CHAPTER 9 LANGUAGE Flashcards
the use of an organized means of
combining words to communicate with those
around us.
Language
exchange of thoughts and feelings.
communication
2 Aspects of Communication:
verbal cummunication
non verbal communictaion
such as gestures or facial expressions, can be used to embellish or to indicate.
non verbal communictaion
the psychology of our language as it interacts with the human mind. It considers both production and comprehension of language.
psycholinguistics
Four areas of study that contributed greatly to an understanding of Psycholinguistics:
- Linguistics - the study of language structure and change
- Neurolinguistics - the study of the relationships among the brain,
cognition, and language - Sociolinguistics - the study of the relationship between social behavior
and language - Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics - the study of language
via computational methods
Four areas of study that contributed greatly to an understanding of Psycholinguistics:
- Linguistics
- Neurolinguistics
- Sociolinguistics
- Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics
the study of language structure and change
linguistics
the study of language structure and change
linguistics
the study of the relationships among the brain, cognition, and language
neurolinguistics
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
properties of language
Communicative
Arbitrarily symbolic
Regularly structured
Structured at multiple levels
Generative, productive
dynamic
language permits us to communicate with
one or more people who share our language.
communicative
language permits us to communicate with
one or more people who share our language.
communicative
language creates an arbitrary relationship
between a symbol and what it represents - an idea, a thing, a process, a relationship, or a description.
arbitarily symbolic
The thing or concept
in the real world that a word refers to is called
referent
2 Principles underlying word meanings:
conventionality and contrast
simply states that meanings of words are determined by conventions— they have a meaning upon which people agree.
principle of conventionality
different words have differentmeanings.
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 (e.g., in sounds, meaning units, words, and phrases).
Structured at multiple levels
Levels of Language that Psycholinguistics studies:
Sounds
Words
Sentences
Larger units of language
such as p and t
sounds
such as pat, tap, pot, top, pit, and tip
words
such as “Pat said to tap the top of the pot, then tip it into the pit”
sentences
such as this paragraph or even this
book
Larger units of language
within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances - the possibilities for creating new utterances are virtually limitless.
Generative, productive
within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances - the possibilities for creating new utterances are virtually limitless.
Generative, productive
languages constantly evolve.
dynamic
main purpose of language
to construct a mental representation of a situation that enables
us to understand the situation.
communicate about it
Basic Components of Words and Sentences
phoneme
morpheme
lexicon
syntax
is the smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance from another. The study of the particular phonemes of a language is called phonemics.
Phoneme
the smallest unit of meaning within a particular language.
morpheme
is the entire set of morphemes in a given language or in a given person’s linguistic repertoire.
lexicon
refers to the way we put words together to
form sentences. It plays a major role in our
understanding of language.
syntax
genius lay in his creation of
new words by combining existing morphemes. He is alleged to have coined
more than 1,700 words—8.5% of his written vocabulary—and countless
expressions—including the word countless itself, but also other words like
inauspicious, pander, and dauntless (Lederer, 1991).
William Shakespeare’s
2 parts of a sentence:
Noun phrase
Verb phrase (predicate)
- which contains at least one noun (like “man”) and includes all the relevant descriptors of the noun (like “big”
or “fast”).
Noun phrase
- which contains at least one verb and whatever the verb acts on (like “runs”), if anything.
Verb phrase (predicate)
Process of Language Comprehension:
- Perceive and recognize the words being said.
- Assign meaning to the words.
- Make sense of the sentences we hear.
Understanding Words
Speech perception is fundamental to language use in our everyday lives.
Understanding speech is crucial to human communication.
We can perceive as many as fifty phonemes per second in a language in which we are fluent.
When confronted with nonspeech sounds, we can perceive less than one sound per second.
how we pronounce more than one sound at the same time; viewed as necessary for the effective transmission of speech
information.
Coarticulation:
: process of trying to separate the
continuous sound stream into distinct words.
speech segmentation
suggests that there are different stages of neural processing:
One stage, speech sounds are analyzed into their components.
In another stage, these components are analyzed for patterns and matched to a prototype or template.
involves integrating what we know with what we hear when we perceive speech.
Phonemic-Restoration Effect:
suggests that speech-perception processes differ from the processes we use when we hear other sounds:
Categorical Perception and motor theory of speech perception.
one phenomenon in speech
perception that led to the notion of specialization; discontinuous categories of speech sounds.
Categorical Perception: