S2 Wk 5 - Cognitive: Language Flashcards
what is psycholinguistics
a sub-field of cognitive science devoted to the study of language
the study of the mental mechanisms that make it possible for people to use language (Garnham 1985)
essential features of psycholinguistics
low-level perceptual processing
word recognition
parsing: how we understand sentences
semantic interpretation
mental models
pragmatic interpretation
what did McClelland & Rumelhart 1981 do
create a computational model with how we recognise words
what is the word superiority effect
context is the best guide
what was Noam Chomsky book about
Syntactic Structures
- revolutionised the scientific study in language
- challenged behaviourist view that language is mostly learned / modelled
what is deep structure
the topic of the sentence (meaning)
what is surface structure
how its expressed (form)
what is syntax
how the sentence is constructed
what are pragmatics
choice of words/order
what usually overrides syntax
semantics and pragmatics
what is the mental lexicon
our knowledge about spelling, pronunciation, grammar and semantics
what is lexical access
info needed to retrieve a word from the lexicon
what is parsing
assigning sentence elements to grammatical classes
difficult unless clauses are marked
what is inference
reaching a conclusion based on evidence and reasoning
what was Skinner 1957 book called and what did it do
Verbal Behaviour
developed a functional theory of language
