Psych 100 - Language - Final Exam Flashcards
Phoneme
The smallest unit of sound that makes a meaningful difference in a language. In transcription, phonemes are placed between slashes.
Eg. the word “bit” has three phonemes: /b/, /i/, and /t/.
Categorical perception of speech
The phoneme is a category of sounds that are treated alike within the language.
Speakers of different languages are able to hear the difference between only some phonemes, but not others.
Eg. The Arabic language can differentiate between c and k, while the English language cannot differentiate between these sounds at the beginning of a word.
Morpheme
A string of one or more phonemes that makes up the smallest units of meaning in a language.
Some morphemes are suffixes that are added onto an existing word: happiest, coolest, OR rewrite, repay….
Syntax
The set of rules of a language by which we construct sentences. Each language has a different syntax.
Contextual information
The information surrounding language — to help us interpret it.
Common ground
A set of knowledge that the speaker and listener share and they think, assume, or otherwise take for granted that they share.
Audience design
Speakers design their utterances for their audiences by taking into account the audiences’ prior knowledge.
Lexicon
The vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge: words and expressions.
Situation models
Representations about the topic of a conversation.
So, if you are talking about Gary and Mary with your friends, you might have a situation model of Gary giving Mary a ring in your mind.
Pickering and Garrod’s theory is that as you describe the situation using language, others in the conversation begin to use similar words and grammar, and many other aspects of language use converge.
Priming
Occurs when your thinking about one concept (e.g., ring) reminds you about other related concepts (e.g., marriage or wedding ceremony)
Social brain hypothesis
Dunbar showed that those primate genera that have larger brains tend to live in larger groups.
Linguistic intergroup bias
People tend to describe positive actions of their ingroup members using adjectives (e.g., she is generous) rather than verbs (e.g., she gave a blind man some change), and negative actions of outgroup members using adjectives (e.g., she is cruel) rather than verbs (e.g., she kicked a dog).
Ingroup members are typically good, and if they do anything bad, that’s more an exception in special circumstances.
In contrast, outgroup members are typically bad, and if they do anything good, that’s more an exception.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - aka linguistic relativity hypothesis
A certain type of language use (i.e., linguistic practice) is repeated by a large number of people in a community, it can potentially have a significant effect on their thoughts and action.
Refers to the proposal that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality.
Eg. many words for snow in the Inuit language
Linguistic relativity - Sapir-Whorf Theory
The idea that language and its structures influence and limit human thought.
Whorf argued that the Inuit people of Canada had many words for snow, whereas English speakers have only one, and that this difference influenced how the different cultures perceived snow. Whorf argued that the Inuit perceived and categorized snow in finer details than English speakers possibly could because the English language constrained perception.
Overextensions
Children often make overextensions of concepts, which means they use a given word in a broader context than appropriate.
Eg. a child might at first call all adult men “daddy” or all animals “doggie.”
Generativity
Refers to the fact that speakers of a language can compose sentences to represent new ideas that they have never before been exposed to.
Eg. when a child says they “swimmed” in the pool they are demonstrating generatively.
Universal grammar
Chomsky - believer that human brains contain a language acquisition device that includes a universal grammar that underlies all human language.
Chomsky proposed that children are born with a knowledge of general rules of syntax that determine how sentences are constructed that then coordinates with the language the child is exposed to.
Eg. children automatically grasp the correct way to arrange dependent sentence structures without being taught.
Deep structure of an idea
How the idea is represented in the fundamental universal grammar that is common to all languages.
Surface structure of an idea
How the idea is expressed in language in exact words.
Once we hear or express a thought in surface structure, we generally forget exactly how it happened. At the end of a lecture, you will remember a lot of the deep structure (i.e., the ideas expressed by the instructor), but you cannot reproduce the surface structure (i.e., the exact words that the instructor used to communicate the ideas).
Broca’s area
An area in front of the left hemisphere near the motor cortex, is responsible for language production.
Broca’s aphasia - have difficulty producing speech
Wernicke’s area
An area of the brain next to the auditory cortex, is responsible for language comprehension.
Wernicke’s aphasia - nonsensical speech produced, and trouble understanding language
Asphasia
A condition in which language functions are severely impaired.
