Midterm key terms Flashcards
Phonology
how the language sounds
Phoneme
The smallest unit of spoken language that distinguishes between meanings
Minimal pairs
words that differ in only one phoneme (have completely different meanings)
Orthography
written structure of a language
Grapheme
the smallest unit of written language that distinguishes between meanings
Morphology
the way the bits of meaning get put together in a larger structure
Morpheme
the smallest unit of meaning in a language
Syntax
rules about how words fit together in a phrase or sentence
Prescriptive grammar
“proper” rules taught in school & used in formal writing
Descriptive grammar
underlying rules and patterns behind normal use of language
Discourse
(hint: think of discord)
a connected conversation, story, or text
Nativist approach
humans are born with innate capabilities to learn and use language
Behaviorist approach
humans are born as a tabula rasa (blank slate). Humans learns language through experience
Rudimentary grammar
No function words, verb tense, agreement
Pidgin
a simplified proto-language derived from existing languages
Creole
a full blown language derived from a pidgin
Dishabituation
not bored anymore. Notice the change
Habituation
don’t notice the change. Get used to first stimulus then bored
VOT
voice onset time (relative to air is released)
Arflow gets released before the vocalization of the word begins
Refers to the time that a burst of air is forced through the mouth to produce a stop consonant (ex: /p/, /b/, /k/, /g/, /t/, /d/) relative to the time that the vocal folds start vibrating
Prosody
the pattern of stress and intonation in language
Phonotactic information
what’s legal and illegal in the language
Statistical Learning
Language can be viewed as a sequence of probabilities
Transitional probability
Between word transition are lower probability than within-word transitions
Training studies
long sequences of nonsense syllables without prosodic cues (synthesized speech) and test infants familiarity with different combinations
Conceptualization
think of what you want to say
Formulation
figure out how to say it
Articulation
move your muscles around to produce the right sounds
Weaver++
a model of speech production. It treats speech production as a sequence of mental processes
Conceptual preparation
Interface between non-language thought processes and linguistic processes that allow us to communicate those thoughts
first step in Weaver++
Lexical concept
an idea for which the language has a label (still conceptual knowledge, but not yet a word)
results from conceptual preparation (part of step 1 for Weaver++)
Lexical selection
The speaker then has to choose from several different words that could be used to convey the thought
ex: couch vs sofa
second step in Weaver++
Lemma
a mental representation that contains both semantic and syntactic (part of speech) information
results from lexical selection (part of second step in Weaver++)
Morphological encoding
Then the speaker has to select which morphemes to produce, depending on the exact meaning and grammatical structure needed
step 3 in Weaver++
Phonological encoding
The speaker then has to activate the required phonemes and organize them into groups
step 4 in Weaver++
Syllabification
process of mapping individual phonemes onto syllables to be spoken
metrical structure
emphasis for each syllable
phonological words
a set of syllables that is produced as a single unit (ex: “es-core-tuss” rather than “es-cort-us”)
part of step 4 in Weaver++
Phonetic encoding
Then the speaker has to plan out how to produce the necessary phonemes in the right order
step 5 in Weaver++
phonological gestural score
representation used by the motor system to create the actual muscle movements that will create the intended speech sounds
part of step 5 in Weaver++
articulation
The speaker can then produce the sounds that will be perceived as speech
Articulators
part of the speaker’s body that can be moved to perturb the air flow to create sounds, including the lips, tongue, velum (soft palate), glottis (vocal folds)
sound wave
vibration of air molecules
Place of articulation (ex: /k/ vs /t/ vs /p/
Manner of articulation (ex: /sh/ vs /ch/)
coarticulation
Gestures from one phoneme overlap in time with gestures for the preceding and following phonemes
Semantic substitution errors (pick the wrong word)
Related words becomes activated and are sometimes accidentally selected at the lexical concept or lemma level
Sound exchange errors
Reflect problems at the phonological or phonetic encoding stages
ex: “barn door” instead of “ darn bore”
Picturing word interference
Picture then on top of picture is a word
Spreading activation model
Based on Weaver++, same stages and outputs but also has interactive and cascaded activation
Amplitude
total change in pressure (higher = louder, lower = quieter)
Frequency
of cycles per second (Hz)
Frequency Spectra
Sounds are usually distributed across many frequencies (except for pure tones)
Sound spectrogram
a graph of the distribution of frequencies over time for an acoustic signal
Tuning fork
pure tone, one frequency band
Categorical perception
Perception of speech sounds reflects category membership rather than continuous acoustic differences
Perceptual constancy
different physical patterns are perceived as being the same
Lack of invariance problem
there is no one to one relationship between acoustic signal (waveforms) and phonemes
motor theory
Analyze the sound wave in order to reconstruct the phonological gestural score used by the speaker to articulate the message
McGurk effect
play syllable along with a video of someone saying that syllable or a different syllable
Bottom-up processes
analyze the acoustic signals- processes from the env
Top-down processes
use information from long-term memory to identify the best candidate from the set of potential matches
phonemic restoration effect
(cough)
tendency to perceive missing phonemes, especially if a noise is inserted in its place
ex: cough
priming
Faster response time when preceded by something that is related instead of something that is unrelated
Semantic memory
Storage of word meanings, concepts, and general facts
episodic memory
Storage of events and their context (when & where)
Semantic Network Theory
Meanings are represented by patterns of activity in a network consisting of nodes and the links between them
Mediated priming
Can prime indirectly related concepts as well
Ex: “lion” primes “stripes”
corpora
large collections of utterances or written texts from the real world
co-occurrence
how frequently they appear with other words
Affordances
possible interactions with an object
embodied semantics
Word meanings are tied to perceptual/motor experiences
Lexical access
the process of retrieving word information from long-term memory in order to identify perceived word forms & their meanings
Lexical representations
mental representations at the word level
Sublexical representations
mental representations “below” the word level; phonemes, graphemes, and features of words
Frequency-ordered serial bin search (FOBS)
Word representations are organized into bins by morphological roots
Words are then organized within a bin by frequency of occurrence
Morphological decomposition
breaking down words into their individual morphomes & identifying the root
Cohort
set of possible words
Activation
initial auditory input activates many lexical candidates (possible words; called the cohort); occurs within the first 150ms of word onset
Selection
more bottom-up input + contextual information narrows down the number of activated lexical representations to the best match
Integration
syntactic & semantic information about the word is mapped onto the representation of the whole utterance
