Language and Communication - Terminology Flashcards
Define aphasia
A language disorder caused by damage in a specific area of the brain that controls language expression and communication
Define lexeme
Ab abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to set of words that are different forms of the same word
Define phonetics
A branch of linguistics concerned with the study of the characteristics, production, and perception of speech sounds
Define pragmatics
The study of the ability of natural language speakers to communicate more than that which is explicitly stated
Define phones
A speech sound or gesture considered a physical event without regard to its place in the phonology of a language
Define phonemes
The smallest units of sound that are recognisable as human speech and make words distinct from one another
Define minimal pairs
Pairs of words in a particular language which differ in only one phonological element and have a different meaning
Define allophone
Any of several slightly different speech sounds that are regarded as contextual variants of the same phoneme
Define onomatopoeia
Involving the user of words which imitate sounds
Define sound symbolism
Argues that sounds are directly involved in conveying meaning
Define FoxP2 gene
The first gene implicated in a speech and language disorder
Define lemma
An abstract conceptual form of a word that has been mentally selected for utterance in the early stages of speech production
Define lexeme
An abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of words that are different forms of “the same word”
Define lexicalisation
The process of going from meaning to sound in speech production
Define cascaded processing
The implementation of later scales of information processing before the completion of earlier stages
Define grapheme
A minimal meaningful unit in the writing system of a particular language
Define morpheme
A unit of meaning that can’t be analysed into smaller such units
Define affix
The linguistic process in which affixes (prefixes, suffixes, and infixes) are added to words to create inflected or derived forms
Define pseudo-affix
Used to mark something that superficially appears to be (or behaves like) one thing, but is something else
Define compound word
Two or more words or other linguistic units combined into a single unit
Define orthographic priming
The difference in speed of target word recognition between orthographic primes and control primes
Define semantic priming
The observation that a response to a target (e.g. dog) is faster when it’s preceded by a semantically related prime (e.g. cat) compared to an unrelated prime (e.g. car)
Define masked priming
A visual prime is presented followed by a visual mask at the same position or surrounding the same position
Define mental lexicon
A mental dictionary that contains information regarding the word store or a language user, such as their meanings, pronunciations, and syntactic characteristics
Define bottom-up processing
The process of ‘sensation’, whereby the input of sensory information from the external environment is received by our sensory receptors (when sensory receptors pick up signals for the brain to integrate and process)
Define top-down processing
The idea that our brains form an idea of a big picture first from previous knowledge and then break it down into more specific information
Define serial processing
Allows only one object at a time to be processed
Define parallel processing
Assumes that various objects are processed simultaneously
Define threshold
The lowest point at which a particular stimulus will cause a response in an organism
Define pragmatics
The analysis of language in terms of its functional communicative properties, rather than its formal and structural properties (e.g. phonology, semantics, grammar), and in terms of the intentions and perspectives of its users
Define competence
A system’s underlying knowledge: the internal rules and states that ultimately explain a given capacity, often in idealised terms
Define performance
The application/use of such competences: how the system actually behaves when prompted to express its knowledge
Define generative grammar
The way that sentences are put together and words are arranged which differ from language to language
Define phrase structure rules
A type of generative grammar in which a system of phrase-structure rules (or rewrite rules) is used to describe a sentence in terms of the grammatical structures that generate its form and define it as grammatical (??)
Define encapsulation
An introjective (??) process through which attempts are made to fuse and confuse parts of the self with parts of the lost and abandoning object
Define parsing
In vision, to deconstruct a complex stimulus into its component features and attributes
Define modular/modularity
A cognitive system is composed of neural structures and mental processes that are distinct, localised with neural architecture, and domain specific
Simply - modularity of mind means functionally specialised mental systems
Define interactive
Interaction includes responses to human physical manipulation like movement, body language, and/or changes in mental states
Define garden-path sentence
A sentence in which structural cues, lexical ambiguity, or a combination of both mislead the reader/listener into an incorrect interpretation until a disambiguated cue appears later in the sentence
Define minimal attachment
In psycholinguistics, the minimal attachment principle is the theory that listeners and readers initially attempt to interpret sentences in terms of the simplest syntactic structure consistent with the input that’s known at the moment
Define late closure
Causes new words or phrases to be attached to the current clause
Define incrementality/incremental validity
Used to determine if a new psychological measure will provide more information than measures that are already in use
Define lexical ambiguity
The potential for multiple interpretations of spoken or written language that renders it difficult or impossible to understand without some additional information
Define homonyny
One of two or more words that are written or pronounced (or both) in the same way but are unrelated in meaning
Define polysemy
The phenomenon whereby a single word form is associated with two or several related senses
Define metonymy
The use of a single characteristic to identify a more complex entity
Define reference (in Frege’s sense)
Said that the reference of a sentence is a certain special sort of object - a truth value - but this isn’t essential to the view
Define denotation
The literal meaning of a word
Define connotation
The underlying feeling or emotion associated with that word
Define synonym
A word that has the same meaning as another word, or nearly the same meaning
Define antonym
A word of opposite meaning
Define holophrastic
Describes how infants use their limited vocabulary in single-word phrasing
Define telegraphic
A form of communication consisting of simple two-word long sentences often composed of a noun and a verb that adhere to the grammatical standards of the culture’s language
Define overextension
Occurs when a categorical term (a word used to describe a group of things) is used in language to represent more categories than it actually does
Define underextension
A child doesn’t use a word for enough particular cases - opposite of overextension where a child uses a word for too many different cases
Define taxonomic assumption
In language development, the tendency of children to suppose that a novel word that refers to one thing also refers to similar things (rather than thematically related things)
Define U-shaped learning
A U-shaped curve in a cognitive-developmental trajectory refers to a three-step process: good performance followed by bad performance followed by good performance once again
Define CDS (Child-Directed Speech)
The way a person’s linguistic characteristics alter when speaking to an infant or toddler
Define nativist/nativism
The view that certain skills or abilities are “native” or hard-wired into the brain at birth
Define fast mapping
The ability to acquire a word rapidly on the basis of minimal information
Define LAD (Language Acquisition Device)
The LAD concept is a purported instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language - it’s a component of the nativist theory of language
Proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960’s
Define MLU (Mean Length of Utterance)
The average number of morphemes per utterance
It’s an index of expressive language development used beyond the stage of single words, when a child uses two or more words together in an utterance
Communication
When one organism (the transmitter) encodes information into a signal which passes to another organism (the receiver) which decodes the signal and is capable of responding appropriately
Verbal communication
Spoken/written transmission of a message
Non-verbal communication
Non-lingustic aspects, e.g. body language, gestures, emoticons
Language
- A type of communication
- A structured system of symbols (“words”) and the rules (“grammar”) by which they are combined
