Language Flashcards
What are linguistics?
The study of language structure, variation and change
e.g. Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics
What are psycholiguistics?
The psychology of our language as it interacts with the human mind. Perception (speech, reading) and production (speaking, writing, signing)
How does linguistics work?
- From elementary sounds (e.g., phonemes) to words (e.g., morphology)
- Then combination of words (e.g., syntax)
- Then meanings (semantics) and beyond (pragmatics)
- Various types/levels of ambiguity
What is Iconicity?
resemblance between form and meaning
What is systematicity?
any statistical regularity between phonological structure and meaning
What are the two ways to represent sound patterns in speech (Phonology)?
Phonemes and phonetics
What are phonemes?
smallest unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another
e.g. lips, slip, spill, pills, and lisp comprise the “same sounds” in different orders
What are phonetics?
the physical properties of speech sounds and how they are produced and perceived in different contexts
What is prosody?
the tune and rhythm of speech
- Speech properties typically at a level above that of the individual phoneme/segment (i.e., syllables) and in sequences of words (phrases).
- At the phonetic level, prosody is characterised by: vocal pitch (fundamental frequency), loudness (acoustic intensity) & rhythm (phoneme and syllable duration) ——– Conveys attitude, emotion, sarcasm, etc
What is morphology?
word structure and formation
What are the types of morphology?
The “free” morpheme
“Bound” morpheme
What is The “free” morpheme?
comprises one meaning.
- It can stand alone as a single word.
What is The “Bound” morpheme?
can be derivational or inflectional
· Derivational morphemes can be prefixes and suffixes, e.g. “re-” charge “-able”
· Inflectional morphemes are suffixes, e.g., plural “-s” and regular past tense “-ed”
What is syntax?
The system of rules specifying how words are combined in sentences
is the english rule for syntax?
Subject-Verb-Object
What are semantics?
How word and sentence level meanings are expressed in languages
- Influenced by morphology, syntax and phonology
- Monosemy refers to a word form that has only one meaning (or sense)
What is lexical ambiguity in semantics?
○ A homonymis associated with two or more unrelated senses, e.g., “coach” = “bus” or “sports instructor”
○ Polysemy refers to a single word form being associated with two or several related senses, e.g., “the mouth of the river” (a metaphorical relationship)
○ A homophoneis a word that is pronounced similarly to another word but differs in meaning, e.g., “flower” and “flour”
What is pragmatics?
How context and other information contribute to meaning
○ Explains how language users can overcome apparent ambiguity
○ Literal versus figurative meanings
What is speech perception?
Most important form of auditory perception for humans
- So it is both bottom-up and top-down (flexibly dynamic and interactive)
How does speech perception work?
it is incremental - processing (e.g., semantic, syntactic) occurs while a word is being attended to
it is predictive - listeners devote resources during sentence processing to predicting upcoming words or phrases
Processing stages - Select the relevant speech signal;
○ Decoding (extracting either phonemes, allophones or syllables)
○ Segmentation (word recognition/lexical retrieval)
○ Interpretation (extract/reconstruct meaning)
○ Integrate (with previous speech to construct overall message)
What are problems with speech perception?
- It’s noisy, particularly under adverse conditions, making speech segmentation difficult (where does one word end and the next begin if there are no pauses between words?)
- There is co-articulation: pronunciation of a phoneme depends on the preceding and following phonemes.
- requires rapid processing
What are helpful cues for speech perception?
- Lip reading
- Sentence context
○ Influences phoneme perception and so rapidly influences spoken word perception - Prosody
○ Intonation helps to direct attention to the potentially most informative parts of speech
What processing is involved in reading?
○ orthography (the spelling of words);
○ phonology (the sound of words);
○ semantics (word meaning);
○ syntax;
○ higher-level discourse integration.
What processing is involded in reading?
○ orthography (the spelling of words);
○ phonology (the sound of words);
○ semantics (word meaning);
○ syntax;
○ higher-level discourse integration.
How are eye movements used in reading?
Most text information we process relates to the word we are currently fixated on
What does the automatic reading of words aid?
letter identification (orthographic processing)
What is the word superiortity effect?
A top-down process from the word to letter level
What is phonological processing in reading?
- Debate about whether it is essential or just a by-product of reading (i.e., epiphenomenal)
- Word meaning can be accessed without access to phonology first, unlike speech perception
What are the effects of phonological processing in reading?
- Homophone effects (“Is it a flower? ROWS” elicits more errors than “Is it a flower? ROBS”)
- Phonological neighbourhood effects -number of words that sound similar to a given word
- Phonological priming effects -words are processed faster when preceded by masked phonologically identical non-word primes than by unrelated primes (e.g., klip-CLIP).
What is the role of working memory in text reading?
Individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity (the ability to maintain and manipulate information concurrently) are moderately correlated with reading comprehension
- this effect is indirect rather than direct
What is the role of inferential processing in text reading?
Readers with superior reading skills (including those with high working memory capacity) draw more inferences than other readers
What are the kinds of speech errors?
Units
Mechanisms
Spoonerisms
Malapropisms
Speech errors exhibit a lexical bias effect
A tip-of-the-tongue (TOT)
What is a unit speech error?
- phrases, words (e.g. saying “pass the pepper” instead of “pass the salt”),
- morphemes, phonemes (e.g. saying “flock of bats” instead of “block of flats”)
- features (e.g. saying “turn the knop” instead of “knob”)
What are mechanisms of speech error?
- Anticipations (e.g. saying “the mirst of May” instead of “the first”)
- Perseverations (e.g. saying “God rest re merry gentleman” instead of “God rest ye”)
- Exchanges (e.g. “Guess whose mind came to name?” instead of “name came to mind”)
- Substitutions (“Get me a fork” instead of knife)
- Blends (saying “chung” for “children” and “young”).
What are spoonerisms of speech error?
are exchange errors involving the initial consonants of words
- You have hissed my mystery lecture!
What are Malapropisms of speech error?
are phonological word substitutions
What is a tip-of-the-tongue-state and how is it a speech error?
is a noticeable temporary failure to speak, where the word can take considerable time to be produced, if at all. In a TOT state, “you know you know” the word, but cannot access the phonology.
What is verbal self-monitoring?
- The set of processes speakers use to inspect their own speech to prevent errors and to intervene when trouble arises
- Speakers are able to detect and rapidly correct their own speech errors
- We monitor both their inner and their overt speech
What are verbal self-monitoring accounts?
The perceptual loop model
The forward model
What is the Picture-word interference paradigm?
Semantically-related distractor words slow naming compared to an unrelated word = semantic interference effect
Phonologically-related distractor words facilitate naming compared to an unrelated word = phonological facilitation effect
What is the Continuous naming paradigm?
- Each additional presentation of an object from the same semantic category results in a ~30 msslowing of naming latencies = semantic interference effect
What is syntactic priming in sentence production (speech planning)?
- People are more likely to use a particular syntactic structure if that structure has recently been employed
- Syntactic (or structural) priming is the facilitation of processing that occurs when a sentence has the same syntactic form as a preceding sentence
What kind of process is syntactic priming in sentence production (speech planning)?
An automatic, implicit process;
- Effect occurs regardless of lexical overlap
- More efficient than
- generating novel structures
What is the role of working memory in speech planning?
A concurrent verbal working memory (WM) task does not affect subject-verb-object sentence planning at the abstract–lexical level
○ Involvement of WM may depend on the complexity of the phrasal structure to be parsed
○ WM effects on production are more limited than those on comprehension
