Language 1

Question 1

What is language?

Answer 1

set of sounds/symbols to express thoughts, feeling, etc

Question 2

what makes human language unique

Answer 2

• creativity
• hierarchical
• rule based

The ideas we can convey are infinite

Question 3

what does hierchical mean?

Answer 3

letters make up many words and sentences

Question 4

What does Rule based mean

Answer 4

Certain rules in how we can organize our thoughts

Question 5

Words are made up of?

Answer 5

• phonemes
• morphemes

Question 6

What are phonemes?

Answer 6

• most basic sound
• 47 in english language
• b/i/t
• “e” in “we” and “wet”

Question 7

What are Morphemes?

Answer 7

• smallest unit of sound with meaning or grammatical function
• “truck” (one morpheme)
• truckS (two morphemes)

Question 8

Phonemic restoration effect

Answer 8

• you hear the “s” in legislature our brain finishes the details to make up for background noise

Question 9

What did Pollack and Picket want to test about word perception in sentences?

Answer 9

• play a word eg. Big girl vs. Big Earl
• can you idenitfy the word without context?
• 50% of the time people can idenitfy it

Question 10

What is the word superioirty effect?

Answer 10

• A letter (like “A”) is recognized faster and more accurately when it is part of a real word (like “CAT”) compared to when it’s:
  Shown alone (just “A”).
  Part of a nonsense string (like “CZT”).
  Key Idea: The brain uses the context of the whole word to identify its parts more efficiently.

Question 11

Word frequency effect

Answer 11

• the more frequent weuse the word the quicker we process and recognize

Question 12

What is lexical ambiguity?

Answer 12

“bug” or “bug” someone

Question 13

What is meaning dominance?

Answer 13

• the word is balanced and has equal usage, it takes longer to process
• if the word is biased and favours one definition over the other it is processed quicker

Question 14

what is semantics?

Answer 14

rules

Question 15

Broca’s aphasia

Answer 15

• left frontal lobe damage
• inability to generate language
• they have no trouble understanding

Question 16

Why did the man with Broca’s aphasia have no trouble counting to 10?

Answer 16

• because it is highly over learned
• it’s one of the first things you are taught

Question 17

What is wenicke’s aphasia?

Answer 17

• can’t understand langauge
• ## damage in left temporal lobe

Question 18

praising and garden path sentences

Answer 18

Parsing: Breaking sentences into parts for meaning.
Garden Path Sentence: Starts simple but misleads (e.g., “The horse raced past the barn fell”).
Confuses readers until re-parsed correctly.
Shows how sentence structure affects understanding.
Parsing relies on grammar and context.

Question 19

Influence of knowledge

Answer 19

• the spy saw the man, with binoculars
• the spy saw, the man with binoculars

we use semantic background knoweldge to derive meaning

Question 20

What is the interactionist approach to parsing?

Answer 20

Parsing uses both syntax (grammar) and semantics (meaning) together.
Context and meaning influence sentence interpretation.
Example: “The spy saw the man with binoculars” – context decides who has the binoculars.
Combines grammar rules and word meaning for understanding.-