Lecture 18 Flashcards
What is the generative and universal aspect of language?
- You can always generate new and original sentences using the building blocks of language.
- It is universal because all people use language (even isolated tribes) and children develop language similarly
What are Phonemes (3)?
- Phonemes are the basic unit of speech. Like /b/ and /p/.
- The sound is different depending on the word it is in.
- The sound can also be the same with different phonemes (Hear/here)
What happens to phonemes development in children with phonemes their language doesn’t use? How does this show Perceptual Narrowing.
- At first they are sensitive to all phonemes, but eventually they are only sensitive to the phonemes in their own language.
- Perceptual narrowing is similar to pruning where unused connections get lost.
What are perseveration, anticipation and exchange errors with phonemes?
- perseveration is when a phoneme used previously is used at a later point as well (Turn the knoT)
- Anticipation is when you say a phoneme too early: the Mirst of May
- exchange is when you switch phonemes: I Feally Real bad
What are morphemes? What are Free and Bound Morphemes?
- The smallest unit in a word that has a meaning in the word.
- Free morphemes have meaning by themselves: CAT
- Bound morphemes only have meaning in combination with another morpheme, like catS.
What are Morpheme Shift, Substitution and exchange
- Shift is when you move a morpheme to the wrong location: I add upS to fifty bucks
- Subsitiution is when you use the wrong morpheme like: A timeFUL remark.
- Exchange is when you switch morphemes, like a SOUP of BOWL
What is your Lexicon? What is it made up off?
- Al the words you know (vocabulary)
- Made up of lexemes.
What does Chomsky say about structure grammar and our ability to know it when the sentence doesn’t make sense?
- We have an innate ability to understand grammar, even if the combination of words makes no sense.
- Only if it is in the right grammar.
What is the Phrase Structure Grammar model (according to dell (Dell)
- There is a CONCEPTS network WORDS network and SOUNDS network
- Activation at WORD level spreads to LETTER level
- And Activation at LETTER level spreads back to the WORD level.
- This means if you hear PRE…, all words with PRE… are activated, which helps you process the word.
What is the Interactive Activation Model? What is the word superiority effect?
- There is a Bi-directional activation where different levels (Like WORD and PHENOME) activate and strengthens each other.
- When you hear a specific PHENOME, all WORDS that start with this PHENOME are activated.
- If a Word is Activated, it then Activates the PHENOMES of this WORD in the PHENOME level
- Word superiority means that When you see K or FORK, it is easier to process that it contains the letter K if it is within a word.
What is the Phonemic Restoration effect?
- In a conversation there is noice and some PHONEMES get lost.
- You fill in these Phonemes without being conscious of it (using context and Lexicon).
What is Lexical Ambiguity (homonym) and Balanced or Biased Dominance? What is the Lexical Ambiguity effect?
- Lexical Ambiguity are words with several meanings
- Balanced dominance is when both meanings have equal frequency. (used equally often). More fixation if you don’t yet know the context.
- Biased dominance is when one meaning is more frequent. Longer Fixation if it is the less likely word AND in the wrong context.
- Lexical Ambiguity effect means the “fast meaning” slows down acces to the “slow meaning” but not the other way around.
How did Millard and Isard show the importance of Grammar and semantics using shadowing in the Grammatical condition, Anomalous Condition and Ungrammatical condition?
- Grammatical condition means words are both grammatically and semantically correct.
- Anomalous means they are grammatically correct but not semantically carry meaning
- Anomalous means they don’t have grammar and don’t have meaning.
- The Grammatical condition was easier to shadow and the ungrammatical condition was hardest.
What are garden path sentences and Late Closure?
- Late Closure means that when predicting a sentence, you assume that the next word is in the same clause as the current word.
- This does not work in Garden Path sentences where you walk along the path of a sentence, but the late closure turns out to be wrong and you have to re-read it properly.
How does meaning resolve synactic ambiguity?
When there are two possibilities for the synaptic structure, the only one that is semantically correct is picked.
What does it mean that we do parallel word processing where the first and last letter is the most important?
What does it mean that we have positional uncertainty?
- If the first and last letter are the same you are able to read the word if the others are mixed.
- We have an approximate idea of where a letter is in a word, but not precisely
What is a situation model? Why do we need it?
- We build a situation model (image) to interpret the sentence. It is a mental model.
- if you don’t know the context, it is hard to interpret the sentence.
What are instrument inference, anaphoric inference and causal inference?
- Instrument inference is when you infer what instrument is used by someone in a sentence.
- Anaphoric inference is when you
- Causal inference is when you assume that there is a cause and effect. “she took an aspirin, the headache went away.”
