Chapter 7 Flashcards
Anaphor
A word or phrase that refers back to a previously mentioned entity in the discourse
Anaphora
The process of an anaphor referring back to an antecedent
Antecedent
The entity in a discourse that an anaphor refers back to
Backchannels
Signals like “mhmm” and “uhhuh” from the listener that indicate engagement and encourage the speaker to continue
Beat
The average time it takes to produce a syllable, as set by the speaking rate of the last turn
Bridging inference
The use of logic or real-word experience to fill in gaps in a discourse
Category anaphor
A noun phrase anaphor that names the category that the antecedent is a member of
Coherence
The use of schemas and logical relations to bind the sentences of a discourse together
Cohesion
The use of linguistic devices to tie together the sentences of a discourse
Common ground
The pool of information that all participants of a conversation share
Conversational fillers
Words like “uh” and “um” that are semantically empty but are used to signal planning difficulties
Cooperative principle
The proposal that speakers should follow social norms to tailor their utterances to fit the current needs of the conversation
Cospeech gestures
Hand movements that speakers make as they talk
Decontextualization
The distancing of thought, language and behavior from the current situation
Developmental language delay
A condition marked by a slower than normal development of expressive language during the first few years of life even though hearing, motor, and cognitive functions are otherwise in the normal range
Ellipsis
The deletion of sentence elements that can be inferred from context
Endogenous oscillators
Neural circuits that fire at regular intervals and thus serve as internal timekeepers for the brain
Entrainment
The synchronization of rhythmic behavior in social interaction
Episode
The fundamental building block of a story
Executive functions
Memory allocation, planning, inhibition, and other cognitive processes necessary for guiding intentional behavior
Face
The personal need to be viewed as competent and to have one’s actions unimpeded by others
Givenness
The degree to which an antecedent is likely to be within the memory and attention span of the listener
Gricean Maxims
Aspects of a speaker’s utterance that the listener attends to in deciding whether to accept the statement at face value
Iconic gesture
A movement of one or both upper limbs to imitate an action
Illocution
The speaker’s intended meaning behind the utterance
Indexical gesture
A movement of an upper limb to point out a referent in a conversation
Indirect speech act
An utterance whose literal and intended messages are not the same
Interlocutors
The participants in a conversation
Lexical bias
A tendency among children to rely on the literal meaning of an utterance even when prosody strongly suggests a nonliteral meaning
Locution
The literal meaning of the utterance
Narrative
A form of discourse in which one participant dominates as the active speaker while the other participants assume passive roles as listeners
Overlaps
Instances when multiple interlocutors speak at the same time
Perlocution
The listener’s perception of the speaker’s intended meaning
Perturbation paradigm
An experimental procedure that disrupts normal infant-caregiver interaction to observe the infant’s response
Pragmatic language impairment
A developmental disorder in which a child has structural language skills intact but still experiences difficulties with the social and contextual aspects of discourse, such as inferring nonliteral meanings of utterances
Pragmatics
The various ways in which context contributes to the meaning of a discourse
Predicitive inference
An expectation of what comes next in a discourse based on the sequence of events so far
Prefrontal cortex
The most forward area of the frontal lobe, known to be responsible for executive functioning
Principle of no gaps/no overlaps
The tendency to avoid leaving a noticeable silence between turns of a conversation and to instead begin a new turn before the current turn is finished
Privileged ground
Information that one interlocutor knows but the other one doesn’t
Reference
The process of using a word or phrase to represent an entity
Referent
The entity that is being represented by a particular word or phrase
Referring expression
A word or phrase that is used to represent a particular entity or event
Relevance theory
The proposal that speakers strive for a balance between providing too much and too little information in choosing referring expressions
Repeated name penalty
A delay in processing when the same referring expression is used on multiple consecutive occasions in a narrative
Scalar implicature
A listener’s inference that a speaker’s use of a weaker term means that a stronger term is not true
Schema
A mental framework for organizing out understanding of how some aspect of the world works
Situation model
A mental representation of the entities and events in a story and how they are related
Speech act theory
The position that the value of an utterance lies not in the literal meaning of its words but rather in the intention of the speaker and the effect it has on the listener
Story grammar
The framework guiding the presentation of events and characters in a narrative
Talk-in-interaction
The spontaneous speech people use as they engage in joint activities
Theory of mind
The ability to make inferences about the mental states and intentions of others
Transition relevance place
A point in the conversation where the listener can expect the current speaker to end a turn
Turn-constructional unit
A syntactic structure, ranging from a single word to a sentence, that can make up a turn in a conversation
Unheralded pronoun
A pronoun without an antecedent
Zero anaphora
The case in which no overt anaphor is used even though an anaphoric reference can easily be inferred
