Exam 4 Flashcards
Language
A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.
Psycholinguistics
The field concerned with the psychological study of language. The study of psychological and neurological bases of language. The four major concerns are comprehension, speech production, representation, and acquisition.
Lexicon
A person’s knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words.
Phoneme
Refers to sounds. The shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word. Not the same as letters.
Morphemes
Refers to meaning. The smallest units of language that have a definable meaning or a grammatical function. Not syllables.
Ex. truck has many phonemes but 1 morpheme and trucks has 2 morphemes.
Phonemic Restoration Effect
Occurs when phonemes are perceived in speech when the sound of a phoneme is covered up by an extraneous noise.
Speech Segmentation
Our ability to perceive individual words even though there are often no pauses between words in the sound signal. Difficult bc there are no cues from the sound energy so it’s hard to tell when there are breaks.
Solution: word familiarity, but words often can’t be identified in isolation so we need to use context.
Word Superiority Effect
Refers to the finding that letters are easier to recognize when they are contained in a word than when they appear alone or in a nonword.
Corpus
The frequency with which specific words are used and the frequency of different meanings and grammatical constructions in a particular language.
Word Frequency
The frequency with which a word appears in a language.
Word Frequency Effect
Refers to the fact that we respond more rapidly to high-frequency words like home than to low-frequency words like hike. Nonwords are no frequency.
Lexical Ambiguity
The existence of multiple word meanings.
Meaning Dominance
The fact that some meanings of words occur more frequently than others.
Biased Dominance
When words have two or more meanings with different dominances.
Balanced Dominance
When a word has more than one meaning but the meanings have about the same dominance.
Semantics
The meaning of words and sentences. Involved with Wernicke’s area.
Syntax
Specifies the rules for combining words into sentences (grammatical structure). Involved with Broca’s area.
Broca’s Aphasia
A condition associated with damage to Broca’s area, in the frontal lobe, characterized by labored ungrammatical speech and difficulty in understanding some types of sentences, but can also comprehend.
Wernicke’s Aphasia
A condition caused by damage to Wernicke’s area, in the temporal lobe, that is characterized by difficulty in understanding language, and fluent, grammatically correct, but incoherent speech.
Parsing
The grouping of words into phrases. Central process for determining the meaning of a sentence. Used to analyze the syntax and semantics of a sentence.
Garden Path Sentences
Sentences that begin appearing to mean one thing but then end up meaning something else. Useful in studying how parsing works.
Syntax-First Approach to Parsing
States that as people read a sentence, their grouping of words into phrases is governed by a number of rules that are based on syntax. Only uses semantics when syntax fails.
Late Closure
States that when a person encounters a new word, the person’s parsing mechanism assumes that this word is part of the current phrase, so each new word is added to the current phrase for as long as possible, unless that doesn’t work out grammatically.
Interactionist Approach to Parsing
The idea that info is provided by both syntax and semantics and is taken into account simultaneously as we read or listen to sentences.