Language Flashcards
Language
The use of an organised means of combining words in order to communicate with those around us
Psycholinguistics and 4 related disciplines
The psychology of language as it interacts with the human mind
Linguistics - study of language
Neurolinguistics - the study of the relationships among the brain, cognition, and language
Sociolinguistics - the study of the relationship between social behaviour and language
Computational linguistics - the study of language via computational methods
Language and evolution
- favored individuals with larynx deep enough in the throat to allow for a wider range of sound
6 properties of language
- communicative - permit us to communicate with people who share our language
- arbitrarily symbolic - creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and what it represents
- regularly structured - only certain arrangements of symbols have meaning
- structured at multiple levels - in sounds, words, phrases
- generative and productive - the possibilities for creating new utterances are virtually limitless
- dynamic - constantly evolving
referent
The thing or concept in the real world that a word refers to
2 principles underlying word meanings
principle of conventionality - people agree
principle of contrast - different words have different meanings
phoneme
The smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance in a language from another
Phonemics
The study of the particular phonemes of a language
Morpheme and 2 types
The smallest unit of meaning within a particular language
Content morphemes - the words that convey the bulk of meaning of a language
Function morphemes - add detail and nuance (suffixes, the..)
Lexicon
the entire set of morphemes in a given language or in the given persons linguistic repertoire
Syntax
Refers to the way in which we put words together to form sentences
2 necessary parts of a sentence
noun phrase - a noun and its descriptors
verb phrase - a verb and whatever it acts on
coarticulation
Pronouncing more than one phoneme at the same time
speech segmentation
The process of trying to separate the continuous sound stream into distinct words
Phonetic refinement theory
- analysing auditory stimuli
2. matching the phonemes we hear with words we know
TRACE model
connectionist model of speech perception
interactive nodes on 3 levels:
- the level of acoustic features
- the level of phonemes
- the level of words
phonemic-restoration effect
perceiving phonemes in speech despite them being covered up by another sound - integrating what we perceive with what we know
Categorical perception of speech
We categorise what we hear according to syllables, pitch, etc.
Motor theory of Speech perception
We use the movement of the speakers lips to perceive what they say
McGurk effect
Hearing a compromise sound when when the lips seem to say one sound but we hear another
Semantics
The study of meaning in a language
Denotation vs connotation
Denotation is the strict dictionary definition of a word
connotation is a word’s emotional overtones in other non-explicit meanings
semantic priming
We react faster to words that are related in meaning to a prior presented word
words with multiple meanings
dominant meaning (foot as a body part)
subordinate meaning (foot of the hill)
Grammar and 2 types
The study of language in terms of regular patterns
- prescriptive - “correct” way to structure language
- descriptive - deacribing functions and relationships of words in a language
syntactical priming
Tendency to use syntactical structures that parallel the structures of sentences we have just heard
what kinds of speech errors do we tend to make
Switching nouns for nouns, verbs for verbs etc
Phrase-Structure Grammar
assigning syntactical categories (vetné členy)
Transformational Grammar (Noam Chomsky)
involves transformational rules that guide the ways in which propositions can be arranged into sentences
these rules influence the creation of a deep structure, which is then transformed through the application of more rules into a surface structure
5 processes reading encompasses
perception language memory thinking intelligence
Dyslexia and 2 kinds
difficulty in deciphering, reading and comprehending text
- developmental
- acquired (through brain damage)
4 problems of people with dyslexia
- phonological awareness - can’t tell how many sounds there are in a word
- phonological reading - trouble recognising words in isolation
- phonological coding in working memory - confusing similar phonemes
- lexical access - trouble retrieving words from their lexicon
2 reading processes
lexical processes - used to identify letters and words
comprehension processes - used to make sense of the text as a whole
Eye fixations when reading
our eyes move in saccades - rapid sequential movements when reading.
we fixate more on : content words than function words less familiar words longer words the last words of a sentence
Lexical access
the identification of a word that allows us to access its meaning from memory
top-down and bottom-up processing
lexical-decision task
tests how quickly people identify stimuli as either words or non-words
sentence-superiority effect
people take longer to identify non related words than tp identify words embedded in a sentence
Cohort model of lexical access
a word’s cohort consists of all the words in the lexicon that share its first phonemes
the possibilities for finding a match reduce with each syllable until the RECOGNITION POINT of the word
Discourse
involves systemically structured parts of language larger than sentences : conversations, stories, essays etc.
propositions in reading
as we read, we try to extract fundamental ideas from the text - propositions, not the exact words, into our working memory
Neighbourhood density
a word’s neighbourhood consists of all the words that are phonologically similar
words wirh larger neighbourhoods take longer to retrieve
formants
acoustic frequencies (lowest f1)
