Final _ chapter 11 Flashcards
Semanticity
Language signals mean something
Displacement
Language can be used to talk about things that aren’t present
Openness
Can be used to say something that has never been said before
Tradition
Language is taught
Duality of patterning
Words are made up of smaller meaningless units which can be re-arranged to form new meaning
Phoneme
The smallest unit of distinct sound in a language
-each language has a different inventory of phonemes
Perceptual Tuning
Some pairs of sound get lumped together in one language but treated as different phonemes in another
[Werker and Tees]
- found that 6month olds responded to two d sounds like they were different
-by 12 months they had been tuned into the letter d
Crossmodal Associations
Agreement that some sounds are better fits for certain meanings
[m] calm and round
[k] spiky and exciting
Mental Lexicon
Our internal storehouse of words in our vocabulary
- contains each word’s semantics
- also store each word’s written and spoken form
Factors that affect word processing
Word frequency effect
Concrete effect:
Faster to process concrete vs abstract words
- concrete words have richer representations involving more sensorimotor features
- also faster with words that are embodied
Variable Pronunciation
Words can be pronounced differently based on the other words around them, and by different people
Transitional Probabilities
Statistical pattern of how often a pair of syllables go together within a word vs between a pair of words
Lexical Ambiguity
Tanenhaus et al.
Both meanings for the ambiguous word were activated
- if there was a delay of 200ms, only the noun prompt primed the probe
Meaning dominance
The relative frequency of the meanings of ambiguous words
[Balance dominance] different meanings are equally frequent
[Biased dominance] one meaning is more frequent than the other
Syntax
The structure of a sentence
Parsing
Grouping words into phrases
Garden path sentences
Lead the reader into an interpretation that ends up being incorrect
- they have to then go back and correct their interpretation
-people usually group words based on heuristics (quick decision)
Principal of late closure
When encountering a new word, a person assumes it is added to the current phrase
Constraint-Based approach to Parsing
Information participated in processing
- word meaning
- story context
-scene context [visual world paradigm]
Provides constraints on possible interpretations
Inference
Using our existing knowledge to go beyond the information provided in the text
Coherence
Representation of the text in a person’s mind that creates clear relations between parts of the text and the main topic of the story
Anaphoric Inference
Connecting an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence
Casual Inference
Inferring that the events in one clause or sentence were caused by events in a previous one
Situation Model
