CHAPTER 9 Flashcards
The use of an organized means of combining words to communicate with those around us.
Language
The exchange of thoughts and feelings is through language
Communication
The psychology of our language as it interacts with the human mind. It considers both production and comprehension of language
Psycholinguistics
the study of language structure and change.
Linguistics
the study of the relationships among the brain, cognition, and language.
Neurolinguistics
the study of the relationship between social behavior and language.
Sociolinguistics
the study of language via computational methods.
Computational linguistics and psycholinguistics
states that word meanings are based on agreed conventions.
Principle of Conventionality
● Language permits us to communicate with
one or more people who share our
language.
● The most obvious and remarkable feature.
● Allows people to write and share their
thoughts and feelings, which others can
read and understand.
Communicative
The thing or concept in the real world that
a word refers to
Referent
Language creates an arbitrary relationship
between a symbol and what it represents:
an idea, a thing, a process, a relationship, or
a description
Arbitrarily Symbolic
allow us to refer to things not currently present, things that never existed, or intangible concepts.
Symbols
asserts that different words have different meanings, ensuring that each word represents something slightly different.
Principle of Contrast
Language has a structure; only particularly
patterned arrangements of symbols have
meaning, and different arrangements yield
different meanings.
Regularly Structured
The structure of language can be analyzed
at more than one level.
Structured at Multiple Levels
Refers to our vast ability to produce
language creatively.
Generative, productive.
● Languages constantly evolve.
● The productive aspect of language leads to
its dynamic, evolutionary nature.
● Individuals create new words and phrases,
which are then either accepted or rejected
by the wider language community.
Dynamic
the smallest unit of speech sound that
can be used to distinguish one utterance from
another (i.e., to change the meaning of a word)
Phoneme
the study of how to produce or combine speech sounds or to represent them with written symbols
Phonetics
study of the particular phonemes of a language
Phonemics
the smallest unit of meaning within a particular language
Morpheme
contains at least one verb and whatever the verb acts on (like “runs”)
Verb Phrase (predicate)
the entire set of morphemes in a given
language or in a given per son’s linguistic repertoire
Lexicon
refers to the way we put words together to
form sentences
Syntax
contains at least one noun (like “man”) and includes all the relevant descriptors of the noun (like “fast”)
Noun Phrase
One or more phonemes begin while other phonemes still are being produced.
Coarticulation
record physical sound patterns.
Spectrograms
The process of trying to separate the continuous sound stream into distinct words
Speech segmentation
When we hear one sound but see the mouth of the speaker articulating a different sound, we are likely to perceive a compromise sound
The McGurk Effect
involves integrating what we know with what we hear when we perceive speech
Phonemic-restoration effect
One phenomenon in speech perception that led to the notion of specialization was the finding of categorical perception discontinuous categories of speech sounds
Categorical Perception
The McGurk effect seems to have a physiological basis in the superior temporal sulcus.
Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS)
When researchers used transcranial magnetic stimulation to interrupt activity of the STS in their participants, the likelihood of the McGurk effect was significantly reduced
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)
is the strict dictionary definition of a word.
denotation
studied the McGurk effect with respect to lip reading
Nicholls, Searle, and Bradshaw (2004)
is the study of meaning in a language.
Semantics
is a word’s emotional overtones, presuppositions, and other non explicit meanings.
Connotation
is the study of language in terms of noticing regular patterns. These patterns relate to the functions and relationships of words in a sentence.
Grammar
is the systematic way in which words can be combined and sequenced to make meaningful phrases and sentences
Syntax
form the meaning of a word.
Denotation and Connotation
this kind of grammar prescribes the “correct” ways in which to structure the use of written and spoken language.
Prescriptive grammar
in which an attempt is made to describe the structures, functions, and relationships of words in language.
Descriptive grammar
Syntactic priming and speech errors and consider two approaches to analyzing sentences
phrase-structure grammar and transformational grammar
we spontaneously tend to use syntactic structures and read sentences faster than parallel the structures of sentences we have just heard.
Syntactic Priming
even when we accidentally switch the placement of two words in a sentence, we still form grammatical, if meaningless or nonsensical, sentences.
Speech errors
who have extreme difficulties
in both comprehending and producing language,
preserve syntactic categories in their speech errors
Agrammatic aphasics
they analyze the
structure of phrases as they are used.
Phrase-structure grammar
when we compose sentences, we seem to
analyze and divide them into functional components.
Parsing
the rules governing the
sequences.
Phase-structure rules
revolutionized the study of syntax.
Noam Chomsky
which involves
transformational rules.
Transformational grammar
refers to an underlying syntactical
structure that links various phrase structures through various transformation rules
Deep structure
refers to any of the various phrase
structures that may result from such
transformations.
Surface structure
the activation of our ability to
recognize letters when it is presented in a wide array
of type styles and typefaces.
Orthographic
is a complex process that involves, at
minimum, perception, language, memory, thinking,
and intelligence
Reading
playwright and lover of the
English language, observed the illogicality of English spellings
George Bernard Shaw
are used to identify
letters and words. They also activate
relevant information in memory about
these words.
Lexical Processes
are used to
make sense of the text as a whole (and are
discussed later in this chapter). The
separation and integration of both
bottom-up and top-down approaches to
perception can be seen as we consider the
lexical processes of reading.
Comprehension Processes
When we read, our
eyes do not move smoothly along a page or even
along a line of text. Rather, our eyes move in
saccades—rapid sequential movements—as they
fixate on successive clumps of text.
Fixation and Reading Speed
it is the identification of a word that
allows us to retrieve the meaning of the word from
memory.
Lexical Access
developed an
interactive activation model suggesting that
activation of particular lexical elements occurs at multiple levels.
McClelland & Mirman, Rumelhart
-David Rumelhart and James
McClelland used this figure to illustrate how
activation at the feature level, the letter level, and the word level may interact during word recognition.
Word Recognition
distinguishes among
three levels of processing following visual input: the feature level, the letter level, and the word level. The model assumes that information at each level is represented separately in memory.
Interactive-activation model
Letters are read more
easily when they are embedded in words than when
they are presented either in isolation or with letters
that do not form words.
Word Superiority Effect
People take substantially longer to read unrelated letters than to read letters that form a word.
Reicher-Wheeler effect
people take about
twice as long to read unrelated words as to read words in a sentence.
Sentence-Superiority Effect
children are taught how the
letters of the alphabet sound and then progressively put them together to read two letters together, then three, and so on.
Phonics Approach
teaches children to
recognize whole words, without the analysis of the sounds that make up the word
Whole-word Approach
argues that words are
pieces of sentences and reading should therefore be
taught in connection with entire sentences; children start to read by reading sentences rather than words.
Whole-language Approach
