Chapter 11 - Language production

Question 1

Syntactic priming

Answer 1

The tendency for a speaker’s utterances to have the same syntactic structure as those they have heard shortly beforehand.

Question 2

Preformulation

Answer 2

The production by speakers of phrases used frequently before; it reduces the demands of speech production.

Question 3

Underspecification

Answer 3

A strategy used to reduce processing costs in speech production by using simplified expressions.

Question 4

Alzheimer’s disease

Answer 4

A disease in which general deterioration of the brain leads to progressive mental deterioration.

Question 5

Morphemes

Answer 5

The basic units of meaning; words consist of one or more morphemes.

Question 6

Clause

Answer 6

A group of words within a sentence that contains a subject and a verb.

Question 7

Phrase

Answer 7

A group of words within a sentence expressing a single idea.

Question 8

Spoonerism

Answer 8

A speech error in which the initial letter or letters of two words (typically close together) are switched to form two different words.

Question 9

Freudian slip

Answer 9

A speech error that reveals the speaker’s (often unconscious) sexual desires.

Question 10

Spreading activation

Answer 10

Activation of a node (corresponding to a word or concept) in the brain causes some activation to spread to several related nodes or words.

Question 11

Mixed-error effect

Answer 11

A form of speech error in which the incorrect word spoken is related to the correct one in terms of both meaning and sound.

Question 12

Lexical bias effect

Answer 12

The tendency for speech errors to form words rather than non-words.

Question 13

Lexicon

Answer 13

An individual’s internal dictionary containing information about word meaning.

Question 14

Lemmas

Answer 14

Abstract words possessing syntactic and semantic features but not phonological ones.

Question 15

Lexicalisation

Answer 15

The process of translating a word’s meaning into its sound representation during speech production.

Question 16

Tip-of-the-tongue state

Answer 16

The frustrating experience of being unable to find the correct word to describe a given concept or idea

Question 17

Aphasia

Answer 17

Severe problems in the comprehension and/or production of language caused by brain damage.

Question 18

Wernicke’s aphasia

Answer 18

A form of aphasia involving fluent speech with many content words missing and impaired comprehension.

Question 19

Broca’s aphasia

Answer 19

A form of aphasia involving non-fluent speech and grammatical errors.

Question 20

Anomia

Answer 20

A condition caused by brain damage in which there is an impaired ability to name objects.

Question 21

Phonological output lexicon

Answer 21

It contains information about the spoken form of words (e.g., number of syllables) and is used in object naming and reading aloud.

Question 22

Agrammatism

Answer 22

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.

Question 23

Jargon aphasia

Answer 23

A brain-damaged condition in which speech is reasonable correct grammatically but there are severe problems in accessing the appropriate words.

Question 24

Neologism

Answer 24

Made-up words produced by patients suffering from jargon aphasia

Question 25

Audience design

Answer 25

This involves speakers tailoring what they say to the specific needs and knowledge of their audience.

Question 26

Prosodic cues

Answer 26

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).

Question 27

Discourse markers

Answer 27

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).

Question 28

Directed retrospection

Answer 28

A technique in which individuals (e.g., writers) categorise their immediately preceding thoughts.

Question 29

Knowledge effect

Answer 29

The tendency to assume others possess the same knowledge as us.

Question 30

Dysexecutive agraphia

Answer 30

Severely impaired writing abilities in individuals with damage to the frontal lobes whose central executive functioning is generally impaired.

Question 31

Orthographic working memory (also known as the graphemic buffer)

Answer 31

A store in which information about the individual letters in a word (and their ordering) is held immediately prior to spelling the word.

Question 32

Graphemic buffer (also known as the Orthographic working memory)

Answer 32

A store in which graphemic information about the individual letters in a word is held immediately prior to spelling the word.

Question 33

Phonological dysgraphia

Answer 33

A condition caused by brain damage in which familiar words can be spelled reasonably well but un-familiar words and non-words cannot.

Question 34

Surface dysgraphia

Answer 34

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.

Question 35

Orthographic lexicon

Answer 35

Part of long-term memory in which learned word spellings are stored.

Question 36

Dyslexia

Answer 36

Impaired ability to read not attributable to low intelligence

Question 37

Dysgraphia

Answer 37

Impaired ability to write (including spelling).