Chapter 11 Flashcards

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1
Q

what is language?

A

a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.

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2
Q

what does language make possible?

A

Language makes it possible to create new and unique sentences because it has a structure that is hierarchical and governed by rules.

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3
Q

What is the hierarchical nature of language?

A

consists of small components that can create larger units when combined

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4
Q

what is the rule based nature of language?

A

components can be arranged in certain ways.

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5
Q

What areas in the brain are involved in language

A

frontal and temporal lobes are involved in different aspects of language

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6
Q

What are psycholinguistics?

A

field concerned with the psychological study of language. Includes comprehension, speech production, representation, and acquisition.

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7
Q

What are phonemes?

A

shortest segment of speech that can change the meaning of a word. Phonemes refer to sounds and not letters.

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8
Q

What are morphemes?

A

smallest unit of language that have definable meaning or grammatical function. Bedroom has two morphemes.

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9
Q

What is the phonemic restoration effect?

A

phonemes are perceived in speech when the sound of the phoneme is covered up by an extraneous noise.
(top-down processing) Filling in phonemes based on context. Did not notice there was no first s in legislatures.

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10
Q

What did Pollack and pickett do and what did they find out?

A

recorded people and isolated words, could not understand the isolated words.
Understood that perceiving words in conversation is aided by context.

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11
Q

What is speech segmentation?

A

ability to perceive individual words even though there are no pauses between words.

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12
Q

What is the word superiority effect?

A

we recognize a letter more easily when it comes from a word. letters are easier to recognize when they are contained in a word then when they appear alone, or are contained in a non-word.

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13
Q

What are lexicons?

A

words people know the meaning of

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14
Q

What is the corpus?

A

the representative sample of utterances or written text from a particular language. The frequency with which different words are used and the frequency of different meanings and grammatical constructions.

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15
Q

What is the word frequency effect?

A

we respond more rapidly to high-frequency words than low-frequency words. We look at low-frequency words 40ms longer. Higher frequency = more likely it will be skipped.

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16
Q

what are high frequency words?

A

Words that we come across often.

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17
Q

what is lexical ambiguity?

A

existence of multiple word meanings.

18
Q

What is meaning dominance?

A

some meanings of words occur more frequently than others

19
Q

What are semantics?

A

the meanings of words and sentences

20
Q

What is syntax?

A

Specifies the rules of combining words into sentences

21
Q

What is special about Broca’s area?

A

Found in the frontal lobe: is involved in language production → linked to syntax

22
Q

What can damage to the frontal lobe lead to?

A

Damage to frontal lobe: speech is slow and labored and jumbled sentence structure.
Broca’s aphasia.

23
Q

What is Wernicke’s area?

A

found in the temporal lobe and is involved in language comprehension, therefore linked to semantics.

24
Q

What happens when wernicke’s area is damaged?

A

Speech is fluent and grammatically correct but is incoherent.

25
Q

What is parsing?

A

The grouping of words into phrases. it is the central process for determining the meaning of a sentence.

26
Q

what are garden path sentences?

A

Temporary ambiguity because the initial words are ambiguous but lead to a clear meaning at the end of a sentence.

27
Q

What is the interactionist approach to parsing?

A

Information by syntax and semantics is taken into account

28
Q

What is the visual world paradigm?

A

determining how participants process information as they are observing a visual scene.

29
Q

What is the N400 and what does it mean?

A

elicited when the meaning of a certain word does not fit in with the rest of the sentence. Unexpected words within a context.

30
Q

What was the bransford and johnson experiment?

A

participants asked to read passages and tested on what they could remember. Inferred that josh was using a hammer to make the bird house.

31
Q

What are inferences?

A

important process of creating a coherent story. Determining what the text means by using our knowledge.

32
Q

What is coherence?

A

representation of the text so that one part of the text is related to the next.

33
Q

What is an anaphoric inference?

A

connect an object in one sentence to an object to another.

34
Q

What is an instrument inference?

A

inferences about tools or methods

35
Q

what is a causal inference?

A

events in one sentence were caused by events occurring in another sentence.

36
Q

what is the situation model approach?

A

It s a mental representation of what the text is about. While we read, we create a mental representation of the overall meaning of a story.

37
Q

What is the given-new contract?

A

a speaker should construct sentences so that they include given information and new information

38
Q

What is syntactic coordination?

A

when people use similar grammatical constructions in their sentences.

39
Q

What is syntactic priming?

A

hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a return sentence will be produced with the same construction?

40
Q

What is the sapir-whorf hypothesis?

A

the nature of a culture’s language can affect the way people think

41
Q

What is the relation between language and color?

A

language is processed in the left hemisphere and colors are viewed in the right visual field.