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
Motor speech of speech perception
Acoustic and visual information is integrated during speech perception
-The Mcgurk effect
What does the mental lexicon consist of and how big is it on average.
Made up of:
-Sound (phonology)
-Meaning (semantics)
-Spelling (orthography)
-grammar (e.g., noun, verb, syntax)
Average 20 year-old knows approx 40,000 words.
How would the word cat be categorised win different ways in the mental lexicon.
-Phonology (kaet)
-Orthology (Cat)
-Syntax (noun, subject, object)
-Semantics (furry, four legs, chases mice)
How do we use the mental lexicon
Lexical processing: linking auditory/ visual input to relevant representations in the mental lexicon.
How is the mental lexicon organised?
Webs of words not isolated from each other
