Week 8 - Language Flashcards
___________ describes the physical nature of the speech signal
- Phonetics
___________ relates to the sound structure of language
Phonology
_________ are speech sounds and the smallest units that distinguish meaning in a given
language (e.g. pan vs. tan; tan vs. Dan)
phonemes
___________ relates to morphemes, the smallest meaning-bearing units
Morphology
(morphemes can be words in themselves (e.g. cat) or they can combine to create words (e.g.
beauti-ful; umpire-s; eat-ing; bed-room; police-man …)
_______ relates to the combination of meaningful units (morphemes
and words) to create sentences
- Syntax
___________ meaning of a larger unit is a function of the
meanings of its component parts as well as the nature of their
combination
Compositionality
(* John kissed Stacey and Stacey kissed John have related, but
different meanings
* we can understand sentences that we have never heard before:
Yesterday, a herd of purple elephants invaded the Magill campus)
__________ relates to the meaning of linguistic units
- Semantics
_________ relates to language use
- Pragmatics
(* e.g. It’s cold in here; You’re an absolute genius!)
How do we understand language?
(language comprehension)
How do we produce language?
(language production)
How do we learn language?
(language acquisition)
The brain
begins to dissociate real
words from word-like
stimuli (“pseudowords”)
after ____ ms of stimulus
uniqueness point
e.g. bike vs boak
50
drawing a conclusion by connecting an object in one sentence to an object in another sentence, __________ inference.
anaphoric
drawing a conclusion about methods that occurs while reading text or listening to speech, _________ inference.
instrument
drawing the conclusion that events described in one sentence were prompted by events in a previous sentence, ___________ inference.
casual
system of communication that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences
language
idea that there are principles specifying the permissible ways for arranging words and phrases in a system of communication
rule-based nature of language
field concerned with the mental and emotional study of language
psycholinguistics
knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they relate to other words
lexicon
meaning of words
lexical semantics
phenomenon of faster reading time for words that are highly common compared with unusual words
word frequency effect
process of perceiving individual words within the continuous flow of words
speech segmentation
situation when a word can have more than one meaning
lexical ambiguity
situation where some definitions of words occur more frequently than others
meaning dominance
situation when a word has more than one meaning and one meaning is more likely
biased dominance
situation in which the meaning of a sentence is unclear because multiple meanings are possible
temporary ambiguity