Chapter 11 Flashcards
what is language?
a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.
what does language make possible?
Language makes it possible to create new and unique sentences because it has a structure that is hierarchical and governed by rules.
What is the hierarchical nature of language?
consists of small components that can create larger units when combined
what is the rule based nature of language?
components can be arranged in certain ways.
What areas in the brain are involved in language
frontal and temporal lobes are involved in different aspects of language
What are psycholinguistics?
field concerned with the psychological study of language. Includes comprehension, speech production, representation, and acquisition.
What are phonemes?
shortest segment of speech that can change the meaning of a word. Phonemes refer to sounds and not letters.
What are morphemes?
smallest unit of language that have definable meaning or grammatical function. Bedroom has two morphemes.
What is the phonemic restoration effect?
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.
What did Pollack and pickett do and what did they find out?
recorded people and isolated words, could not understand the isolated words.
Understood that perceiving words in conversation is aided by context.
What is speech segmentation?
ability to perceive individual words even though there are no pauses between words.
What is the word superiority effect?
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.
What are lexicons?
words people know the meaning of
What is the corpus?
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.
What is the word frequency effect?
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.
what are high frequency words?
Words that we come across often.
what is lexical ambiguity?
existence of multiple word meanings.
What is meaning dominance?
some meanings of words occur more frequently than others
What are semantics?
the meanings of words and sentences
What is syntax?
Specifies the rules of combining words into sentences
What is special about Broca’s area?
Found in the frontal lobe: is involved in language production → linked to syntax
What can damage to the frontal lobe lead to?
Damage to frontal lobe: speech is slow and labored and jumbled sentence structure.
Broca’s aphasia.
What is Wernicke’s area?
found in the temporal lobe and is involved in language comprehension, therefore linked to semantics.
What happens when wernicke’s area is damaged?
Speech is fluent and grammatically correct but is incoherent.
What is parsing?
The grouping of words into phrases. it is the central process for determining the meaning of a sentence.
what are garden path sentences?
Temporary ambiguity because the initial words are ambiguous but lead to a clear meaning at the end of a sentence.
What is the interactionist approach to parsing?
Information by syntax and semantics is taken into account
What is the visual world paradigm?
determining how participants process information as they are observing a visual scene.
What is the N400 and what does it mean?
elicited when the meaning of a certain word does not fit in with the rest of the sentence. Unexpected words within a context.
What was the bransford and johnson experiment?
participants asked to read passages and tested on what they could remember. Inferred that josh was using a hammer to make the bird house.
What are inferences?
important process of creating a coherent story. Determining what the text means by using our knowledge.
What is coherence?
representation of the text so that one part of the text is related to the next.
What is an anaphoric inference?
connect an object in one sentence to an object to another.
What is an instrument inference?
inferences about tools or methods
what is a causal inference?
events in one sentence were caused by events occurring in another sentence.
what is the situation model approach?
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.
What is the given-new contract?
a speaker should construct sentences so that they include given information and new information
What is syntactic coordination?
when people use similar grammatical constructions in their sentences.
What is syntactic priming?
hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a return sentence will be produced with the same construction?
What is the sapir-whorf hypothesis?
the nature of a culture’s language can affect the way people think
What is the relation between language and color?
language is processed in the left hemisphere and colors are viewed in the right visual field.
