Language Flashcards
The collection of words that one understands in terms of meaning, sounds, and syntax
Lexicon
English speakers usually have how many words by adult hood?
30,000
Phonemes are
the shortest units of sound in a language
English has how many sounds?
40
Morphemes are
The smallest unit of language that has a meaning
missing phonemes can filled in using context
Phonemic restoration effect
perception of language is
constructive
McGurk effect
That visual perception interferes with the audible perception
speech segmentation
parsing speech into words despite a lack of apparent breaks in the sound, using context and meaning
It is easier to identify a letter within the context of word vs standalone
Word superiority effect
context drives
perception
How you doing?
Great! I’m going to kill it on this exam! xo
Language determines our thinking patterns
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Right handed people process speech in
the left hemisphere
what happens at your optic chiasm?
Vision splits to L/R hemispheres
crosses to the opposite hemi
What did Gilbert et al hypothesise?
That language will affect right visual field colour perception, but not the left
A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.
Language
Where and what is Broca’s area?
PFC
Language production
Where and what is Wernicke’s area?
superior temporal gyrus in the dominant hemisphere.
language comprehension
When a word has more than one meaning?
lexical ambiguity
In Tanehaus et al’s 1979 experiment, what did lexical priming show?
That we briefly access the multiple meanings of words before context kicks in
our grouping of words is regulated by
heuristics
An approach to parsing that proposes that semantics, syntax, and other factors operate simultaneously to determine parsing.
- constraint-based approach to parsing
A sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is the object in the embedded clause, as in this sentence
- object-relative construction
in Brandsford and Johnson’s 1973 study, what did they show?
That we use inferences based on narrative and coherence
(John was trying to fix the birdhouse. He was pounding the nail when his father came out to watch him and help him do the work. -
Subjects were likely to indicate that they had read: “John was using a hammer to fix the birdhouse when his father came out to watch him and help him do the work.”)
as we read, we create
situation models that contain many details that we know about the situation we are reading
(Meusalem et al 2012)
Process by which people use similar grammatical constructions when having a conversation.
- syntactic coordination
syntactic priming
Hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a statement that follows will be produced with the same construction.
prosody
The pattern of intonation and rhythm in spoken language.
using pitch and rhythm to express the desired emotion
Explain “tonic” in relation to music
the 1st note of a scale in a particular key
we expect to return to tonic when the scale ends
