Cognitive Psychology - Language Flashcards
A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas and experiences
Language
The _______ nature of language means that is consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units
Hierarchical
The ____ _____ nature of language means that components within language can be arranged in certain ways, but not in other ways
Rules - based
A persons knowledge of what words mean, how they sound and how they are used in relation to other words (all of the words we know/ our “mental dictionary”)
Lexicon
The meanings of words
Lexical semantics
The frequency with which a word appears in a language
Word frequency
We respond more rapidly to high frequency words than to low frequency words
Word frequency effect
A task in which participants need to decide as quickly as possible whether strings of letters are words or non words
Lexical decision task
The perception of individual words within a continuous flow of sentences, even though there are often no pauses between words
Speech segmentation
When a word has more than one meaning- eg, a bug, can mean an insect, a listening device or a problem on a computer program
Lexical ambiguity
Priming that occurs when a word is followed by another word with a similar meaning
Lexical priming
The relative frequency of the meanings of ambiguous words
Meaning dominance
The word “tin”, meaning a type of metal occurs more frequently than the word “tin” meaning a small container
Biased dominance
The word “cast” can mean “members of a play” and “plaster cast”- and both meanings are equally likely when hearing the word “cast”
Balanced dominance
The mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases.
Parsing
A sentence that is temporarily ambiguous or confusing because it contains a word group which appears to be compatible with more than one structural analysis
Garden path sentence
Model of parsing that states that as people read a sentence, their grouping of words into phrases is governed by a number of heuristics
Garden path model of parsing
An approach to parsing where information in addition to syntax participates as a person reads or hears a sentence
Constraint based approach
A technique which involves how information in a scene can influence how a sentence is processed
Visual world paradigm
groups of words that contain a subject and a verb
clause
a group of words that contains a subject and a verb and can form a complete sentence that makes sense on its own
main clause
a clause used in the middle of another clause/or inside the main clause, to give the reader more information about a sentence
embedded clause
a sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is also the subject in the embedded clause
subject relative construction
a sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is the object in the embedded clause
object-relative construction
in language, the process by which readers create information that is not explicitly stated in the text
inference
texts in which there is a story that progresses from one event to another
narrative
an important property of a narrative, where the representation of the text in a persons mind creates clear relations between parts of the text and between parts of the text and the main topic of the story
coherence
an inference that connects an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence
anaphoric inference
an inference about tools or methods that occurs when reading text or listening to speech
instrument inference
an inference that results in the conclusion that the events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occured in the previous clause or sentence
causal inference
an approach to how we understand sentences that proposes that as people read or hear a story, they simulate the perceptual and motor characteristics of the objects and actions in the story
situation model
in a conversation, a speak should construct sentences so that they contain both information that the listener already knows and information that the listener is hearing for the first time
given-new contract
the mental knowledge and beliefs shared among two people - the sharing of information means that each person is accumulating knowledge about the topic at hand and accumulating information about what the other person knows
common ground
a way of studying how common ground is established, using a task in which two people are exchanging information in conversation, when this information involves a reference - identifying something by naming or describing it
referential communication task
the process of creating common ground results in _______ - synchronisation between two partners
entrainment
a process by which people use similar grammatical constructions when having a conversation
syntactic coordination
priming that occurs when hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the changes that a sentence will be produced with the same construction
syntactic priming
