Chapter 11 - Language production Flashcards
Syntactic priming
The tendency for a speaker’s utterances to have the same syntactic structure as those they have heard shortly beforehand.
Preformulation
The production by speakers of phrases used frequently before; it reduces the demands of speech production.
Underspecification
A strategy used to reduce processing costs in speech production by using simplified expressions.
Alzheimer’s disease
A disease in which general deterioration of the brain leads to progressive mental deterioration.
Morphemes
The basic units of meaning; words consist of one or more morphemes.
Clause
A group of words within a sentence that contains a subject and a verb.
Phrase
A group of words within a sentence expressing a single idea.
Spoonerism
A speech error in which the initial letter or letters of two words (typically close together) are switched to form two different words.
Freudian slip
A speech error that reveals the speaker’s (often unconscious) sexual desires.
Spreading activation
Activation of a node (corresponding to a word or concept) in the brain causes some activation to spread to several related nodes or words.
Mixed-error effect
A form of speech error in which the incorrect word spoken is related to the correct one in terms of both meaning and sound.
Lexical bias effect
The tendency for speech errors to form words rather than non-words.
Lexicon
An individual’s internal dictionary containing information about word meaning.
Lemmas
Abstract words possessing syntactic and semantic features but not phonological ones.
Lexicalisation
The process of translating a word’s meaning into its sound representation during speech production.
Tip-of-the-tongue state
The frustrating experience of being unable to find the correct word to describe a given concept or idea
Aphasia
Severe problems in the comprehension and/or production of language caused by brain damage.
Wernicke’s aphasia
A form of aphasia involving fluent speech with many content words missing and impaired comprehension.
Broca’s aphasia
A form of aphasia involving non-fluent speech and grammatical errors.
Anomia
A condition caused by brain damage in which there is an impaired ability to name objects.
Phonological output lexicon
It contains information about the spoken form of words (e.g., number of syllables) and is used in object naming and reading aloud.
Agrammatism
Literally, “without grammar”; a condition in which speech production lacks grammatical structure and many function words and word endings are omitted; there are often also problems with language comprehension.
Jargon aphasia
A brain-damaged condition in which speech is reasonable correct grammatically but there are severe problems in accessing the appropriate words.
Neologism
Made-up words produced by patients suffering from jargon aphasia
Audience design
This involves speakers tailoring what they say to the specific needs and knowledge of their audience.
Prosodic cues
Features of spoken language such as stress, intonation, pauses and duration making it easier for listeners to work out grammatical structure and meaning; similar cues are often present in text (e.g., commas; semi-colons).
Discourse markers
Spoken words and phrases that do not contribute directly to the content of what is being said but still serve various functions (e.g., clarifying the speaker’s intentions).
Directed retrospection
A technique in which individuals (e.g., writers) categorise their immediately preceding thoughts.
Knowledge effect
The tendency to assume others possess the same knowledge as us.
Dysexecutive agraphia
Severely impaired writing abilities in individuals with damage to the frontal lobes whose central executive functioning is generally impaired.
Orthographic working memory (also known as the graphemic buffer)
A store in which information about the individual letters in a word (and their ordering) is held immediately prior to spelling the word.
Graphemic buffer (also known as the Orthographic working memory)
A store in which graphemic information about the individual letters in a word is held immediately prior to spelling the word.
Phonological dysgraphia
A condition caused by brain damage in which familiar words can be spelled reasonably well but un-familiar words and non-words cannot.
Surface dysgraphia
A condition caused by brain damage in which there is impaired spelling of irregular words but reasonable accurate spelling of regular words and non-words.
Orthographic lexicon
Part of long-term memory in which learned word spellings are stored.
Dyslexia
Impaired ability to read not attributable to low intelligence
Dysgraphia
Impaired ability to write (including spelling).
