Chapter 11

Question 1

What is a phoneme?

Answer 1

Shortest segment of speech - if changed, changes meaning of the word

Question 2

What is a morpheme?

Answer 2

Smallest unit of language that has definable meaning or grammatical function

Question 3

What is phonemic restoration?

Answer 3

Phoneme in a spoken word in a sentence can be perceived even if it is obscured by noise - mind “fills in the gaps”

Question 4

What are the effects of isolating words from conversational speech?

Answer 4

The words are difficult to perceive when isolated

Question 5

What is speech segmentation?

Answer 5

The ability to perceive individual words even though there are often no pauses between words in sound signal

Question 6

What is word superiority?

Answer 6

Letters that are part of a word are easier to recognize than if they are just in a jumbled mix of letters or individual

Question 7

What is a corpus of a language?

Answer 7

A large representative sample of utterances or written text from particular language, indicates frequency with which different words are used

Question 8

What is the word frequency effect?

Answer 8

We respond more quickly to high-freq words like “home” than to low-freq words like “hike”

Question 9

What is the lexical decision task?

Answer 9

Subjects asked to read stimuli and decide whether they are words or nonwords

Question 10

What is lexical ambiguity?

Answer 10

A word can refer to two different meanings

Question 11

What is meaning dominance?

Answer 11

The fact that some meanings of words occur more frequently than others - if words have two or more meanings with different dominances, the words have biased dominance. If the meanings are equally likely, the words have balanced dominance

Question 12

What is the effect of meaning dominance on brain processing?

Answer 12

People fixate on words that have balanced dominance because both meanings are activated. Context also has a role though - with context, less frequent meaning is activated at a higher strength, so person still looks at it for longer even if it is a biased dominance

Question 13

What is semantics and syntax?

Answer 13

Semantics: Meaning of words and sentences
Syntax: the rules for combining words into sentences

Question 14

Where are Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas located?

Answer 14

Broca’s: area in the frontal lobe

Wernicke’s: area in temporal

Question 15

Characteristics of Broca’s aphasia

Answer 15

Slow labored ungrammatical speech, difficulty understanding some types of sentences such as “The boy was pushed by the girl”

Question 16

Characteristics of Wernicke’s aphasia

Answer 16

Speech that is fluent and grammatically correct but tends to be incoherent, cannot understand speech and writing

Question 17

What are the significance of the N400 and P600 waves in an ERP?

Answer 17

N400 is affected by semantics - gets larger when the meaning of the word doesn’t fit the rest of the sentence
P600 affected by syntax - gets larger when grammatically incorrect word is used

Question 18

What is parsing?

Answer 18

Grouping of words into phrases

Question 19

What is the syntax-first approach to parsing?

Answer 19

As people read a sentence, grouping of words into phrases is governed by number of rules that are based on syntax but if they realize there is something wrong they will reinterpret sentence

Question 20

What is late closure?

Answer 20

Principle part of the syntax-first approach to parsing - person’s parsing mech assumes word is part of current phrase so each new word is added to current phrase for as long as possible

Question 21

What is the interactionist approach to parsing?

Answer 21

Information provided by both semantics and syntax is taken into account simultaneously when parsing a sentence

Question 22

What are the other things other than syntax that can affect parsing?

Answer 22

Semantics, content of a scene, and past experience with statistics of language

Question 23

What is anaphoric inference?

Answer 23

Inferences that connect object or person in one sentence to object or person in another sentence (Poodle won the dog show. She has now won the last three shows she has entered)

Question 24

What is instrument inference?

Answer 24

Inferences about tools or methods

Question 25

What is causal inference?

Answer 25

Inferences that events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous sentence

Question 26

What is a situation model?

Answer 26

Mental representation of what a text is about - approach proposes that mental rep is about the situation in terms of people/objects in story and not about phrases sentences or paragraphs

Question 27

What is the given-new contract?

Answer 27

A speaker should construct sentences so that they include two kinds of information - given information and new information

Question 28

What is syntactic coordination?

Answer 28

When two people exchanging statements in a conversation use the same grammatical constructions

Question 29

What is syntactic priming?

Answer 29

Hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction

Question 30

What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

Answer 30

The nature of a culture’s language affects the way people think