PSYCH CHAP 10

Question 1

American Sign Language (ASL)

Answer 1

The manual-visual language used by most deaf persons in the United States.

Question 2

aphasia

Answer 2

Any of a number of linguistic disorders caused by injury to or malformation of the brain. See also fluent aphasia, nonfluent aphasia.

Question 3

basic level

Answer 3

A concept at some accessible, middling degree of abstractness or inclusiveness (e.g., dog, spoon). See also subordinates, superordinates.

Question 4

case marker

Answer 4

A word or affix that indicates the semantic role played by some noun phrase in a sentence. English case marks pronouns (e.g., he versus him) but usually marks semantic roles by word order, e.g., the first noun phrase in simple sentences usually plays the actor role. Many languages case mark all noun phrases and thus word order may be quite free in these languages.

Question 5

content morpheme

Answer 5

A morpheme that carries the main semantic and referential content of a sentence. In English content morphemes are usually nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs. See also function morpheme.

Question 6

crib bilingual

Answer 6

A prelinguistic infant who is exposed to two or more languages in the home environment.

Question 7

definitional theory of word meaning

Answer 7

The theory that mental representations of word meanings consist of a necessary and sufficient set of semantic features. The representation of apple, for example, might be [round], [edible], [sweet], [red], [juicy].

Question 8

family resemblance structure

Answer 8

An overlapping set of semantic features shared by members of a category, such that no members of the category need to have all of the features but all members have at least one of them.

Question 9

function morpheme

Answer 9

A morpheme that, while adding such content as time, mode, individuation, and evidentiality, also serves a grammatical purpose (e.g., the suffixes ?s and ?er, or the connecting words and or if). See also content morpheme.

Question 10

garden path

Answer 10

A premature, false syntactic analysis of a sentence as it is being heard or read, which must be mentally revised when later information within the sentence falsifies the initial interpretation, as in, e.g., Put the ball on the floor into the box.

Question 11

morpheme

Answer 11

The smallest significant unit of meaning in a word (e.g., the word boys has two morphemes, boy and -s).

Question 12

phoneme

Answer 12

The smallest significant unit of sound in a language. Alphabetic characters roughly correspond to phonemes (e.g., apt, tap, and pat are all made up of the same phonemes).

Question 13

phrase structure description

Answer 13

A tree diagram or labeled bracketing that shows the hierarchical structure of a sentence.

Question 14

predicate verb phrase

Answer 14

The verb phrase immediately descending from the root of the sentence tree. In simple English sentences, this verb phrase usually expresses the action or state of the agent or actor.

Question 15

proposition

Answer 15

(1) A statement relating a subject and a claim about that subject. (2) A predicate-argument structure. In a sentence, the verb is the predicated act or state and the noun phrases are its arguments, playing various semantic roles.

Question 16

prototype

Answer 16

The typical or most familiar example of a category (e.g., a robin is a prototypical bird for many Americans but an auk might be the prototype for Laplanders). See also prototype theory.

Question 17

prototype theory

Answer 17

A theory in which concepts and word meanings are formed around average or typical values. Some prototype theories comprise feature representations, but without the necessary and sufficient conditions of definitional theory, but some are exemplar representations. In both cases, centrality in the category is measured by closeness to an ideal or average. See also prototype.

Question 18

rules of syntax (or grammar)

Answer 18

The regular principles governing how words can be assembled into sentences.

Question 19

semantic feature

Answer 19

A basic semantic category or concept that cannot be decomposed into smaller or less inclusive categories. According to several strict theories (e.g., Hume, 1739), the basic features are all sensory-perceptual.

Question 20

semantic role

Answer 20

The part that each phrase plays in the “who did what to whom” drama described by a sentence. One word takes the role of being the cause of the action, another, its effect, and so on.

Question 21

sensitive period

Answer 21

An early period during the development of an organism when it is particularly responsive to environmental stimulation. Outside of this period, the same environmental events have less impact and may yield imperfect learning even after lengthy exposure and practice.

Question 22

Specific Language Impairment

Answer 22

(SLI) A syndrome of unknown etiology in which the course of development of a first language is unusually protracted despite otherwise normally developing cognitive functions. The language problems may eventually diminish or disappear but sometimes persist throughout life.

Question 23

subject noun phrase

Answer 23

The noun phrase immediately descending from the root of the sentence tree. In simple English sentences, this noun phrase usually plays the semantic role of actor or agent of the action.

Question 24

subordinates

Answer 24

Concepts that are less abstract or more particular than basiclevel concepts (e.g., poodle, soup spoon). See also basic level, superordinates.

Question 25

superordinates

Answer 25

Concepts that are more abstract or inclusive than basic-level concepts (e.g., animal, utensil). See also basic level, subordinates.

Question 26

tree diagram

Answer 26

A geometric representation of the structure of a sentence. Its nodes are labeled with phrase- (e.g., noun phrase) and word-class (e.g., adjective) category names, and the descending branches indicate relationships among these categories.

Question 27

Whorfian hypothesis

Answer 27

The proposal that the language one speaks determines or heavily influences the thoughts one can think or the saliency of different categories of thought.