Words Flashcards
tip of the tongue
feel you know the word but can’t name it
shows word retrieval is in stages
free morpheme
=word
Concept
A mental representation of some sort of statistical regularity in our experience. A representation of a class of objects or events.
duality of words
Phonological form (the way it sounds) Semantic representation (the concept)
Content words
Labels for concepts Aka open-class words We continue to learn these all the time New content words are introduced and old content words are discarded from languages continuously Form the bulk of a language’s vocabulary
3 categories of content words
noun
verb
adjective
Function words
Limited in number
Remain stable across generations and centuries
Aka closed-class words
Serve grammatical purposes
3 categories of function words
Prepositions - in
Determiners - the
Conjunctions – and
Morphology
The set of processes involved in changing the shape of a word to fit its grammatical context
Open-class words
more likely to change their shape, depending on the context in which they’re used
English nouns
singular, plural
Spanish nouns
masculine, feminine
Russian nouns
object or subject
Lemma
most basic form of a word
run
Lexeme
The set of all forms a word can take, the word dressed up for a particular occasion. ran running runs
Phonology: ice
2 phonmes 1 syllable
Phonology: bee
2 phonemes 1 syllable
Phonology: dog
3 phonems 1 syllable
Digraph
a combination of two letters representing one sound, as in ph and ey.
syllable ‘onset’
A consonant or group of consonants that goes in front of the nucleus of the syllable
syllable ‘rime’
Following the onset of the syllable, Consisting of two parts, the nucleus and the coda (coda is optional and is a consonant).
skills to read
Being able to recognize and count syllables
Being able to recognize the same onset in words
Being able to recognize the same rime in words
Nucleus
The nucleus is formed by the vowel part of the syllable.
A syllable MUST have a nucleus. (it does not need an onset or a coda).
The nucleus follows the onset consonant (if there is one).
When a syllable has an onset consonant, the nucleus (and optional coda) form/s the rime of a syllable.
Coda
The coda is the consonant at the end of a syllable
The coda is optional and need not be part of a syllable
The coda follows the nucleus
The nucleus and coda together form the “rime” of a syllable
Phonotactic Rules
Rules for combining phonemes into sequences to form words.
Symbol Grounding Problem
The question of where the meaning of a symbol comes from.
traditional cognitive approach
Through the relationships they have with other symbols
Semantic Primes
A set of innately meaningful concepts that are used to define all other concepts.
Embodied Representation
A concept is a symbol that is understood in terms of the perceptual and motor experiences it evokes.
Arbitrariness of the Sign
The observation that the sound of a word gives virtually no information about its meaning. A universal property of human language.
benefit of arbitrariness
Aids in discriminating similar concepts (e.g., dog vs. wolf).
benefit of regularities
Mainly serves a grammatical purpose (e.g., distinguish singular and plural or past from present tense)
period of relatively quick vocabulary learning
Between 18 months and 6 years
explanations for vocabulary spurt
Children acquire “naming insight”,
Children master the phonology of language,
Children have improved memory abilities,
Children become more socially engaged
Receptive Vocabulary
Set of words a person is able to recognize and of which a person is able to understand the meaning.
Expressive Vocabulary
Set of words the person is able to produce in appropriate contexts.
3 different skills involved in word learning
Construct a concept
Learn a phonological word form
Create a link between the phonological word form and the underlying meaning of the concept. This link needs to work in both directions.
Fast Mapping
The ability to learn a new word after only one or a few exposures
brain structure is thought to underlie fast mapping
Hippocampus
Referential Uncertainty
The observation that there is no direct link between the word and the object or event it refers to.
Whole Object Assumption
The assumption that a new word refers to the entire object and not just a part of it.
Taxonomic Assumption
A new word extends to other similar referents
Mutual Exclusivity Assumption
The assumption that no two words mean exactly the same thing.
Cross-situational word learning
The ability to learn to associate novel words with novel objects even in cases of referential ambiguity by tracking co-occurrence statistics.
Joint Attention
A situation in which all participants in an interaction have focused their attention on the same object or event.
Syntactic Bootstrapping
Children make use of syntactic information to infer the meaning of verbs.
Word Frequency
a measure of how often a particular word, in all its forms, occurs in the language
most common type of words
function words
three types of words do children learn first, in which order?
Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives
Neighbourhood Density
A measure of how many other words differ from the target word by substitution of a single phoneme (a speech sound, not a letter – see Figure 5.7).
Phonotactic Probability
The likelihood that a particular sequence of phonemes will occur in a language. List three highly probably pairs (an, it, re)
Trochaic Stress Pattern
Strong – weak stress pattern (Pretty, Baby)
Iambic Stress Pattern
Weak– strong stress pattern (parfait, café)
Infants at 19 months of age used two things to learn new words
stress
phonotactic regularities
Mental Lexicon
Storage of information about words in long-term memory
two types of information are stored in both a regular dictionary and your mental lexicon
Phonological information and semantic information
first assumption of conventional models of lexical processing
Word forms are stored as phonemes, and very common words may be stored as syllables
research supporting: speech errors
second assumption of conventional models of lexical processing
Only the most basic form of the word (Lemma) is stored, other morphological forms are generated by rule.
Inflectional Suffix
A suffix that is added to words for the purposes of grammar.
Ing, s, ed,
Derivational Suffix
A suffix that changes the meaning and grammatical category of a word.
Agreement agreeable
Which type of suffix is stored separate from the lemma?
Research suggests Inflectional
Base Frequency Effect
The observation that the frequency effect of the base form extends to its inflected forms
Words like agrees and agreed show the same frequency effect as agree.
exception to the Base Frequency Effect
Some words with derivational suffixes such as “ity” (serenity) do not show the same frequency effect as the lemma ”serene”.
Connectionist Approach
Proposes that all word forms, both inflectional and derivational, have separate entries in the mental lexicon.
Word Association Task
One of the most basic tools for exploring the mental lexicon. A procedure in which the participant is asked to produce a word in response to a prompt.
Thematic (associative) Relation
A relationship between two words based on frequency of co-occurrence (they often appear together in the same context).
Dominant in children up to age 9.
Taxonomic (categorical) Relation
A relationship between two words that belong to the same category. Dominant in adults and children aged 9 or older.
Anomia
Word finding difficulty due to stroke or brain damage
Network Model
A conceptualization of the mental lexicon as a network of words or concepts connected to each other by semantic links.
Spreading Activation Model
A model of the mental lexicon that proposes activation of one node spreads out to other nodes linked to it.
Semantic Priming Task
An experimental technique that presents a pair of words and measured the participant’s reaction time.
Semantic Priming Effect
The observation that target words are recognized faster when they are preceded by related primes than unrelated primes.
Picture-Word Interference Task
An experimental procedure in which the participant is asked to name a picture while ignoring a simultaneously presented distractor word.
Define the Semantic Interference Effect:
The observation that taxonomic relations lead to slower naming times.
Semantic Facilitation Effect
The observation that thematic relations lead to faster naming times.
Dual Lexicon Model
The proposal that there are two mental lexicons, one for the dorsal sound-to-action stream, and another for the ventral sound to meaning stream.
ventral lexicon location
Ventral temporal lobe
dorsal lexicon location
Supramarginal Gyrus, to hold representations of phonological word forms for translation into articulatory codes for speech production
embodied semantics
The proposal that we understand the meaning of a word by simulating it in the sensorimotor cortex.
Recognition
A search of long-term memory to find a stored match with the current stimulus.
Recognition is passive
Recall
Intentional retrieval of information from long-term memory.
Recall is active
Word Recognition
Process of extracting phonological word forms from the speech stream and linking them by way of the mental lexicon to their semantic representations.
Word Production
The process of finding phonological word forms in the mental lexicon to express underlying semantic representations or thoughts.
Lexical Access
the process of matching the acoustic signal of the speech stream to candidate phonological representations stored in the mental lexicon
Lexical Selection
The process of choosing the best fitting word match to the acoustic input.
Lexical Integration
The process of linking the selected word form to the overall semantics and syntax of the utterance.
Cohort
The set of all words that begin with the same sequence of phonemes (e.g, ele-).
Word Recognition Point
The point at which a string of phonemes provides enough evidence for identifying the word. Longer unique words.
Bottom-up Process
A process that is driven solely by the input without consideration of context of expectations.
Sentence Superiority Effect
The improved ability to identify a word within a sentence as opposed to by itself.
Visual World Paradigm
A task in which participants are asked to interact with objects or pictures in the visual environment according to spoken instructions. (e.g., click on the white kitten).
two steps in spoken word production
Lexical Selection: process that goes from a particular concept to an abstract word form or lemma.
Phonological Encoding: the process that goes from abstract word form, or lemma, to its phonological representation.
Dysarthria
a disorder where you have decreased muscle control of your speech.
Feedforward model
A model in which each process is performed in a serial fashion. The flow of information goes in one direction only.
Interactive model
A model in which higher and lower levels of processing influence each other. The flow of information goes in both directions.
six stages/processes of the Levelt Model
Conceptual preparation, lexical selection, morphological encoding, phonological encoding, phonetic encoding, articulation.
outputs for each of the six stages
Lexical concept, lemma, morpheme, phonological word, gestural score, sound wave
Conceptual preparation
lexicla concept
lexical selection
lemma
morphological encoding
morpheme
phonological encoding
phonological word
phonetic encoding
gestural score
articulation
sound wave
Dell’s model has three layers.
Semantic layer
word layer
phoneme layer
Semantic layer
concepts are distributed across a network of feature nodes (Cat is a concept- a group of features including 4 feet, mammal, furry, pet)
Word Layer
– one node = one lemma
Phoneme Level
nodes for each phoneme
Semantic Neighbours
Concepts with related meanings (cat and dog) that have overlapping feature nodes.
lemma within the word level of Dell’s model
Abstract representation of word, not the word forms as they are spoken.
Dell’s model propose phonemes become properly sequenced into word
Each phoneme is tagged with its syllable position (onset, nucleus, coda).
how each layer interacts within Dell’s model
Spreading activation and spreading activation feedback
