Chapter 11 Flashcards
What is a phoneme?
Shortest segment of speech - if changed, changes meaning of the word
What is a morpheme?
Smallest unit of language that has definable meaning or grammatical function
What is phonemic restoration?
Phoneme in a spoken word in a sentence can be perceived even if it is obscured by noise - mind “fills in the gaps”
What are the effects of isolating words from conversational speech?
The words are difficult to perceive when isolated
What is speech segmentation?
The ability to perceive individual words even though there are often no pauses between words in sound signal
What is word superiority?
Letters that are part of a word are easier to recognize than if they are just in a jumbled mix of letters or individual
What is a corpus of a language?
A large representative sample of utterances or written text from particular language, indicates frequency with which different words are used
What is the word frequency effect?
We respond more quickly to high-freq words like “home” than to low-freq words like “hike”
What is the lexical decision task?
Subjects asked to read stimuli and decide whether they are words or nonwords
What is lexical ambiguity?
A word can refer to two different meanings
What is meaning dominance?
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
What is the effect of meaning dominance on brain processing?
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
What is semantics and syntax?
Semantics: Meaning of words and sentences
Syntax: the rules for combining words into sentences
Where are Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas located?
Broca’s: area in the frontal lobe
Wernicke’s: area in temporal
Characteristics of Broca’s aphasia
Slow labored ungrammatical speech, difficulty understanding some types of sentences such as “The boy was pushed by the girl”
Characteristics of Wernicke’s aphasia
Speech that is fluent and grammatically correct but tends to be incoherent, cannot understand speech and writing
What are the significance of the N400 and P600 waves in an ERP?
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
What is parsing?
Grouping of words into phrases
What is the syntax-first approach to parsing?
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
What is late closure?
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
What is the interactionist approach to parsing?
Information provided by both semantics and syntax is taken into account simultaneously when parsing a sentence
What are the other things other than syntax that can affect parsing?
Semantics, content of a scene, and past experience with statistics of language
What is anaphoric inference?
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)
What is instrument inference?
Inferences about tools or methods
