Chapter 11 Language Quiz 1 Flashcards
Anaphoric inference
An inference that connects an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence.
Balanced dominance
When a word has more than one meaning and all meanings are equally likely.
Biased dominance
When a word has more than one meaning, and one meaning is more likely.
Broca’s aphasia
A condition associated with damage to Broca’s area, in the frontal lobe, characterized by labored ungrammatical speech and difficulty in understanding some types of sentences.
Causal inference
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.
Coherence
The representation of a text or story in a reader’s mind so that information in one part of the text or story is related to information in another part.
Common ground
Knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions shared between two speakers.
Congenital amusia
A condition, present at birth, in which people have problems with music perception, including tasks such as discriminating between simple melodies or recognizing common tunes.
Constraint-based approach to parsing
An approach to parsing that proposes that semantics, syntax, and other factors operate simultaneously to determine parsing.
Emoji
Symbols used in electronic communication and web pages that can indicate emotions, and are also used to represent other things, such as objects, animals, places, and weather.
Entrainment
Synchronization between partners in a conversation. This can include gestures speaking rate, body position, pronunciation, and grammatical structure.
Garden path model of parsing
A model of parsing that emphasizes syntactic principles as a major determinant of parsing.
Garden path sentence
A sentence in which the meaning that seems to be implied at the beginning of the sentence turns out to be incorrect, based on information that is presented later in the sentence.
Given–new contract
In a conversation, a speaker should construct sentences so that they contain both given information (information that the listener already knows) and new information (information that the listener is hearing for the first time).
Heuristic
A “rule of thumb” that provides a best-guess solution to a problem.
Hierarchical nature of language
The idea that language 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.
Inference
In language, the process by which readers create information that is not explicitly stated in the text.
Instrument inference
An inference about tools or methods that occurs while reading text or listening to speech.
Language
A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.
Late closure
In parsing, when a person encounters a new word, the parser assumes that this word is part of the current phrase.
Lexical ambiguity
When a word can have more than one meaning. For example, bug can mean an insect, a listening device, to annoy, or a problem in a computer program.
Lexical decision task
A procedure in which a person is asked to decide as quickly as possible whether a particular stimulus is a word or a nonword.
Lexical priming
Priming that involves the meaning of words. For example, rose would prime flower, because their meanings are related.
Lexical semantics
The meaning of words.
Lexicon
A person’s knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words.
Meaning dominance
Some meanings of words occur more frequently than others.
Narrative
A story that progresses from one event to another.
Object-relative construction
A sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is the object in the embedded clause, as in this sentence: The senator who the reporter spotted shouted.
Parsing
The mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases. The way a sentence is parsed determines its meaning.
Prosody
The pattern of intonation and rhythm in spoken language.
Psycholinguistics
The field concerned with the psychological study of language.
Referential communication task
A task in which two people are exchanging information in a conversation, when this information involves reference—identifying something by naming or describing it.
Return to the tonic
n a musical composition, coming back to the tonic note that was at the beginning of the composition.
Rule-based nature of language
The idea that there are rules in a language that specify the permissible ways for arranging words and phrases.
Semantics
The meanings of words and sentences. Distinguished from Syntax.
Situation model
A mental representation of what a text is about.
Speech segmentation
The process of perceiving individual words within the continuous flow of the speech signal.
Subject-relative construction
A sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is also the subject in the embedded clause, as in the sentence, The senator who spotted the reporter shouted.
Syntactic coordination
Process by which people use similar grammatical constructions when having a conversation.
Syntactic priming
Hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a statement that follows will be produced with the same construction.
Syntax
The rules for combining words into sentences. Distinguished from Semantics.
Temporary ambiguity
A situation in which the meaning of a sentence, based on its initial words, is ambiguous because a number of meanings are possible, depending on how the sentence unfolds. “Cast iron sinks quickly rust” is an example of a sentence that creates temporary ambiguity.
Theory of mind
The ability to understand what others think, feel or believe.
Tonic
The key of a musical composition. The tonic note is the first note of a scale in a particular key.
Visual world paradigm
In experiments on language processing, determining how subjects are processing information in a scene as they respond to specific instructions related to the scene.
Word frequency effect
The phenomenon of faster reading time for high-frequency words than for low-frequency words.
Word frequency
The relative usage of words in a particular language. For example, in English, home has higher word frequency than hike.
Summary 1
Language is a system of communication that uses sounds or symbols that enable us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences. It is hierarchical and rule-based
Summary 2
Modern research in the psycholog y of language blossomed in the 1950s and 1960s, with the advent of the cognitive revolution. One of the central events in the cognitive revolution was Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s behavioristic analysis of language
Summary 3
All the words a person knows are his or her lexicon. Semantics is the meaning of language.
Summary 4
The ability to understand words in a sentence is influenced by word frequency. This has been demonstrated using the lexical decision task and by measuring eye movements
Summary 5
The pronunciation of words is variable, which can make it difficult to perceive words when they are heard out of context.
Summary 6
There are often no silences between words during normal speech, which gives rise to the problem of speech segmentation. Past experience with words, the word’s context, statistical properties of language, and knowledge of the meanings of words help solve this problem.
Summary 7
Lexical ambiguity refers to the fact that a word can have more than one meaning. Tanenhaus used the lexical priming technique to show that (1) multiple meanings of ambiguous words are accessed immediately after they are heard, and (2) the “correct” meaning for the sentence’s context is identified within 200 msec
Summary 8
The relative frequency of the meanings of ambiguous words is described in terms of meaning dominance. Some words have biased dominance, some have balanced dominance. The type of dominance, combined with the word’s context, influences which meaning is accessed.
Summary 9
Syntax is the structure of a sentence. Parsing is the process by which words in a sentence are grouped into phrases. Grouping into phrases is a major determinant of the meaning of a sentence. This process has been studied by using garden path sentences that illustrate the effect of temporary ambiguity.
Summary 10
Two mechanisms proposed to explain parsing are (1) the garden path model and (2) the constraint-based approach. The garden path model emphasizes how syntactic principles such as late closure determine how a sentence is parsed. The constraint-based approach states that semantics, syntax, and other factors operate simultaneously to determine parsing. The constraint-based approach is supported by (a) the way words with different meanings affect the interpretation of a sentence, (b) how story context influences parsing, (c) how scene context, studied using the visual world paradigm, influences parsing, and (d) how the effect of memory load and prior experience with language influences understandability.
Summary 11
Coherence enables us to understand stories. Coherence is largely determined by inference. Three major types of inference are anaphoric, instrumental, and causal.
Summary 12
The situation model approach to text comprehension states that people represent the situation in a story in terms of the people, objects, locations, and events that are being described in the story.
Summary 13
Measurements of brain activity have demonstrated how similar areas of the cortex are activated by reading action words and by actual movements
Summary 14
Experiments that measure the ERP response to passages show that many things associated with the passage are activated as the passage is being read
Summary 15
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 given–new contract and establishing common ground
Summary 16
Establishing common ground has been studied by analyzing transcripts of conversations. As common ground is established, conversations become more efficient.
Summary 17
The process of creating common ground results in entrainment—synchronization between the people in the conversation. One demonstration of entrainment is provided by syntactic coordination—how people’s grammatical constructions become coordinated
Summary 18
Music and language are similar in a number of ways. There is a close relation between song and speech, music and language both cause emotion, and both consist of organized sequences.
Summary 19
There are important differences between music and language. 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.
Summary 20
Expectation occurs in both music and language. These parallel effects have been demonstrated by experiments using the ERP to assess the effect of syntactic violations in both music and language
Summary 21
There is evidence for separateness and overlap of music and language in the brain.
