PSYC*2650 Chapter 10: Language Flashcards
What is a sentence?
A sequence of words that conforms to the rules of syntax
What is a morpheme?
The smallest unit of language that carries meaning
What is the difference between free/content morphemes and bound/function morphemes?
- Free/content morphemes: Able to stand on their own and usually refer to particular objects, ideas, or actions (ex. tree)
- Bound/function morphemes: Unable to stand on their own and usually specify relations among words by adding information crucial for interpretation (ex. -ed)
What are phonemes?
The smallest unit of sound that distinguish one word/morpheme from another
What are the three features that define a sound’s identity?
- Manner of production
- Voicing
- Place of articulation
What is the manner of production?
The way in which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound
What is the difference between voiced sounds and unvoiced sounds?
- Voiced sounds: Cause vocal cords to vibrate while the sound is produced
- Unvoiced sounds: Cause vocal cords to start vibrating sometime after the sound begins
What is the place of articulation?
The position at which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound
What is speech segmentation?
The process through which a stream of speech is “sliced” into its constituent words, followed by its morphemes, followed by phonemes
What is coarticulation?
A trait of speech production in which the way a sound is produced is altered slightly by the immediately preceding and following sounds
Does coarticulation help make speech more or less fluent?
More fluent
What is the phonemic restoration effect?
A pattern in which people “hear” phonemes that aren’t actually presented but are highly likely in that context
What is categorical perception?
The pattern in which speech sounds are heard merely as members of a category
Which pattern in the perception of speech allows people to be better at hearing differences between categories of sounds than they are at hearing variation within a category?
Categorical perception
T or F: If individual phonemes are changed gradually from one extreme to another, people will notice an abrupt shift, rather than hearing the gradations inside each category.
True
What two types of word representation do people have?
- Semantic representation (what the word means)
- Phonological representation (what the word sounds like)
What is generativity?
The trait that enables someone to combine and recombine basic units to generate more complex entries
T or F: Linguistic rules are generative
True
T or F: Knowledge of language generativity is conscious.
False. It’s unconscious.
What is syntax?
The rules governing the sequences and combinations of words in the formation of phrases and sentences
T or F: Syntax definitions allow for recursion.
True
What is a recursion?
A rule that references itself
T or F: Many principles of syntax are related to semantics and sensibility.
False. They are separate.
What is the difference between prescriptive and descriptive rules?
- Prescriptive: Rules describing how things are supposed to be
- Descriptive: Rules describing the regularities in a pattern of observation (how things actually are)
What are phrase structure rules?
Constraints that govern what elements must be contained within a phrase and the sequence they must go in
Are phrase structure rules prescriptive or descriptive?
Descriptive
In the study of language, what are tree structures used to depict?
The relationships among the words in a phrase and relationships between phrases in a sentence
What does parsing involve?
Dividing an input into its appropriate elements
Do people parse sentences as they perceive them, or after the entire thing has been presented?
As they are perceived
What are garden path sentences?
A sentence that initially leads the reader to one interpretation but then requires a change in the initial interpretation to understand the full sentence
T or F: People tend to seek the simplest phrase structure that will accommodate the words they have heard so far.
True
Do people typically assume that they will be hearing/reading active-voice sentences or passive-voice sentences?
Active-voice sentences
What is the N400 brain wave?
The action potential generated when expectations during semantic processing are violated
What is the N175 brain wave?
The action potential generated when expectations of phrase structure/syntax are violated
When perceiving a sentence, do people notice syntactic or semantic anomalies first?
Syntactic
What is extralinguistic context?
The social and physical setting in which an utterance is encountered
What is prosody?
The pattern of pauses and pitch changes that characterize speech production
What are three ways prosody can be used to guide interpretation?
- Provide emphasis to certain elements
- Highlight a sentence’s intended structure
- Signal the difference between a question and an assertion
What are pragmatic rules?
Principles describing how language is ordinarily used that allow for language to be used effectively
What are three things that might affect pragmatics?
- Body language
- Context
- Inferences
What term did the philosopher, Paul Grice, use to describe pragmatic rules?
Maxims
What is the maxim of relation?
States that speakers should say things that are relevant to the conversation
What is the maxim of quantity?
States that speakers shouldn’t give more information than is necessary
During a conversation, what is common in the absence of common ground?
Miscommunication
Language learning depends on what two factors?
- A human genome
- A human environment
What is aphasia?
A disruption of language caused by brain damage
What are the two main types of aphasia?
- Fluent aphasia
- Nonfluent aphasia
What is the difference between fluent and nonfluent aphasia?
- Fluent aphasia: Patient is able to produce speech, but it isn’t meaningful, and they are unable to understand any spoken or written language
- Nonfluent aphasia: Patient is able to understand spoken and written language, but can’t speak or write with any fluency
Fluent aphasia is typically caused by damage to which brain region?
Wernicke’s area
Nonfluent aphasia is typically caused by damage to which brain region?
Broca’s area
What is a specific-language impairment?
A disorder in which individuals seems to have normal intelligence, but experience problems in learning the rules of language
What is an overregularization error?
An error in which a person produces a word form that is consistent with a broad pattern, even though it doesn’t apply to the current utterance
T or F: Overregularization errors are very common for people learning a new language.
True
What does the linguistic relativity proposal suggest?
The language people speak shapes their thought
What is the alternative proposal to linguistic relativity?
The language a person hears guides what they pay attention to, and what a person pays attention to shapes their thinking
T or F: Bilingual children tend to have smaller vocabularies than monolingual children, but bilingual children soon catch up.
True
What are the two opposing views of language acquisition?
- Linguistic nativism
- Linguistic empiricism
What is linguistic nativism?
The idea that humans are born with an innate understanding of grammar and language
What is linguistic empiricism?
The proposal that humans are born as a “blank slate” and language and grammar are only acquired using learning mechanisms following exposure to language (ex. conditioning)
