Week 9 (Language) Flashcards
What is psycholinguistics?
Language in the mind/brain
What do all languages have in common?
- Communicative
- Arbitrarily symbolic
- Regularly structured
- Structured at multiple levels
- Productive (Generative)
- Dynamic
What do communicative mean?
-Allows communication amongst all people who share the language
What does arbitrarily symbolic mean?
In all languages, there’s an arbitrary relationship between a symbol (e.g., a word, sound) and what it represents (e.g., object, idea, action…)
What does regularly structured mean?
Particular patterns of sounds form meaningful words.
What does structured at multiple levels mean?
-Any meaningful utterance can be analysed at multiple levels.
What does productive (generative) mean?
-Language users can produce limitless novel utterances
What does dynamic mean?
-Languages constantly evolve.
What are the language domains.
-Pragmatics
-Semantics
-Syntax
-Morphology
-Phonology
-Phonetics
What are phonetics?
Phoneme: The smallest unit of speech sound
e.g., consonants, vowels: n,p,a etc.
What is phonology?
-the system of contrastive relationships among the speech sounds that constitute the fundamental components of a language.
What is morphology?
Morpheme: smallest unit of meaning.
the “s” in “cats” and “dogs”
the “ing” in “kicking”
the “ed” in “kicked”
the “break” in “unbreakable”
What is syntax?
The arrangement of words and phrases
What three dimensions of sound are represented on a spectrogram?
-frequency (pitch)
-amplitude (loudness)
-time
What is speech perception influenced by?
Context and background knowledge.
Phoneme restoration effect
I scream … Ice cream
