Chapter 11

Coherence refers to the

representation of the text in a reader's mind, so that information in one part of the text is related to information in another part of the text.

Tanenhaus and coworkers' eye movement study presented participants with different pictures for interpreting the sentence, "Put the apple on the towel in the box." Their results showed the importance of _____ in how we understand sentences in real-life situations

environmental context

According to the situation model of text processing,

people create a mental representation of what the text is about in terms of people, objects, locations, and events.

One of Chomsky's most persuasive arguments for refuting Skinner's theory of language acquisition was his observation that children

produce sentences they have never heard.

In the lexical decision task, participants are asked to

decide whether a string of letters is a word or a non-word.

Language consists of smaller components, like words, that can be combined to form larger ones, like phrases, to create sentences, which themselves can be components of a larger story. This property is known as

hierarchical structure

Lexical ambiguity studies show that people initially access

multiple meanings of an ambiguous word.

The word frequency effect refers to the fact that we respond more

slowly to low-frequency words than high-frequency words.

Syntax is

the rules for combining words into sentences

A phoneme refers to

the shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word.