Chapter 9: Language

Phonetic Refinement Theory

Analyze auditory skills Try to match phonemes to words we already know in memory (template matching) Use higher-level processing and context to help figure out what we heard (top-down processing)

Properties of Language

Communicative, Arbitrarily symbolic, regularly structured, structured at multiple levels, generative/ productive, dynamic

Arbitrarily Symbolic

Language creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and what it represents: an idea, a thing, a process, relationship, or a description

Communicative

Language permits us to communicate with one or more people who are our language

Orthographic regularity

Real words follow the same rules for letter orders (u always follows q)

Structured at Multiple Levels

The structure of language can be analyzed at more than one level (e.g., in sounds, meaning units, words, and phrases)

Phrase-structure grammar

a type of generative grammar in which constituent structures are represented by phrase structure rules or rewrite rules (p. 382)

Connotation

a words' emotional overtones, presuppositions, and other non-explicit meanings

Function morphemes

add detail and nuance to the meaning of the content morphemes or help the content morphemes fit the grammatical context (suffix and prefix)

Noun Phrase

contains at least one noun and includes all the relevant descriptors of the noun (big, fast); helps to comprise a sentence and is the subject of the sentence

Dyslexia

difficulty in deciphering, reading, and comprehending text

Categorical Perception

discontinuous categories of speech sounds aka listeners can only discriminate between sounds that they would identify as belonging to different categories (ba, da, and ga are different categories based on consonant sound)

Lexicon

entire set of morphemes in a given language or in a given person's linguistic repertoire (average English speaker has lexicon of 80,000 morphemes)

Communication

exchange of thoughts and feelings

Phonemic-restoration effect

involves integrating what we know with what we hear when we perceive speech (hear: *eel is on the axle; assume the "wheel" is on the axle. hear *eel is on the heel; assume "heel" on on the shoe)

Transformational grammar

involves transformational rules that guide the ways in which an underlying proposition can be arranged into a sentence (p. 382)

Discourse

involves units of language larger than individual sentences (conversations, lectures, stories, essays, textbooks, etc.)

Regularly Structured

language has a structure; only particularly patterned arrangements of sybmols have meaning, and different arrangements yield different meanings

Word-Superiority Effect

letters are read more easily when they are embedded in words than when they are presented either in isolation or with letters that do not form words (Reicher-Wheeler effect)

Verb Phrase

predicate; contains at least one verb and whatever the verb acts on if anything; helps to comprise a sentence

Psycholinguistics

psychology of our language as it interacts with the human mind; considers both production and comprehension of language vie linguistics, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and computational linguistics

Word Superiority Hypothesis

real words are able to be recalled much more effectively due to pronounceability, frequency, meaningfulness, neighborhood density, and orthographic regularity

Neighborhood density

real words tend to share similar letters with other real words; some letter appear more than others (r, s, t, l, n, e)

Deep structure

refers to an underlying syntactical structure that links various phrase structures through various transformation rules

Surface Structure

refers to any of the various phrase structures that may result from transformations

Syntax

refers to the way in which we put words together to form sentences; plays major role in how we understand language

TRACE model

speech perception begins with three levels of feature detection: the level of acoustic features, the level of phonemes, and the level of words; says speech perception is highly interactive

Denotation

strict dictionary definition

Phonetics

study of how to produce or combine speech sounds or to represent them with written symbols

Grammar

study of language in terms of noticing regular patterns that relate to the functions and relationships of words in a sentence (extend as broadly to the level of discourse and narrowly to the pronunciation and meaning of words)

Linguistics

study of language structure and change

Phonemics

study of the particular phonemes o f a language

Lexical Access

the identification of a word that allows us to gain access to the meaning of the word from memory;

Morpheme

the smallest unit of meaning within a particular language

Phoneme

the smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance in a given language from another

Computational Linguistics

the study of language via computational methods

Semantics

the study of meaning in a language

Sociolinguistics

the study of the relationship between social behavior and language

Neurolinguistics

the study of the relationships among the brain, cognition, and language

Referent

the thing or concept in the real world that a word refers to

Language

use of an organized means of combining words in order to communicate with those around us

Lexical Processes

used to identify letters and words; also activate relevant information in memory about these words

Comprehension processes

used to make sense of the text as a whole

Semantic Priming

we react faster to words that are related in meaning to a prior presented word

Syntactical Priming

we spontaneously tend to use syntactical structures and read faster sentences that are similar to sentences just heard

Motor Theory of Speech perception

we use movements of the speaker's vocal tract to perceive what he says (movement of the lips)

Coarticulation

when we pronounce more than one sound at the same time (say "pool" and "palace" - the p's form different shapes on your lips because they are paired with the neighbor phonemes [o or a])

Generative/Productive

within the limits of linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances. The possibilities for creating new utterances are virtually limitless (ex: on fleek, selfie, unfriend - words developed in our generation)

Content morphemes

words that convey the bulk of the meaning of a language (root words)