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.