Language Flashcards
Semanticity
Symbolic representation of objects and abstract concepts shared by all communicators
Displacement
Ability to talk about the past and future
Productivity
Ability to combine limited number of signs into infinite number of messages
3 things languages have in common
Nouns
Verbs
Are structure dependent
Phonemes
Basic sounds we put together to make speech
How many phonemes
Around 100
Study of phonemes
Phonetics
Morphemes
Basic units of language
Morphemes convey
Meaning and grammatical properties
Morphemes can be
Free or bound
Inflectional morpheme
Does not change the syntactic category of the morpheme (s, Ed, ing)
Derivational morpheme
Creates new words (develop to development)
Prefix
Comes at the beginning of the word to change it
Suffix
Comes at the end of the word to change it
Syntax
Rules which specify the ordering of words
Sentence is made up of
A noun phrase and a verb phrase
Mental lexicon
Adding all the words we know together
Semantics
Knowledge of words and their meaning
Adults know how many words
70,000
College student know how many words
120,000
What happens in conversation
Turn taking, cooperation, non verbal signals, verbal signals
Speech errors
Occur at rate of around 1 per 500 uttered sentences
Dysfluencies
Hesitations and pauses
Slip of the tongue
Parapraxes or Freudian slips
Tip of the tongue
Temporary inability to access a word from memory, often accompanied with feeling of knowing
Exchange
Transposition of two segments or two words which swap place in a sentence
Language production is underpinned by these key stages
- conceptualisation.
- formulation.
- articulation.
- monitoring.
Lateralisation
The study of differences between the hemispheres in terms of function
We speak with which hemisphere
Left
Meanings of words are sent from
Wernickes area
Meanings of words are sent to
Broca’s area
Speaking flow chart
Cognition->wernickes area->Broca’s area->facial area of motor cortex->cranial nerves/brain stem->speech
Connectionist model
Each of the characteristics of language are processed by distinct areas in the brain with serial connections
Hearing language
- words processed by the primary auditory cortex.
- passed to wernickes area.
- finds meaning from memory.
Seeing language
- words are processed by the primary visual cortex.
- passed to angular gyrus.
- passed to wernickes area.
Aphasia
Deficit in language following brain injury
Aphasia but speech is fluent
Wernickes aphasia
Aphasia but speech is non-fluent
Brocas aphasia
Speech perception
Process by which a stream of speech is converted into individual words and sentences.
Prosody
Using sound signals from speech
How many words does a speaker produce a minute
Around 150
How many phonemes a second
10-15
Sounds produced vary due to
Accents.
Age.
Gender.
Background noise.
Sounds can be influenced by
The preceding sound or subsequent sound
Observation that sounds can blend means
Speech almost becomes a continuous signal
Stress syllables have a
Strong syllable and weak syllable
Vowels in weak signals tend to be
Shorter.
Lower density.
Different in quality.
Four types of slip of the ear
Deletion of boundary before a strong or weak syllable.
Insertion of boundary before a strong or weak syllable.
Sounds are processed more efficiently from which ear
Right ear
McGurk effect
Facial cues help us understand speech
Lexical access
Process where we retrieve word meaning from our store of words.
Open class words
Nouns
Closed class words
Pronouns
Factors influencing lexical access
Syntax and semantics
Parsing
Process where we assign a syntactic structure to a sentence
Garden path sentences
Are grammatically correct but have ambiguous meaning
Two theoretical approaches that explain how we deal with ambiguity when parsing
Syntax first
Interactive
Syntax first
Parsing based on syntax alone
Interactive
Parsing based in syntax but also context and semantics
