Cognitive Psychology Chapter IX Language I Flashcards
Define psycholinguistics!
Psycholinguistics is the psychology of our language as it interacts with our minds.
Define language:
Language is the use of an organized means of combining words in order to communicate.
Six properties that are distinctive for language:
- Communicative
- Arbitrarily symbolic
- Regularly structured
- Structured at multiple levels
- Generative / productive
- Dynamic (constantly evolving)
Two principles underlying word meanings:
principle of
- conventionality
- contrast
(Clark, Diesendruck)
Principle of conventionality:
Words mean what conventions make them mean.
Principle of contrast:
Different words have different meanings.
The main purpose of language:
Language facilitates our being able to construct a mental representation of a situation that enables us to understand and communicate aut it (Budwig 1995, Zwaan, Radvansky 1998)
Verbal comprehension is …
… the receptive ability to comprehend written and spoken linguistic input.
Verbal fluency is …
… the expressive ability to produce linguistic output.
What is the smallest unit of speech sound?
a phone
What is a phoneme?
A phone that can be used to distinguish one utterance in a given language from another.
Four similar words showing the importance of four phonemes:
sit, sat, fit, fat
Phones that are not neccesary to distinguish words in a given language are sometimes referred to as …
… allophones.
What are allophones?
Sound variants of the same phoneme.
Phonemics is …
… the study of the particular phonemes of a language.
Phonetics is …
… the study of how to produce or combine speech sounds or to represent them with written symbols.
What’s on the next higher level after the phoneme?
The morpheme.
What is a morpheme?
The smallest unit that denotes meaning within a particular language.
Suffixes and prefixes together are …
… affixes.
How many morphemes does the word “recharge” consist of?
2
Two kinds of morphemes:
- Content morphemes
2. Function morphemes
What do function morphemes do?
- add nuances to content morphemes
- help the content morpheme fit the grammatical context
Examples for function morphemes:
and, the, -ed
What is the lexicon?
The entire set of morphemes in a given language.
Syntax refers to …
… the way in which users of a particular language put words together to form languages.
Two parts every sentence must have:
- noun phrase
- verb phrase
Semantics is …
… the study of meaning in a language.
“Discourse” encompasses language …
… use at the level beyond the sentence (conversations, paragraphs, stories etc.).
