Language and Thought - Warren (Chap 1-2) Flashcards
- Mental lexicon
Dictionary in our head. Consisting of representations for the forms and contents of words. Ex. When you hear the word “cat,” your mental lexicon retrieves the information that it’s a small, furry animal often kept as a pet.
Word stress
Emphasis placed on a specific syllable within a word when speaking. More clearer, higher pitch and longer duration. This can affect the orally meaning and pronunciation of the word. Ex. “BaNAna”.
Appropriate meaningful content
Make sense in specific situations. Ex. If someone asks you about the weather, an appropriate response would be talking about the current conditions outside.
Appropriate lexical items
Words and vocabulary in language. For instance, when talking about fruits, appropriate lexical items would include “apple,” “banana,” “orange,” etc.
Appropriate grammatical structures
Organized and formed sentences. Ex. Saying “I am going to the store” instead of “I going store.”
Appropriate pronunciation
Intonation and phrasing. For instance, pronouncing “banana” as “buh-NAH-nuh” instead of “buh-NAY-nuh.”
Pronunciation
Saying words in a way you understand the sound clearly.
Intonation
Changing pitch / melody of voice when talking. Ex. Questions or statements differ.
Agreement errors
Agreement errors occur when there is inconsistency or mismatch between different elements in a sentence, such as subject-verb agreement or noun-adjective agreement. For example, saying “The dogs is barking” instead of “The dogs are barking” is a subject-verb agreement error.
Phrasing
How you put words together when speaking. In the right order. Ex. In the sentence “I ate an apple,” the phrasing is important for understanding that the action of eating (ate) is performed on the object (an apple).
Sound errors
Sound errors refer to mistakes or inaccuracies in the pronunciation of sounds or words. For instance, mispronouncing “squirrel” as “squirel” or “library” as “libary” would be examples of sound errors.
Word errors
Word errors involve using incorrect or inappropriate words in speech or writing. For example, saying “I have a lot of paint in my knee” instead of “I have a lot of pain in my knee” is a word error.
Psycholinguistics
Study of the mental representations and processes involved in language use. Including the production, comprehension. And storage of spoken and written language.
Representations (mental)
Stored or constructed mental form of a linguistic unit. For example, the mental representation of the word “dog” includes its meaning, pronunciation, and grammatical properties.
Process
Operation that is part of the production or comprehension of language. Psycholinguistics can be defined as the study of the representations and processes involved in language use.
Bottom-up
Processing based on the sensory input (ex. the speech signal) rather than on higher level (ex. contextual) information. An example would be decoding individual letters to understand a word.
Top-down
Process guided by contextual or utterance/sentence factors rather than by lower level input. For example, using context clues to infer the meaning of a word in a sentence.
Interaction
Influence on one another of different processes in different parts of the cognitive and/or language processing systems. For example, the process of conceptual preparation (preparing to speak based on intentions) may interact with word retrieval (finding the appropriate words) during language production.
Production processes
These are the cognitive processes involved in generating language, such as conceptual preparation, word retrieval, and phonological encoding. For instance, when preparing to speak, a speaker generates a pre-verbal message based on their intentions (conceptual preparation).
Comprehension processes
Comprehension processes involve understanding language, including parsing sentences, interpreting meaning, and integrating information. For example, when listening to speech, a listener must parse the spoken words into meaningful units and interpret their meaning.
Click location
Task used to support claims of clausal processing. Participants had to mark on transcripts where they heard a non-speech signal, and this “migrated” to boundaries between clauses.
Conceptual preparation
Initial stage of language production, where a pre-verbal message is generated based on the speaker’s or writer’s intentions.
Dichotic switch monitoring
Task where participants listen to speech that is louder in one headphone channel than the other and while they listen to this imbalance switched channels. The participants task is to indicate when this happens, and their response can be affected by the processing load at the time of the switch.
Picture naming
Picture naming is a task where participants name objects or scenes depicted in pictures, providing insights into lexical retrieval and phonological encoding processes. For example, participants may name a picture of a cat, retrieving the word “cat” from their mental lexicon and phonologically encoding it for production.
Word retrieval
Word retrieval is the process of accessing and retrieving words from the mental lexicon during language production. For example, when asked to describe a picture of a dog, a speaker retrieves the word “dog” from their mental lexicon to use in their response.
Phonological code retrieval
This process involves retrieving the phonological form of words, including their sounds and syllable structure, during language production. For example, when speaking, a speaker retrieves the phonological form of words from memory to produce speech sounds accurately.
Neurophysiology
Study of brain structures, often to discover which parts of the brain are responsible for particular tasks. Ex. Language processing.
Syllabification
Syllabification is the division of words into syllables, which is important for pronunciation and phonological encoding. For example, the word “elephant” is syllabified as “el-e-phant” with three syllables.
fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging)
Technique that measures brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow in the brain.
PET scans (positron emission tomography)
Means of measuring brain activity by tracking emissions from radioactive substances injected into the bloodstream.
CAT scans
Computed axial tomography, imaging of the structures of the brain. Based on a series of X-rays taken from different angles.
MEG (magnetoencephalography)
Technique for determining brain activity by measuring the magnetic fields created by naturally occurring electrical activity in the brain.
EEG (electroencephalography)
Technique for measuring brain activity that measures electrical activity (event-related potential) on the scalp.
ERP (event-related potential)
Electrical activity of currents passing through the fluid surrounding the brain’s neurons as they respond to an event. Measured using electroencephalography.
ERF (event-related magnetic field)
Currents flowing over larger neuronal structures in the brain than those showing up as event-related potentials. Usually measured using magnetoencephalography.
- Pauses
Type of hesitation. Can either be silent or filled (um, er). Studied as a measure of planning load.
Hesitation
Interruption to fluent speech, which may reveal aspects of the planning process.
Filled pauses
A hesitation which is a break in the flow of speech, usings sounds such as “ um”, “em”, or “er”. Often when searching for words.
Filler
Verbal fillers
Conceptualisation
Initial state of language production, where a pre-verbal message is generated based on the speaker’s or writer’s intentions.
Formulation (grammatical and phonological encoding)
Part of the language production process that imposes linguistic form on the abstract pre-verbal message.
Articulation
Final stage of the speech production process, when the sounds of words are pronounced, as the speaker implements a phonetic plan.
Pre-verbal message
Mentalese
Thematic role
Agent
Articulatory pause
Delimitative pauses
Physiological pauses
Prosody
Intonation
Microplanning
Macroplanning
Speech acts
Performance of some action through saying something. What the speakers want to achieve or communicate by what they say. Indirect/direct and explicit/implicit.
Locutionary Acts
These are the basic acts of producing sounds, words, and sentences that have linguistic meaning. In other words, locutionary acts refer to the literal meaning of the words spoken. For example, saying “It’s raining” to convey the information that precipitation is falling from the sky.
Illocutionary Acts
Perlocutionary Acts
Linearisation
