Wikinotes

Maintainer: admin

Semantics: the study of meanings of words, “dog” refers to a furry animal with four legs says “woof”
Syntax: the study of word order, how words come together following specific rules to make meaningful sentences
Derivational morphology: the changes to a word that do change its underlying meaning or syntactic category (develop (verb) --> development (noun), redevelop, developmental (adjective))
Inflectional morphology: the changes to a word that do not alter its underlying meaning or syntactic category (drink (noun) --> drinks, cry (verb) --> cries, cried) usually pluralisation or verb tense changes
Pragmatics: the study of language use, how words are combined and used to fulfil a purpose (a request, an exclamation, etc)
Lexicon: our mental dictionary, it contains everything you need to know about a word like its meaning, sound, and written appearence
Noam Chomsky: his book review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour is widely seen as the starting point of modern psycholinguistics
Transformational grammar: Chomsky’s linguistic theory proposed to counter behaviourism, every sentence has two levels: deep and surface
Semantic priming: priming using an object that is semantically related, you may be faster to recognize the word BREAD if you have just seen BUTTER, rather than if you had just seen MIRROR
Wernicke’s area: a spot in the posterior temporal lobe that is involved in the understanding of written and spoken language
Broca’s area: a spot important for articulation and sound retrieval near the front of the left hemisphere
Modularity: the idea that different parts of language are contained in different parts of the brain that work together to produce coherent speech and understanding
FOXP2 gene: a gene involved in coordinating sensorimotor information as well as skilled complex movements, damage to this gene results in a difficulty with normal language acquisition
Clever Hans effect: Clever Hans was a horse that appeared to understand language, but in reality he was just picking up on clues from his owner and thus could not perform the tricks if he couldn’t see his owner
Left hemisphere: the left hemisphere of the brain is concerned with analytic, time-based processing and is usually the hemisphere that controls language functions in right-handed people
Right hemisphere: the right hemisphere is concerned with more holistic, spatially based processing
Broca’s aphasia: damage to the cortex of the left frontal lobe (Broca’s area) results in an impairment in the ability to speak
Wernicke’s aphasia: damage to the left temporal gyrus (Wernicke’s area) results in speech that is fluent but makes very little sense, as well as the inability to comprehend language although hearing is unaffected
Disconnection syndrome: a result of damage to the arcuate fasciculus which is the bundle of fibres connecting Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, the result of this condition is difficulty in repeating language, although comprehension and production remain unimpaired otherwise
Critical period hypothesis: the idea that certain linguistic events must happen to a child learning a language within a specific time window for them to be able to fully develop their language, people who support this claim draw evidence from the fact that language is indeed more easily learned during a critical period, which has given way to a new theory called sensitive period
Equipotentiality hypothesis: the two hemispheres of the brain are equal at birth with respect to their language abilities, the left usually matures into the dominant one
Irreversible determinism hypothesis: this hypothesis states that the left hemisphere is privileged for language capacities at birth, though language has an affinity for the left hemisphere, if it is damaged then the right can take over with little difficulty
Emergentist account: there are innate biases that are unrelated to language processing that privilege the left hemisphere over the right for language capacity
Maturational state hypothesis: the capacity to learn a first or second language disappears as maturation progresses, regardless of any other factors, this theory is comparable to the critical period theory
Exercise hypothesis: unless the capacity to learn a language, first or second, is exercised early enough in life, it will be lost
Jean Piaget: a Swiss psychologist who viewed language just the same as any other social-cognitive process, he did not think that there was anything special or privileged about language capacity in humans, his view contrasts with Chomsky’s
Assimilation: the way in which information is abstracted from the world to fit into cognitive structures, how you interpret information and make it fit into your mind’s representation
Accommodation: the way in which cognitive structures are adjusted to accommodate incompatible information, when you encounter something that you can’t assimilate into your previously held cognitive structures, you change these structures to be able to hold the new information
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the form of our language determines the form of our thought process which in turn affects the way we remember things and the way in which we process information from the world
Voice onset time (VOT): the time between release of constriction of the airstream and when the vocal cords start to vibrate
Competence: our knowledge of our language
Performance: our actual language ability, this is limited by our competence
Generative grammar: a finite set of rules that will be able to generate all grammatical sentences in a language
Telegraphic speech: a type of speech that is used by young children, it is characterized by its syntactic simplicity, often words are omitted
Imitation theory: a theory that claims that children learn language by imitating adult language, though this plays an important role in things such as acquiring accent, the theory is thought to be false for overall language acquisition because children often make mistakes that adults do not
Conditioning theory: Skinner asserted that language is acquired through basic conditioning principles of reward and punishment, this theory doesn’t appear to be correct because parents rarely correct their children’s speech
Poverty of the stimulus: the degenerate input that children hear when they’re trying to learn language, complete with hesitations, no clear separations between words, slips of the tongue, Chomsky argues that this is enough to show that children do not learn language by environmental exposure alone
Child-directed speech: a way of speaking to children that is simplified to make it easier for them to understand, there are more pauses and utterances are shorter, speech is slower and more clearly segmented, infants actually prefer to listen to CDS than to normal speech between two adults
Language acquisition device: an innate structure that Chomsky hypothesizes is present in humans that helps them acquire language despite the poverty of the stimulus argument
Pidgin: simplified languages that were created by groups speaking two different languages who have been forced into contact for an extended period of time
Creole: a creole is when a pidgin language becomes the first language of a group, the children of the pidgin speakers
Babbling: an early stage of language where babies and children make sounds that don’t necessarily carry any meaning
Variegated babble: babbling that has distinct syllables “bagara” “mibado”
Reduplicated babble: babbling that has repeated syllables “bababa”
Holophrastic speech: single word speech usually used by children, often there is more implied than what the single word literally says, for example “milk” could mean “I’m thirsty please give me a drink of milk”
Logographic writing: using a picture of something to represent it, a picture of a dog means dog, Chinese is logographic to an extent but not entirely
Syllabic writing: from Phoenetians, Japanese Kana or Cherokee languages are examples of this
Consonantal script: not all the sounds of a language are represented in the writing, the vowels are left out and are implied, examples include Arabic and Hebrew
Alphabetic writing: what we use in languages like English, there are graphemes which usually map onto phonemes though this mapping can be shallow or deep
Word superiority effect: letters are better identified in the context of a word than in a non-word or alone, if the word “LOBSTER” is flashed up on a screen, you will likely be able to tell the researcher you saw an L, O, B, S, T, E and R, whereas if KPENTQJ was projected you wouldn’t be able to accurately identify the letters with the same ease
Simultaneous bilingualism: when L1 and L2 are learned approximately at the same time
Early sequential bilingualism: when L2 is learned after L1 but still very early in childhood
Late bilingualism: when L2 is learned in adolescence or onwards
Code switching: the tendency for bilinguals to switch from one language to another within the sentence or conversation when speaking with other bilinguals
Cognates: words in different languages that have developed from the same root and are thus similar (night/nuit/nit/noite/notte/noche/Nacht)
Forward translation: it is hypothesized that we translate words from our first language into our second language using conceptual mediation
Backward translation: it is hypothesized that when translating from the L2 into the L1 we use word association which is a direct link between items in the lexicon
Saccades: saccades are the jumps that the eyes make when reading, the still periods between the saccades are called fixations, very little information is taken in while the eyes are moving
Lexical-decision task: when a participant is asked to recall whether or not a stimulus of a string of letters constitutes a word or a non-word
Stimulus onset asynchrony: usually refers to the time between the display of the prime and the target, this can be manipulated to alter the results, for example having a large SOA can lead to words being lost from working memory
Pseudowords: strings of letters that form a pronounceable nonword “smeak” “krummel”
Repetition priming: priming a target by repeating a stimulus
Orthographic priming: also called form-based priming, based on the physical similarities
Logogen model: every word has a feature called a logogen that corresponds to it, each logogen has a resting level of activation and as it receives evidence that it is related to the stimulus being presented its level of activation rises until it surpasses a threshold level causing it to fire and the word to be recognized
Pseudohomophones: these are pseudowords that when pronounced sound like real words, “brane” for “brain”
Pronunciation neighbourhoods: it is argued that the number of consistently pronounced neighbours a word has, the easier it is to pronounce which affects the naming time
Surface dyslexia: this is a type of dyslexia where the patient struggles with exception words (steak = exception, speak = non-exception), people with this condition make over-generalization errors when they are trying to read aloud, in accordance with the dual-route model these patients seem to be able to read only using the indirect, non-lexical route
Imageability: the ease with which a word can conjure an image, “cat” vs “justice,” words that have high imageability are recognized with greater ease
Phonological dyslexia: this is an impairment in the ability to read pronounceable nonwords (“plerp”), this indicates an inability to use the non-lexical route, they can only use the lexical route which is why they can only read words that appear in their lexicon
Deep dyslexia: this is a disorder of reading characterized by semantic errors, this closely resembles phonological dyslexia
Semantic paralexias: reading errors based on the meaning (semantics) of a word, people will produce related words instead of identifying the correct word (see “mother” and say “daughter” or see “rose” and say “flower”)
Phonological awareness: being aware of the sounds in a word, this can be tested by asking people to pronounce a word while omitting a certain sound (“say “bland” without the “l” sound”)
Epilinguistic knowledge: this is knowledge about our language processes which is used unconsciously
Metalinguistic knowledge: knowledge about our language processes that we are aware of and can make deliberate use of
Whole word method: a method for teaching children to read where they learn to associate the sound of a word with a particular visual pattern
Phonic method: the phonics model of teaching children to read is often claimed to be superior to the whole word method, it teaches children to associate sounds with individual letters and be able to combine and build with them to create words
Garden path model: a serial model where cases of ambiguity are handled by pursuing one of the possible constructions (“the man saw the woman with the binoculars”; was he looking at a woman with his binoculars, or did he spot a woman who had a pair of binoculars?)
Constraint satisfaction model: this is a parallel model of handling ambiguity where both possibilities are pursued simultaneously
Animacy: animacy of a word refers to whether or not an action is plausible for that word (“the evidence examined by the prosecutor..”; evidence in this case cannot be the agent, evidence cannot do any examining on its own accord, this sentence means that the prosecutor had done the examining to the evidence)
Early closure: when the word is added on to the earlier clause
Late closure: a strategy where words are added on to the existing clause (“John said he would leave yesterday” is interpreted as “John said (he would leave yesterday)” instead of “John (said he would leave) yesterday”)
Figurative language: a class of linguistic phenomena for which literal analysis is insufficient to capture the meaning, could be an idiom, metaphor, request, etc.
Semantic decomposability: the extent to which a literal breakdown gives clues as to the meaning of something (“he kicked the bucket” has very little semantic decomposability because kicking a bucket doesn’t have anything to do with death)
McGurk effect: when speech processing is affected by non-speech stimuli, usually visual, seeing a video of a man appearing to say “fa fa fa” but the sound you hear is really “ba ba ba”
Invariance problem: the same phoneme can sound different depending on the context in which it occurs, there is variance among situations
Segmentation problem: in normal speech, sounds slur together and cannot easily be separated
Assimilation problem: phonemes take on the acoustic properties of their neighbours
Possible-word constraint: it is unnatural for us to segment speech so that parts of syllables are left unattached to words
Uniqueness point: the point at which a word’s initial sequence is unique to that word and no other
Isolation point: the point at which a listener can reasonably discriminate the word from others
Categorical perception: when speech is classified as one phoneme or another, there is no in-between (P to B transition or T to D transition)
Phoneme restoration effect: when a phoneme is cut out of a sound sample that is presented to listeners and they are unable to tell that a sound was missing, let along identify which it was
Cohort model of word recognition: as we hear speech we set up a cohort of possible items that the words could be, narrowing it down and eliminating items until only one is left
Phonotactic probability: the idea that some phonemes are more likely to occur in normal speech than others, for example /k/ as in cat is much more common than /gr/ as in grass
Lexical identification shift: participants are willing to put a sound into a category that they would not otherwise sort it into provided that it now makes a word (kiss as opposed to giss)
Typicality effect: when you think of something the more typical it is the easier it will be to access this information, it’s easier to verify that a canary can sing than to verify that a mammal can breathe
Category size effect: you are faster to retrieve information from larger categories, “a dog is an animal” is faster than “a dog is a mammal”
Discourse: a sequence of spoken or written utterances, there are many genres like narratives, expository texts, etc.
Embodied cognition: there is coupling between language comprehension and motor programs, areas of the brain involved in speaking are activated when listening
Direct matching: when trying to understand a sentence, we will search our memory to match given information to previous knowledge
Bridging: if we do not have an antecedent, we make an inference
Episodic memory: our memory for events and for particular episodes
Semantic memory: our general knowledge about things
Sentence verification task: participants are presented with sentences and are asked to press a button saying whether the sentence is true or false, then the reaction time is measured
Basic levels: the default level with which we categorize and think about things, we use the basic level of “chairs” rather than the higher level of “office furniture” or the lower level of “swivel chairs”
Inference: the derivation of additional knowledge from facts already known
Spoonerism: a speech error where the initial sounds of two words are swapped
Natural language processing: input is text, using natural language as input to machines to get the computer to do something useful

PSYC 340