Chapter 5 Flashcards
Arbitrariness of the sign
The observation that the sound of a word gives virtually no information about its meaning
Base frequency effect
The observation that the frequency effect of the base form extends to its inflected forms
Bottom-up process
A process that is driven solely by the input without consideration of context or expectation
Chinese Room argument
A demonstration of why meaning cannot arise solely from the relationships among symbols
Cohort
The set of all words that begin with the same sequence of phonemes
Cohort model
A model of word recognition proposing that listeners initially consider all possible word matches to the incoming speech stream but identify the word as soon as a recognition point is reached
Concept
A mental representation of some sort of statistical regularity in our experience
Cross-situational word learning
The ability to learn to associate novel words with novel objects even in cases of referential ambiguity by tracking co-occurrence statistics.
Derivational suffix
A suffix that changes the meaning and grammatical category of a word
Dual lexicon model
The proposal that there are two mental lexicons, one for the dorsal sound-to-action stream and another for the ventral sound-to-meaning stream
Embodied representation
A symbol that is understood in terms of the perceptual and motor experiences it evokes
Embodied semantics
The proposal that we understand the meaning of a word by stimulating it in the sensorimotor cortex
Fast mapping
The ability to learn a new word after only one of a few exposures
Feedforward model
A model in which each process is performed in a serial fashion
Gating task
A procedure in which participants are presented with increasingly longer increments of a word and asked to guess what they think the word will be
Iambic
A weak-strong stress pattern
Inflectional suffix
A suffix that is added to words for the purposes of grammar
Interactive model
A model in which higher and lower levels of processing influence each other
Joint attention
A situation in which all participants in an interaction have focused their attention on the same object or event
Lemma
The most basic form of a word
Lexeme
The set of all forms a word can take
Lexical access
The process of matching the acoustic signal of the speech stream to candidate phonological representations stored in the mental lexicon
Lexical concept
A concept that can be expressed by a word
Lexical integration
The process of linking the selected ford form to the overall semantics and syntax of the utterance
Lexical selection
The process of choosing the best-fitting word match to the acoustic input. The process that goes from a particular concept to an abstract word form, or lemma.
Mental lexicon
The storage of information about words in long-term memory
Mutual exclusivity assumption
The assumption that no two words mean exactly the same thing
Neighborhood density
A measure of how many other words differ from a particular word by substitution of a single phoneme
Network model
A conceptualization of the mental lexicon as a network of words or concepts connected to each other by semantic links
Onomatopoeia
A word that represents a sound
Phonological encoding
The process that foes from abstract word form, or lemma, to its phonological representation
Phonotactic probability
The likelihood that a particular sequence of phonemes will occur in a language
Phonotactic rules
Rules for combining phonemes into sequences to form words
Picture-word interference task
An experimental procedure in which that participant is asked to name a picture while ignoring a simultaneously presented distractor word
Productive vocabulary
The set of words a person is able to produce in appropriate contexts
Recall
The intentional retrieval of information from long-term memory
Receptive vocabulary
The set of words a person is able to recognize and understand the meaning of
Recognition
A search of long-term memory to find a stored match with the current stimulus
Recognition point
The point at which a string of phonemes provides enough evidence for identifying a word
Referential uncertainty
The observation that there is no direct link between the word and the object or event it refers to
Semantic facilitation effect
The observation that the thematic relations lead to faster naming times
Semantic interference effect
The observation that thematic relations lead to slower naming times
Semantic neighbors
Concepts with related meanings
Semantic primes
Innately meaningful concepts that are used to define all other concepts
Semantic priming effect
The observation that target words are recognized faster when they are preceded by related primes rather than unrelated primes
Semantic priming task
An experimental technique that presents a pair of words and measures the participant’s reaction time
Sentence superiority effect
The improved ability to identify a word within a sentence as opposed to by itself
Shadowing task
A procedure in which the participant is asked to repeat the items in the correct order
Spreading activation model
A model of the mental lexicon that proposed that activation of one node spreads out to other nodes linked to it
Supramarginal gyrus
A region of the inferior parietal lobe that is adjacent to the lateral fissure
Symbol grounding problem
The question of where the meaning of a symbol comes from
Syntactic bootstrapping
The use of syntactic information to infer the meaning of verbs
Taxonomic assumption
The assumption that a newly learned word extended to other similar referents
Taxonomic relation
A relationship between to words that belong to the same semantic category
Thematic relation
A relationship between two words based on frequency of co-occurrence
Trochaic
A strong-weak stress pattern
Visual world paradigm
A task in which participants are asked to interact with objects or pictures in the visual environment according to spoken instructions
Whole object assumption
The assumption that a new word refers to the entire object and not just a part of it
Word
A minimal unit of meaningful speech that can stand alone
Word association task
A procedure in which the participant is asked to produce a word in response to a prompt
Word frequency
A measure of how often a particular word in all its forms occurs in the language
Word production
The process of finding phonological word forms in the mental lexicon to express underlying semantic representations or thoughts
Word recognition
The process of extracting phonological word forms from the speech stream and linking them by way of the mental lexicon to their semantic representations
