Cog. Ch. 11

Anaphoric inference

An inference that connects an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence.

Causal inference

An inference that results in the conclusion that the events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous clause or sentence.

Theory of mind

The ability to understand what others think, feel or believe.

Psycholinguistics

The field concerned with the psychological study of language.

Parsing

The mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases. The way a sentence is parsed determines its meaning.

Prosody

The pattern of intonation and rhythm in spoken language.

Word frequency effect

The phenomenon of faster reading time for high-frequency words than for low-frequency words.

Speech segmentation

The process of perceiving individual words within the continuous flow of the speech signal.

Coherence

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

Lexical ambiguity

When a word can have more than one meaning. For example, bug can mean an insect, a listening device, to annoy, or a problem in a computer program.

Consider the sentence, "Because he always jogs a mile seems like a short distance to him." The principle of late closure states that this sentence would first be parsed into which of the following phrases?

"Because he always jogs a mile"

Which term best reflects the process of reading and understanding sentences in a story?

Dynamic

Common ground

Knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions shared between two speakers.

Yoda, a central character of the Star Wars movies created by George Lucas, has a distinctive way of speaking. His statement, "Afraid you will be," violates which property of the English language?

Language has a structure that is governed by rules.

Lexical priming

Priming that involves the meaning of words. For example, rose would prime flower, because their meanings are related.

Syntactic coordination

Process by which people use similar grammatical constructions when having a conversation.

Which of the following is NOT a factor in prosody?

Semantics

Meaning dominance

Some meanings of words occur more frequently than others.

Emoji's

Symbols used in electronic communication and web pages that can indicate emotions, and are also used to represent other things, such as objects, animals, places, and weather.

Entrainment

Synchronization between partners in a conversation. This can include gestures speaking rate, body position, pronunciation, and grammatical structure.

Tonic

The key of a musical composition. The tonic note is the first note of a scale in a particular key.

Lexical semantics

The meaning of words.

Semantics

The meanings of words and sentences.

Boxing champion George Foreman recently described his family vacations with the statement, "At our ranch in Marshall, Texas, there are lots of ponds and I take the kids out and we fish. And then of course, we grill them." That a reader understands "them" appropriately (George grills fish, not his kids!) is the result of a(n) ____________________ inference.

anaphoric

The given-new contract is a method for creating

comprehension between a speaker and a listener in a conversation.

The idea that the rules governing the grouping of words in a sentence is the primary determinant of the way a sentence is parsed is part of the ____________________ approach to parsing.

garden path

In New Guinea, tribes that had been isolated for centuries were found that they

had a large number of sophisticated language systems.

Lilo can't wait for school to start. This year is the first time she gets to take a foreign language class, and she is taking Japanese. Dr. Nabuto is a professor interested in studying how people learn additional languages later in life, and he is including Lilo's class in his research. Dr. Nabuto is most likely studying

language acquisition

Ron is an avid reader. He has a large vocabulary because every time he comes across a word he doesn't know, he looks it up in the dictionary. Ron encounters "wanderlust" in a novel, reaches for the dictionary, and finds out this word means "desire to travel." The process of looking up unfamiliar words increases Ron's

lexicon

Dictionaries commonly list the multiple definitions of a particular word in a numbered list, with the first definition as #1, the next definition as #2, and so on. Which concept does this reflect?

meaning dominance

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.

B.F. Skinner, the modern champion of behaviorism, proposed that language is learned through

reinforcement

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.

In the context of language, another term for "heuristics" is ________.

rules

Syntax is the

rules for combining words into sentences.

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

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

When two people engage in a conversation, if one person produces a specific grammatical construction in his or her speech and then the other person does the same, this phenomenon is referred to as

syntactic priming

Lexical ambiguity studies show that people access ambiguous words based on

the meaning dominance of each definition of the word.

Syntactic priming

Hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a statement that follows will be produced with the same construction.

Given-new contract

In a conversation, a speaker should construct sentences so that they contain both given information (information that the listener already knows) and new information (information that the listener is hearing for the first time).

Return to the tonic

In a musical composition, coming back to the tonic note that was at the beginning of the composition.

Visual world paradigm

In experiments on language processing, determining how subjects are processing information in a scene as they respond to specific instructions related to the scene.

heuristics

A "rule of thumb" that provides a best-guess solution to a problem.

Congenital amusia

A condition, present at birth, in which people have problems with music perception, including tasks such as discriminating between simple melodies or recognizing common tunes.

Situation model

A mental representation of what a text is about.

Garden path model of parsing

A model of parsing that emphasizes syntactic principles as a major determinant of parsing.

Lexicon

A person's knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words.

Lexical decision task

A procedure in which a person is asked to decide as quickly as possible whether a particular stimulus is a word or a nonword.

Subject-relative construction

A sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is also the subject in the embedded clause, as in the sentence, The senator who spotted the reporter shouted.

Object-relative construction

A sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is the object in the embedded clause, as in this sentence: The senator who the reporter spotted shouted.

Narrative

A story that progresses from one event to another.

Hierarchical nature of language

The idea that language consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units. For example, words can be combined to create phrases, which in turn can create sentences, which themselves can become components of a story.

Rule-based nature of language

The idea that there are rules in a language that specify the permissible ways for arranging words and phrases.

Word frequency

The relative usage of words in a particular language. For example, in English, home has higher word frequency than hike.

Syntax

The rules for combining words into sentences.

Which of the following is a nonverbal component of communication?

Theory of mind

Balanced dominance

When a word has more than one meaning and all meanings are equally likely.

Biased dominance

When a word has more than one meaning, and one meaning is more likely.

Garden path sentences

A sentence in which the meaning that seems to be implied at the beginning of the sentence turns out to be incorrect, based on information that is presented later in the sentence.

Temporary ambiguity

A situation in which the meaning of a sentence, based on its initial words, is ambiguous because a number of meanings are possible, depending on how the sentence unfolds. "Cast iron sinks quickly rust" is an example of a sentence that creates temporary ambiguity.

Language

A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.

Referential communication task

A task in which two people are exchanging information in a conversation, when this information involves reference—identifying something by naming or describing it.

Constraint-based approach to parsing

An approach to parsing that proposes that semantics, syntax, and other factors operate simultaneously to determine parsing.

Instrument inference

An inference about tools or methods that occurs while reading text or listening to speech.

Inferences

In language, the process by which readers create information that is not explicitly stated in the text.

Late closure

In parsing, when a person encounters a new word, the parser assumes that this word is part of the current phrase.