Chapter 11: Language Flashcards
A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences. It is hierarchical and rule-based.
Language
The _____ means that it consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units. For example, words can be combined to create phrases, which in turn can create sentences, which themselves can become components of a story.
Hierarchical nature of language
The _____ means that these components can be arranged in certain ways (“What is my cat saying?” is permissible in English), but not in other ways (“Cat my saying is what?” is not).
Rule-based nature of language
The field concerned with the psychological study of language.
Psycholinquistics
All the words a person knows (mental dictionary) are his or her _____.
Lexicon
The meaning of language is called _____.
Semantics
The meaning of words is called _____.
Lexical semantics
The frequency with which a word appears in a language.
Word frequency
This effect refers to the fact that we respond more rapidly to high-frequency words like “home” than to low-frequency words like “hike.” The reason this is important is because a word’s frequency influences how we process the word.
Word frequency effect
The ability to understand words in a sentence is influenced by word frequency. This has been demonstrated using the _____ task (in which the task is to decide as quickly as possible whether strings of letters are words or nonwords) and by measuring eye movements (how long a person fixates on a word; low-frequency words (not often used) result in longer fixation).
Lexical decision task
The pronunciation of words is _____, which can make it difficult to perceive words when they are heard out of context.
a) fixed
b) variable
Variable
Refers to the fact that a word can have more than one meaning (“My mom is bugging me”).
Lexical ambiguity
Tanenhaus used the _____ technique (priming that involves the meaning of words. For example, rose would prime flower, because their meanings are related) to show that:
- multiple meanings of ambiguous words are accessed immediately after they are heard, and
- the “correct” meaning for the sentence’s context is identified within 200 msec.
Lexical priming technique
The relative frequency of the meanings of ambiguous words is described in terms of _____ dominance. Some words have _____ dominance, some have _____ dominance.
Meaning dominance; biased dominance; balanced dominance
Some meanings of words occur more frequently than others.
Meaning dominance
When a word has more than one meaning, and one meaning is more likely.
Biased dominance
When a word has more than one meaning and all meanings are equally likely.
Balanced dominance
_____ is the structure of a sentence. _____ is the process by which words in a sentence are grouped into phrases.
Syntax; parsing
A mechanism proposed to explain parsing. Emphasizes how syntactic principles such as late closure (in parsing, when a person encounters a new word, the parser assumes that this word is part of the current phrase) determine how a sentence is parsed.
Garden path model
A mechanism proposed to explain parsing. States that semantics, syntax, and other factors operate simultaneously to determine parsing.
Constraint-based approach
In experiments on language processing, determining how subjects are processing information in a scene as they respond to specific instructions related to the scene.
Visual world paradigm
The process by which readers create information that is not explicitly stated in the text.
Inference
a. An inference that connects an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence.
b. “John and the birdhouse” example, knowing that He in the second sentence refers to John.
Anaphoric inference
a. An inference about tools or methods that occurs while reading text or listening to speech.
b. “John pounded nails” example, inferring that he is using a hammer.
Instrumental inference
a. An inference that results in the conclusion that the events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous clause or sentence.
b. “Sharon took an aspirin. Her headache went away.” Inferring that taking the aspirin made her headache go away.
Causal inference
The _____ approach to text comprehension states that people form a mental representation of the situation in a story in terms of the people, objects, locations, and events that are being described in the story.
- This approach to how we understand sentences proposes that as people read or hear a story, they create this model, which simulates the perceptual and motor (movement) characteristics of the objects and actions in a story.
Situation model
States that a speaker should construct sentences so that they include two kinds of information:
o information that the listener already knows, and
o information that the listener is hearing for the first time.
- Given-new contract
Conversations, which involve give-and-take between two or more people, are made easier by procedures that involve cooperation between participants in a conversation. These procedures include the _____ and _____.
given–new contract; establishing common ground
A way of studying how common ground is established is through the _____ task, a task in which two people are exchanging information in a conversation, when this information involves identifying something by naming or describing it.
referential communication task
The process of creating common ground results in _____, the synchronization between the people in the conversation. One demonstration of this is provided by syntactic coordination—how people’s grammatical constructions become coordinated.
entrainment
One demonstration of entrainment is provided by _____, how people’s grammatical constructions become coordinated.
syntactic coordination
In syntactic coordination, this copying of form reflects a phenomenon called _____ in which hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction. This phenomenon is important because it can lead people to coordinate the grammatical form of their statements during a conversation.
syntactic priming
Part of understanding what the other person means involves _____, the ability to understand what others feel, think, or believe (Corballis, 2017), and also the ability to interpret and react to the person’s gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other things that provide cues to meaning.
theory of mind
_____ and _____ are similar in a number of ways. There is a close relation between song and speech, both cause emotion, and both consist of organized sequences.
There are important differences though. They create emotions in different ways, and rules for combining tones and words are different. The most important difference is based on the fact that words have meanings.
Music; language
