LECTURE 8 Flashcards
What is orthography?
The study of word letters and spelling.
What is phonology?
The study of word sounds and parts of words.
What is semantics?
The meaning conveyed by words, phrases, and sentences.
What is the lexicon?
The vocabulary and knowledge of a language.
What is prosody?
The rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech, providing information beyond literal word meaning.
What is syntax?
The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences.
What is morphology?
The study of the internal structure of words.
What is discourse?
Areas of written, spoken, or signed communication, whether formal (debates) or informal (conversations).
What are the six types of grammar?
Descriptive, pedagogical, reference, traditional, theoretical, and prescriptive grammar.
What is descriptive grammar?
Describes how language is used without judgment.
What is prescriptive grammar?
Lays down rules for socially correct use of grammar.
What is the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure?
The typical word order in English sentences (e.g., “I give a lecture”).
What is semantics in language?
The study of meaning in language, including words, concepts, and sentences.
How can the meaning of “mean” vary?
It can indicate purpose, importance, reference, or convey symbolic relationships.
What is categorical perception in speech?
Sounds are classified as distinct phonemes, even when intermediate sounds exist.
What is the McGurk effect?
A phenomenon where visual cues (e.g., lip movements) alter speech perception.
What is the phonemic restoration effect?
The brain fills in missing phonemes masked by noise, based on context.
What is the Ganong effect?
Ambiguous sounds are biased toward forming real words instead of non-words.
What is orthographic transparency?
The consistency of spelling-to-sound relationships in a language.
How does English compare to German in transparency?\
English is less transparent, with inconsistent spelling and pronunciation rules.
What is the word superiority effect (WSE)?
People recognize letters more easily when they are part of real words than when isolated or in non-words.
What did McClelland & Rumelhart propose about word recognition?
An interactive model where top-down and bottom-up processes combine to recognize words.
What is coarticulation in speech perception?
Phonemes’ pronunciations depend on preceding and following phonemes.
What is energetic masking?
Difficulty perceiving speech due to background noise.
What is prosody’s role in speech perception?
It helps understand sentence meaning and speaker emotion through rhythm and stress.
How do listeners use speaker variability?
They adapt to accents or speech patterns to interpret the speech signal.
What is the hierarchical approach to segmentation?
Listeners use lexical, syntax, and word knowledge cues, followed by segmental and prosodic cues.
What are saccades in reading?
Rapid eye movements between fixations during reading.
What did Rayner et al. (2006) find about letter order in reading?
Readers could process jumbled words as long as initial and final letters were intact.
How does context influence reading?
Context provides strong priors for word identity, reducing reliance on individual letters.
What did Cattell (1886) discover about reading?
Reading connected words is faster than reading isolated letters.
What are graphemes and phonemes?
Graphemes represent written symbols, while phonemes represent sounds.
How do we read non-transparent languages?
By fixating toward the center of words to maximize information intake.
What is Rumelhart’s interactive activation model?
A model that combines top-down and bottom-up processes to explain letter and word recognition.
What is the main limitation of Rumelhart’s model?
It focuses on four-letter words and ignores meaning and phonological processing.
How does orthography affect phonology? I
In transparent languages, orthography closely corresponds to phonology, unlike in English.
How does eye-tracking reveal reading strategies?
It shows initial fixations are closer to the word center rather than sequentially targeting letters.
How does context aid the brain’s “hypothesis testing”?
Readers predict words based on syntactic/semantic context and confirm through visual input.
