Chapter 9: Language Flashcards
It is 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.
Non-verbal communication
Verbal communication
It is the psychology of our language as it interacts with the human mind; considers both production and comprehension of language.
Psycholinguistics
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 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
6 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 creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and what it represents - an idea, a thing, a
process, a relationship, or a description.
Arbitrarily symbolic
The thing or concept in the real world that a word refers to.
Referent
2 Principles underlying word meanings.
Principle of conventionality
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
Level of language such as p and t.
Sounds
Level of language such as pat, tap, pot, top, pit, and tip.
Words
Level of language such as “Pat said to tap the top of the pot, then tip it into the pit”.
Sentences
Level of language 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
Languages constantly evolve.
Dynamic
Basic Components of Words and Sentences.
Phoneme
Morpheme
Lexicon
Syntax
It is the smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance from another.
Phoneme
The study of the particular phonemes of a language.
Phonemics
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
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)
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 when we perceive speech, we use the same processes as when we perceive other sounds
like the crowing of a rooster.
The View Of Speech Perception As Ordinary
The stage where speech sounds are analyzed into their components.
One stage
The stage where components are analyzed for patterns and matched to a prototype or template.
In another stage
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; discontinuous categories of speech sounds.
Categorical Perception
Suggests that speech-perception processes differ from the processes we use when we hear other sounds.
The View Of Speech Perception As Special
When we hear one sound but see the mouth of the speaker articulating a different sound, we are likely to perceive a compromise sound; how we integrate what we hear with what we see.
McGurk Effect
The study of meaning in a language; concerned with how words and sentences express meaning.
Semantics
Strict dictionary definition of a word.
Denotation
Word’s emotional overtones, presuppositions, and other nonexplicit meanings; vary between people.
Connotation
Made by humans that are mostly distinguished by means of their function.
Objects
Mainly distinguished by means of
their looks.
Living things
Used more often (ex. Foot as a body part).
Dominant meaning
(ex. Foot as bottom part of the hill)
Subordinate meaning
The systematic way in which words can be combined and sequenced to make meaningful phrases and sentences; focuses on the study of the grammar of phrases and sentences.
Syntax
The study of language in terms of noticing regular patterns; patterns relate to the functions and relationships of words in a sentence.
Grammar
Kind of grammar prescribes the
“correct” ways in which to structure the use of written and spoken language.
Prescriptive Grammar
An attempt is made to describe the structures, functions, and relationships of words in language.
Descriptive Grammar
We spontaneously tend to use syntactical structures and read sentences faster that parallel the structures of sentences we have just heard.
Syntactical Priming
Example of syntactical priming.
Sentence 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
Extreme difficulties in both
comprehending and producing language, preserve syntactical categories in their speech errors.
Agrammatic Aphasics
Analyze the structure of phrases
as they are used.
Phrase-structure Grammar
Mental mechanisms of humans for classifying words according to syntactical categories.
Parts of speech
Rules governing the sequences of
words.
Phrase-Structure Rules
Revolutionized the study of syntax; suggested that to understand syntax, we must not only
observe the interrelationships among phrases within sentences but also consider the syntactical relationships between sentences.
Noam Chomsky
Involves transformational rules; these rules guide the ways in which an underlying proposition can be arranged into a sentence.
Transformational Gramma
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
A complex process that involves, at
minimum, perception, language, memory, thinking, and intelligence.
Reading
3 different process that contribute to our
ability to read.
Perceptual
Lexical processes
?
A basic but important step in reading is the
activation of our ability to recognize letters.
Perceptual
Ability to identify pattern of specific letters as words leading to word recognition.
Orthographic
Playwright and lover of the English language,
observed the illogicality of English spellings. Suggested that, in English, it would be perfectly reasonable to pronounce ghoti as
fish.
George Bernard Shaw
2 basic kinds of processes readers must master.
Lexical processes
Comprehension processes
Used to identify letters and words; also activate relevant information in memory about these words.
Lexical processes
Used to make sense of the text as a whole.
Comprehension processes
Our eyes move in saccades—rapid sequential movements—as they fixate on successive
clumps of text.
Fixation and Reading Speed
The last word of a sentence seems to receive an extra long fixation time.
Sentence wrap-up time.
The identification of a word that allows us to retrieve the meaning of the word from memory. . It combines information of different kinds, such as the features of letters, the letters themselves, and the words comprising the letters.
Lexical Access
Suggesting that activation of particular lexical elements occurs at multiple levels; activity at each of the levels is interactive.
Interactive-activation model (David Rumelhart and James McClelland)
3 Levels of processing following visual input in
interactive-activation model.
Feature level
Letter level
Word level
Involving discrete levels of processing comes from studies of cerebral processing.
Word-recognition 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
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.
Whole-language approach
Difficulty in deciphering, reading, and comprehending text—can suffer greatly in a society that puts a high premium on fluent reading.
Dyslexia
Refers to awareness of the sound structure of spoken language.
Phonological awareness
Entails reading words in isolation.
Phonological reading
People have difficulty storing phonemes in working memory and tend to confuse them more often, reading becomes increasingly difficult.
Phonological coding in working memory
Entails one’s ability to retrieve phonemes from
long-term memory.
Lexical access
2 types of dyslexia.
Developmental Dyslexia
Acquired Dyslexia
Dyslexia that starts in childhood and is believed to have both biological and environmental causes.
Developmental Dyslexia
Dyslexia that is the result of a traumatic
brain injury.
Acquired Dyslexia
Involves units of language larger than individual sentences—in conversations, lectures, stories, essays, and even textbooks.
Discourse
The process by which we translate sensory information (i.e., the written words we see) into a meaningful representation.
Semantic encoding
Used to formulate the meaning based on the existing information stored in memory.
Context cues
Has developed a model of text comprehension based on his observations.
Walter Kintsch
Briefest unit of language that can be independently found to be true or false.
Proposition
Thematically crucial propositions.
Macropropositions
Overarching thematic structure of a passage of
text.
Macrostructure
May be viewed as a sort of internal working
model of the situation described in the text, as the reader understands it.
Mental model
Preliminary conclusions or judgments.
Inferences
An inference a reader or listener makes when
a sentence seems not to follow directly from the sentence preceding it.
Bridging inference
Direction of Process of Interactive-activation model which is bottom-up, starting with sensory data and working up to higher levels of cognitive processing.
First
Direction of Process of Interactive-activation model which is top-down, starting with high-level cognition operating on prior knowledge and experiences related to a given context.
Second
