Language Flashcards
What is a sentence?
coherent sequence of words
What is a word?
a complete/discrete unit of meaning in a language
What is a morpheme?
the smallest language unit that carries a meaning
What is a phoneme?
the smallest unit of sound that serves to distinguish a meaning
How would you seperate the word talked into morphemes? What about players?
talk, ed
play, er, s
What types of sounds are we senstive to?
the ones that carry a meaning in languages that we speak
The categorization of speech sounds is based on?
voicing, manner of production, place of articulation
What does speech segmentation refer to?
the parsing (slicing) of a continuous speech stream into appropriate segments
What is coarticulation?
adjacent phonemes overlap when producing speech
What are the effects of coarticulation?
make speech production faster and more fluent, makes it more difficult for people that are learning the language
Do acoustical patterns for phonemes differ? What does this mean?
yes they differ in different contexts, certain sounds sound differnt depending on waht word they are in
What is the phonemic restoration effect?
when listening to a sentence if a sound in a word is cut out we can still understand it (top-down)
What is categorical perception?
we’re better at hearing differences between categories of sounds than within sound categories
Are all combinations of phonemes acceptable?
in your language only some are
What is generavity?
the capacity to create endless new combintaions from a small set of fundamental units
What does syntax mean?
rules that govern the structure of a phrase or sentence
Can a phrase violate the syntax rules and still make sense?
yes (me want cookie)
Do syntactic rules depend on meaning?
no (jabberwocky, a nonsense poem)
What are prescriptive rules?
rules describing how something is supposed to be in a language
What are descriptive rules?
rules describing the language as it is ordinarily used by fluent speakers/listeners
What do NP and VP stand for?
noun phrase and verb phrase (parts of sentence that talk about the noun/verb)
What are ambiguous sentences?
sentences that are, despite being written and understood correctly, can have ambiguous meaning (visiting relatives can be awful)
What is parsing?
refers to the process of determining each words syntactic role in a sentence
Do people parse sentences once its done or while they are listening?
parse them as they hear them (can lead to misinterpretation)
