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)