Week 10 Flashcards
what is aphasia?
A loss of the ability to produce and understand ordinary language.
What are the 2 main types of aphasia?
Nonafluent aphasia - People can understand language but can not write or speak. Caused by damage to Brocas area.
Fluent aphasia - Can talk freely but their sentences lack meaning. Cause by damage to Wernickes area.
What are the 5 parts of the heirarchy of linguistic units?
Sentences
Phrase
Word
Morpheme
Phoneme
What is a morpheme?
the smallest units of language that carry meaning. Some stand alone and refer to particular objects (e.g. umpire), others are bound (e.g. ‘ed’ = past tense morpheme, ‘s’ = plural morpheme)
What is a phoneme?
The smallest units of sound that serve to distinguish words in a language.
‘a’ ‘ee’ etc
What is meant by speech segmentation?
The process of identifying the boundaries between words, syllables, or phonemes in spoken natural languages
What does co-articulation mean?
Refers to the fact that in producing speech, you don’t utter one phoneme at a time. Instead, they overlap e.g. while you are producing the ‘s’ in soup you are beginning to say the vowel.
Explain categorical perception as it relates to speech perception.
Refers to the fact that people are much better at hearing the differences between categories of sounds than they are at hearing the variations within a category of sounds.
What is meant by the claim that language is generative?
It has the endless capacity to create an endless series of new combinations, all built from a small set of fundamental units.
What is syntax?
Rules that govern the structure of a phrase or sentence
Explain the difference between prescriptive and descriptive rules in relation to language
Prescriptive - rules describing how something is supposed to be.
Descriptive - rules characterising the language as its ordinarily used by fluent speakers and listeners.
What is an extralinguistic context?
The physical and social setting in which you hear or see sentences.
Define prosody
rhythm & pitch of speaking
Define pragmatics
The rules that govern how people actually use language
Is there an innate facet to human language acquisition? Explain why/why not.
Humans are equipped with sophisticated neural machinery specialised for language use.
Aphasias show that damage to specific brain areas impacts language = humans have a considerable amount of neural tissue that is specialised for language.
