Language (CH. 10) Flashcards
What is Psycholinguistics?
The study of the mental aspects of language, acquisition, production, comprehension, and representation
What is a Sentence?
A coherent sequence of words
What is a Phrase?
A group of words that serve a single grammatical function
What is a Word?
A complete, discrete unit of meaning in a language
What is a Morpheme?
The smallest language unit that carries meaning
What is a Phoneme?
The smallest unit of sound that serves to distinguish between words in a language
What is Manner of Production?
The way in which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound. For example, the airflow can be fully stopped for a moment, as in the [t] or [b] sound; or the air can continue to flow, as in the pronunciation of [f] or [v]
What is Voicing?
One of the properties that distinguishes different categories of speech sounds. A sound is considered “voiced” if the vocal folds are vibrating while the sound is produced. If the vocal folds start vibrating sometime after the sound begins (i.e., with a long voice-onset time), the sound is considered “unvoiced”
What is Place of Articulation?
The position at which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound. For example, the place of articulation for the [b] sound is the lips; the place of articulation for the [d] sound is where the tongue briefly touches the roof of the mouth
What is Speech Segmentation?
The process through which a stream of speech is “sliced” into its constituent words and, within words, into the constituent phonemes
What is Coarticulation?
- Adjacent phonemes are blended
- Makes speech production faster and more fluent
What is the Phonemic Restoration Effect?
A pattern in which people “hear” phonemes that actually are not presented but that are highly likely in that context. For example, if one is presented with the word “legislature” but with the [s] sound replaced by a cough, one is likely to hear the [s] sound anyhow
What is Categorical Perception?
The pattern in which speech sounds are heard “merely” as members of a category – the category of [z] sounds, the category of [p] sounds, and so on. Because of categorical perception, perceivers are highly sensitive to the acoustic contrasts that distinguish sounds in different categories; people are much less sensitive to the acoustic contrasts that distinguish sounds within a category
What is Generativity?
The capacity to create an essentially endless series of new combinations, all built from the same set of basic units
What is Syntax?
Rules governing the sequences and combinations of words in the formation of phrases and sentences
What is Generativity Through Syntax?
The way that we generate new sentence is through our use and understanding of the language’s syntax
What are Phrase-Structure Rules
Constraints that govern what elements must be contained within a phrase and, in many languages, what the sequence of those elements must be
What is Tree Structure?
A style of depiction often used to indicate hierarchical relationships, such as the relationships (specified by phrase-structure rules) among the words in a phrase or sentence
What are Prescriptive Rules?
Rules describing how things are supposed to be instead of how they are. Often called “normative rules”
What are Descriptive Rules?
Rules that simply describe the regularities in a pattern of observations, with no commentary on whether the pattern is “proper,” or “correct,” or “desirable”
What Does it Mean to Parse?
To divide an input into its appropriate elements – for example, dividing the stream of incoming speech into its constituent words – or a sequence of words into its constituent phrases. In some settings, parsing also includes the additional step of determining each element’s role within the sequence
What are Garden-Path Sentences?
A sentence that initially leads the reader to one understanding of how the sentence’s words are related but then requires a change in this understanding to comprehend the full sentence. Examples are “The old man ships” and “The horse raced past the barn fell”
Pollack Pickett (1964) Aids to Phoneme Perception
The more words that you are given in an audio object, the easier it is for you to correctly recall the first word of the trial sentence
What are Semantics?
Aspects of language related to meaning
What is Prosody?
The patterns of pauses and pitch changes that characterize speech production
What is Pragmatic Language?
Beyond the conventional rules of language (e.g., specific words, morphemes, phrases, syntax, etc.), the ability to use language effectively in order to achieve a specific purpose (e.g., body language, context, inferences about listeners comprehension)
What is Linguistic Nativism?
- First prominently suggested by Chomsky
- Not blank slates; possess universal grammar that provides foundation for language learning
- Learning simply requires universal grammar to be tuned to native language
What is Poverty of Stimulus?
- Brown and Hanlon (1970)
- Parents reinforced semantic correctness, but not syntactic correctness
- No training other aspects of language like speech segmentation
What is Linguistic Empiricism?
Language and grammar are only acquired using basic learning mechanisms (e.g., conditioning, etc.) following exposure to the language
What is Broca’s Area?
An area in the left frontal lobe of the brain; damage here typically causes nonfluent aphasia
What is Non-fluent Aphasia?
A disruption of language, caused by brain damage, in which a person loses the ability to speak or write with any fluency. Often contrasted with fluent aphasia
What is Wernicke’s Area?
An area in the temporal lobe of the brain, where the temporal and parietal lobes meet; damage here typically causes fluent aphasia
What is Fluent Aphasia?
A disruption of language, caused by brain damage, in which afflicted individuals are able to produce speech but the speech is not meaningful, and the individuals are not able to understand what is said to them
What is Specific-Language Impairment (SLI)?
A disorder in which individuals seem to have normal intelligence but experience problems in learning the rules of language
What is an Overregularization Error?
In speech production, an error in which a person produces a form that is consistent with a broad pattern, even though that pattern does not apply to the current utterance.