Chapter 2: The Language User Flashcards
Linguistic performance
A speakers use of language in real situations.
Communicative competence
The knowledge of how to use your language in different situations.
Mental lexicon
The vocabulary of a language user; their knowledge of words.
Activation spreading
When activation fans out to surrounding word forms that are closely connected.
Priming effect
When latter words in a sentence can be easily recognized due to activation and activation spreading.
Cognitive system
Our various types of knowledge and abilities to speak and understand language.
Aphasia
Language dysfunctions that are caused by damage to the brain.
Aphasia to Broca’s area
Processing and understanding of syntactic information is affected. Speaking is difficult, few grammatical words are used.
(Broken speech)
Aphasia to Wernicke’s area
Phonology and semantics are affected. Comprehension is difficult, speech is fluent but hard to understand.
(Word Salad)
Aphasia to supramarginal gyrus
Word retrieval difficulties.
Co-articulation
When the pronunciation of a sound is influenced by sounds that both precede and follow it, and it therefore sounds different in different contexts.
Variable
A different way of pronouncing a sound due to co-articulation.
Bottom-up processing
When each individual speech sound within the sound signal is identified and then combined into a word.
Top-down processing
When speech recognition is influenced by our knowledge, expectations and higher levels of processing, such as constructing an interpretation that makes sense.
Cohort
A set of words that is activated at a certain stage in the process of word recognition.
Cohort model
The model of word recognition that uses a cohort.
Context effect
When the context helps to build up an expectation in the listener which may lead to faster recognition.
Parsing
To analyze a sentence in terms of grammatical constitutes, identifying parts of speech, syntactic relations etc.
Syntactic strategy
To use analytic techniques to understand the structure of sentences; hearers anticipate on frequent patterns.
Semantic strategy
To identify the content words in a sentence and instruct an interpretation that makes sense on hat basis; hearers anticipate on the most likely meaning.
Conceptualizing
Thinking out and planning an utterance.
Preverbal message
When the message is thought out and the planning stage is completed, but the utterance does not yet have a linguistic shape.
Grammatical encoding
The formulation of an utterance.
Slip of the tongue
When the right words for an utterance are chosen, but something goes wrong in the word form.
Slip of the hand
Mispronunciations in sign languages.
Phonetic plan
A plan that contains all the information needed to actually produce an utterance, like the phonological encoding of words and their grammatical properties.
Articulation phase
When the abstract word forms that have been activated in the brain are turned into speech movements.
Incremental process
A process that happens in a series of amounts
Linguistic competence
The unconscious knowledge of grammar that allows a speaker to use a language.
Activation
When a word from the lexicon is used it is activated and this activation spreads to other words that are somehow related to the activated word.
