Week 9

Question 1

What is the difference between a letter and a phoneme ?

Answer 1

• letter: what is used to represent the sound (?)
• phoneme: basic unit of sound and what words are made up on

Question 2

What is a morpheme ?

Answer 2

smallest unit of sound with meaning or grammatical function

Question 3

Give an example of how context can help people to perceive phonemes, letters and words

Question 4

What is the Word frequency effect ?

Answer 4

Expereince we have with a word determines how easily we are able to process it and use it in our day-to-day experiences; higher frequency -> more likely to remember these things

Question 5

What is lexical ambiguity ? How does it contribute to the processing times for words ?

Answer 5

• lexical ambiguity - certain words have more than 1 meaning
• meaning dominance influences the processing times for words (word has more than 1 meaning and one of those meaning is equal or stronger than the other)
• biased - more likely to think of the most common meaning so no issue in processing
• balanced- the 2 meaning of the word are equally likely to be experienced in our day-to-day lives so it slows down the processing of sentences since our brain has to decide which meaning to go with

Question 6

What is the difference between Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia ?

Answer 6

• Broca - inability to produce langauge; damage to left frontal lobe
• Wernicke’s - inability to comprehend language; damage to left temporal lobe

Question 7

What is the principle of late closure in relation to the syntax-first approach to parsing sentences ?

Answer 7

• Late closure: when we read a sentence, unless we’re indicated by some grammatical structure, that the sentencing is changing we just assume that every word is part of the sentece (main meaning)
• Syntax-first approach - when we read sentences, we’re using the rules of producing sentences to help us understand what we’re being exposed to

Question 8

What are the three types of inferences that help people create conherent mental represenations of text ?

Answer 8

• Anaphoric inference: practice of using function such as he, she or they to convey that its the same person that’s part of the situation from one sentence to the next
• Instrument inference: inferences about the types of tools or methods that people are using to accomplish certain things
• Causal inference: One thing causing another

Question 9

What are the two rules of language production that help people communicate clearly with others ?

Answer 9

• Given-new contract: as we go from one sentence to the next, when we introduce new information, it’s usually easier for people to process that information if its in the context of giving them some information they’ve been already exposed to
• Syntactic coordination- match our communication style to other people we’re communicating with

Question 10

How does bilingualism benefit cognition ?

Answer 10

• Cognitive benefits - ability to shift attention between different things in your mind is better than a monolingual individual
• Dementia - onset is delayed for various types of dementia
• Thinking and dreaming - dominant language; context dependent