psycholinguistics Flashcards
neighbourhood effect
refers to where the recognition of a particular word is affected by the number of similar words in the lexicon (how many ‘neighbours’ a word has
measuring size of word’s neighbourhood for visual word recognition
In the case of visual word recognition, we can measure the size of a particular word’s neighbourhood by determining how many other words can be formed by changing only one letter of the word - for example two neighbours of the word ‘kind’ are ‘king’ and ‘find’
phonemic restoration effect
the illusion that a phoneme deleted from a stream of speech is actually present. This happens most often in situations where the words preceding the target either structurally suggest it (i.e. if ‘is’ is the target in the phrase ‘my name is…’) or are semantically associated, such as a category name.
What does the principle of compositionality state
That the meaning of complex expressions is determined by semantic composition -> so meanings of sentences are composed of the meanings of the individual constituent lexemes
3 sources of semantic composition
Lexical meaning of the basic expressions, their grammatical forms, and the syntactic structure of the whole expression
Chomsky’s statement of linguistic creativity
“The grammar rules of a human language allow an infinitely numerous range of distinct grammatical sentences, so that most sentences we utter or hear have never been uttered or heard by us (or perhaps anyone) before”
Generative grammar
System of rules that generates ‘all and only’ the grammatical sentences of a language
Nativism thesis
Language arises from a special biologically determined capacity
Empiricism thesis
Language results from general intelligence and problem solving
Bertie Russell quote on Plato’s problem
“How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nonetheless able to know as much as they do know?”
formalised version poverty of the stimulus argument (4 steps)
Step A: A native speaker of a particular language knows a particular aspect of syntax. . . .
Step B: This aspect of syntax could not have been acquired from the language input typically available to children. . . .
Step C: We conclude that this aspect of syntax is not learnt from outside. . . .
Step D: We deduce that this aspect of syntax is built in to the mind.” (Vivian James Cook and Mark Newson, Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, 3rd ed. Blackwell, 2007)
what is a grammar
theory of a language
3 functions of a grammar
- assigns structural descriptions to sentences
- ## distinguishes between well-formed and deviant sentences
purpose of a grammar
describe the intrinsic competence of the idealized native speaker
2 characteristics of a grammar
- accounts for fact that there is no limit on the number of sentences in any language
- corresponds to the linguistic intuition of the native speaker
