intro, communication in animals, language & thought (week 1) Flashcards
what is an allophone?
one of two or more variants of the same phoneme e.g., the aspirated p of pin and the unaspirated p of spin are allophones of the phoneme p
what are minimal pairs?
a set of words that mean two different things but differ by a single speech sound e.g., bat and bad are similar sounding words that differ by one consonant sound at the end
what is a phoneme?
any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another e.g., p, b, d, and t in the english words pad, pat, bad, and bat
what is a phone?
an unanalysed sound of language, a speech segment that possesses distinct physical or perceptual properties and serves as the basic unit of phonetic speech analysis - usually vowels or consonants
what is the foxp2 gene?
a protein coding gene belonging to the forkhead-box group (FOX) - can cause diseases such as childhood apraxia of speech and gallbladder cancer - known to cause language delays such as delayed speech onset articulation difficulties, slurring of speech, stuttering, poor pronunciation and dyspraxia
what is aphasia?
the inability/the impaired ability to produce or understand speech due to a brain injury e.g., broca’s aphasia - the ability to fluently produce language but can easily understand language
what is a lexeme?
a basic lexical unit of a language consisting of one word or several words, the elements of which do not separately convey the meaning of the whole e.g., run, runs, ran, and running are forms of the same lexeme
what are phonetics?
the study/classification of speech sounds
what are pragmatics?
the branch of linguistics dealing with language in use and the contexts in which it is used, including such matters as deixis, the taking turns in conversation, text organisation, presupposition, and implicature e.g., pragmatics such as metaphor, irony, euphemism, and sarcasm require context
what is onomatopoeia?
when the name of the word is associate with the sound it makes e.g., sizzle, bang, pop, twang
what are phrase structure rules?
a type of generative grammar in which constituent structures are represented by phase structure rules or rewrite rules
what is a synonym?
a word that has the same meaning as another word
what is an antonym?
a word that has the opposite meaning to another word
what is sound symbolism?
the resemblance between the sound and meaning
what generative grammar?
grammar (the set of language rules) that indicates the structure and interpretation of sentence that native speaker of a language accept as a belonging to their language - adopting the term generative from mathematics, linguist Noam Chomsky introduced the concept of generative grammar in the 1950s
