in which you encounter sentences

Question 14

Propsody and it’s purpose

Answer 14

§the rise and fall of speech intonation and the pattern of pauses. Can communicate information —> highlighting information

Question 15

What happens when Broca’s area is damaged?

Answer 15

nonfluent aphasia, they can understand heard language, but cannot write or speak => Broca’s area involved in speech and writing

Question 16

When happens when Wernicke’s area is damaged?

Answer 16

fluent aphasia, they can talk freely but say very little

Question 17

Specific-language-impairment

Answer 17

normal intelligence and no problems with speech-muscle-movement, but are slow to learn language and have difficulty with producing and understanding sentences.

Question 18

Semantic bootstrapping

Answer 18

process in language learning in which a person (usually a child) uses knowledge of semantic relationships as a basis for figuring out the syntax of the language

Question 19

Whorfian hypothesis/linguistic relativity

Answer 19

the language people speak shapes their thought, because the structure and vocabulary of their language create certain ways of thinking about the world.