Final (new stuff) Flashcards
Diacrital marks:
Symbols that indicate the correct pronunciation of letters in a particular word.
Articulation:
The production of a language’s sounds.
Recursion:
The capacity of any one component (e.g. phrase or sentence) to contain any number of similar components.
psycholinguistics:
The branch of cognitive psychology interested in how we comprehend, produce, acquire and represent (in the mind) language.
Phoneme:
Smallest unit in language. Phonemes are combined to form morphemes.
Morpheme:
The smallest unit in language that carries meaning.
Syntax:
The rules that govern how words and sentences are structured.
Semantics:
The meaning of words and sentences.
Tree diagram:
A description of a process that proceeds from one level at which a number of relationships are simultaneously present to other levels at which those relationships are ordered serially.
Language:
Open-ended verbal communication that consist of all possible sentences.
Speech:
Those sentences that are actually spoken; only a small subset of language.
Phrase structure rules:
Rules describing the way symbols can be rewritten as other symbols.
Grammatical transformations:
Rules operating on entire strings of symbols to convert them to new strings.
Competence vs performance:
We may have an internalized system of rules that constitutes a basic linguistic competence, but this competence may not always be reflected in our actual use of the language (performance).
Deep and surface structure:
The sequence of words that make up a sentence constitutes a surface structure that is derived from an underlying deep structure.
Innateness hypothesis:
The hypothesis that children innately possess a language acquisition device that comes equipped with principles of universal grammar.
“poverty of the stimulus” argument
The argument that the linguistic environment to which child is exposed is not good enough to enable language acquisition on its own.
Language acquisition device (LAD) and universal grammar hypothesis:
The hypothesis that children possess a language acquisition device containing general principles that apply to any natural language (universal grammar)
Minimalism:
The belief that linguistic competence has only those characteristics that are absolutely necessary.
Parameter-setting hypothesis:
The hypothesis that language acquisition involves the setting of various parameters contained within a universal grammar (e.g. position of verb in relation to object.) A parameter is a universal aspect of language that can take on one of a small set of possible values.
Concealing function hypothesis:
The hypothesis that language is a kind of code, and that the parameters st for one language serve to conceal its meaning from the speakers of another language.
Mirror neurons:
Neurons that fire not only when performing an action, but also when observing an action. Broca’s area in monkeys contains mirror neurons that fire not only when the animal makes grasping movements, but also when it observes other animals making those movements.
Parental reformulations:
Adult reformations of children’s speech. They are negative in that they inform children thet they have made a mistake and positive in that they provide examples of correct speech.
Syntactic development:
Development of the ability to orginize words into grammatical sentences.