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Psychology > Language and Communication - Terminology > Flashcards

Language and Communication - Terminology Flashcards

1
Q

Define aphasia

A

A language disorder caused by damage in a specific area of the brain that controls language expression and communication

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2
Q

Define lexeme

A

Ab abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to set of words that are different forms of the same word

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3
Q

Define phonetics

A

A branch of linguistics concerned with the study of the characteristics, production, and perception of speech sounds

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4
Q

Define pragmatics

A

The study of the ability of natural language speakers to communicate more than that which is explicitly stated

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5
Q

Define phones

A

A speech sound or gesture considered a physical event without regard to its place in the phonology of a language

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6
Q

Define phonemes

A

The smallest units of sound that are recognisable as human speech and make words distinct from one another

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7
Q

Define minimal pairs

A

Pairs of words in a particular language which differ in only one phonological element and have a different meaning

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8
Q

Define allophone

A

Any of several slightly different speech sounds that are regarded as contextual variants of the same phoneme

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9
Q

Define onomatopoeia

A

Involving the user of words which imitate sounds

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10
Q

Define sound symbolism

A

Argues that sounds are directly involved in conveying meaning

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11
Q

Define FoxP2 gene

A

The first gene implicated in a speech and language disorder

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12
Q

Define lemma

A

An abstract conceptual form of a word that has been mentally selected for utterance in the early stages of speech production

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13
Q

Define lexeme

A

An abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of words that are different forms of “the same word”

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14
Q

Define lexicalisation

A

The process of going from meaning to sound in speech production

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15
Q

Define cascaded processing

A

The implementation of later scales of information processing before the completion of earlier stages

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16
Q

Define grapheme

A

A minimal meaningful unit in the writing system of a particular language

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17
Q

Define morpheme

A

A unit of meaning that can’t be analysed into smaller such units

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18
Q

Define affix

A

The linguistic process in which affixes (prefixes, suffixes, and infixes) are added to words to create inflected or derived forms

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19
Q

Define pseudo-affix

A

Used to mark something that superficially appears to be (or behaves like) one thing, but is something else

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20
Q

Define compound word

A

Two or more words or other linguistic units combined into a single unit

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21
Q

Define orthographic priming

A

The difference in speed of target word recognition between orthographic primes and control primes

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22
Q

Define semantic priming

A

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)

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23
Q

Define masked priming

A

A visual prime is presented followed by a visual mask at the same position or surrounding the same position

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24
Q

Define mental lexicon

A

A mental dictionary that contains information regarding the word store or a language user, such as their meanings, pronunciations, and syntactic characteristics

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25
Q

Define bottom-up processing

A

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)

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26
Q

Define top-down processing

A

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

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27
Q

Define serial processing

A

Allows only one object at a time to be processed

28
Q

Define parallel processing

A

Assumes that various objects are processed simultaneously

29
Q

Define threshold

A

The lowest point at which a particular stimulus will cause a response in an organism

30
Q

Define pragmatics

A

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

31
Q

Define competence

A

A system’s underlying knowledge: the internal rules and states that ultimately explain a given capacity, often in idealised terms

32
Q

Define performance

A

The application/use of such competences: how the system actually behaves when prompted to express its knowledge

33
Q

Define generative grammar

A

The way that sentences are put together and words are arranged which differ from language to language

34
Q

Define phrase structure rules

A

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 (??)

35
Q

Define encapsulation

A

An introjective (??) process through which attempts are made to fuse and confuse parts of the self with parts of the lost and abandoning object

36
Q

Define parsing

A

In vision, to deconstruct a complex stimulus into its component features and attributes

37
Q

Define modular/modularity

A

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

38
Q

Define interactive

A

Interaction includes responses to human physical manipulation like movement, body language, and/or changes in mental states

39
Q

Define garden-path sentence

A

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

40
Q

Define minimal attachment

A

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

41
Q

Define late closure

A

Causes new words or phrases to be attached to the current clause

42
Q

Define incrementality/incremental validity

A

Used to determine if a new psychological measure will provide more information than measures that are already in use

43
Q

Define lexical ambiguity

A

The potential for multiple interpretations of spoken or written language that renders it difficult or impossible to understand without some additional information

44
Q

Define homonyny

A

One of two or more words that are written or pronounced (or both) in the same way but are unrelated in meaning

45
Q

Define polysemy

A

The phenomenon whereby a single word form is associated with two or several related senses

46
Q

Define metonymy

A

The use of a single characteristic to identify a more complex entity

47
Q

Define reference (in Frege’s sense)

A

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

48
Q

Define denotation

A

The literal meaning of a word

49
Q

Define connotation

A

The underlying feeling or emotion associated with that word

50
Q

Define synonym

A

A word that has the same meaning as another word, or nearly the same meaning

51
Q

Define antonym

A

A word of opposite meaning

52
Q

Define holophrastic

A

Describes how infants use their limited vocabulary in single-word phrasing

53
Q

Define telegraphic

A

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

54
Q

Define overextension

A

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

55
Q

Define underextension

A

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

56
Q

Define taxonomic assumption

A

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)

57
Q

Define U-shaped learning

A

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

58
Q

Define CDS (Child-Directed Speech)

A

The way a person’s linguistic characteristics alter when speaking to an infant or toddler

59
Q

Define nativist/nativism

A

The view that certain skills or abilities are “native” or hard-wired into the brain at birth

60
Q

Define fast mapping

A

The ability to acquire a word rapidly on the basis of minimal information

61
Q

Define LAD (Language Acquisition Device)

A

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

62
Q

Define MLU (Mean Length of Utterance)

A

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

63
Q

Communication

A

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

64
Q

Verbal communication

A

Spoken/written transmission of a message

65
Q

Non-verbal communication

A

Non-lingustic aspects, e.g. body language, gestures, emoticons

66
Q

Language

A
  • A type of communication
  • A structured system of symbols (“words”) and the rules (“grammar”) by which they are combined
67
Q
A

Psychology (6 decks)

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