PSYCH 108 EXAM 3

defining legal concepts

- a judge or jury need to decide whether a defendant's actions fall into the category of sexual harassment or as something else - this decision then needs to refined to a category with large implications for the likely punishment (murder...second or first degree??) - assess this by identifying how close something is to the prototype (evidence and definition of the crime)

testing the prototype notion

- according to the prototype perspective, participants choose their response (true or false) by comparing the thing mentioned to their prototype for that category - items more distant from the prototype take more time to identify

animal language

- animals have a very sophisticated communication system- including songs and clicks of whales, the dances of honeybees, and the various alarm calls of monkeys - small vocabularies and little that correspond to the rules of syntax - animals that have similar genetics to humans have often shown success when learning new forms of communication

embodied concepts

- brain scans show that sensory and motor areas in the brain are activated when people are thinking about certain concepts - conceptual knowledge is intertwined with knowledge about what particular objects look like (or sound like or feel like) and also with knowledge about how one might interact with the object

the active nature of language learning

- by age 3 or so, children seem to realize that they don't have to memorize each word's past tense as a separate vocabulary item. Instead, they realize they can produce the past tense by manipulating morphemes- that is, be adding the "ed" ending onto a word - children often rely on prosody (rise and fall of pitch) as clues to syntax; children also rely on their vocabulary, listening for words they already know as clues helping them to process more complex words strings

the "vocabulary" of texting

- certain abbreviations such as LOL, TMI, IMO are referred to as the "vocabulary" of texting - referred to as a complex proposition rather than a word - emojis are also another form of conversation; they can convey certain phrases and emotions easily - language "evolution" rather than "erosion" due to it being easily understood and better understood by those with dyslexia

sign language

- children learn language even if their communication with adults is strictly limited - they can create their own gestural language (called "home sign") and teach the language to the people in their surroundings - American Sign Language is also widely used

building new words

- college graduates in the U.S. know between 75,000 and 100,000 different words - knows the word sound, orthography (the sequence of letters that spell the word), and the meaning of the word to go with the phonological representation - the size of our vocabulary is also always changing - because of technology, new words like "merch", "ipod", and "podcasts" - made by combing or adjusting existing words

exemplars

- conceptual knowledge is represented via prototype and that we categorize by making comparisons to that prototype - typicality influences many judgments about category members, including attractiveness - ratings of attractiveness have been closely related to ratings of typicality- so that people seem to find more-typical category members to be more attractive

wernicke's area

- controls the ability to understand speech an area in the temporal lobe of the brain, where the temporal and parietal lobe meet; damage here typically causes fluent aphasia

prototypes and typicality effects

- definitions set "boundaries" for a category - how do you use a prototype in your interactions with the world? - compare objects with the prototype you have in memory; if there is similarity it is probably in the category - resemblance is a matter of degree

concepts and the brain

- different regions of the brain focus on different concepts; depend on perceptual properties - different parts of the brain are activated when thinking about living and nonliving things

language and thought

- do differences among languages affect perception? EX. some languages have a large variety of words for color and some have very little - these differences have an impact on how people perceive and remember colors, directions, and describing events - language has a direct impact on cognition, so that the categories recognized by your language has a direct impact on cognition, so that the categories recognized by your language become the categories used in your thought - language has a different effect on cognition, and as a result, language's influence is irreversible: once your language has led you to think in certain ways, you will forever think in those way - language you hard often guides what you pay attention to, and what you pay attention to shapes your thinking - your experience that shapes thought; depends on what you pay attention to, and language often guides attention - not profound nor permanent, and there is no reason to accept Whorf's ambitious proposal

family resemblance

- family resemblance; the idea that members of a category (e.g., all dogs, all games) resemble one another. In general, family resemblance relies on some number of features being shared by any subset of category members, even though these features may not be shared by all members of the category. Therefore, the basis for family resemblance may shift from one subset of the category to another - there are no "defining features" that are common in the family; maybe shared attributes - features depend on their "subgroup" - identify "characteristic features" for each category- features that many (perhaps most) category members have (give you the ability to recognize that a dog is a dog and a shoe is a shoes)

introspections about images

- galton asked people to use introspection to "look within" and report on their own mental contents - participants could not form a visual image; they were not "seeing" the scenes Galton was describing - people differ in their capacity for visual imagery - there is a "translation step" involved in describing their inner experience; something that differs from person to person (and how a blind person perceives things) - we need a more objective meaning of assessing imagery, no subjective experience

images and pictures: an interim summary

- images are like pictures in the fact that images show exactly what a form looks like (EX. visualizing a robot will highlight the robot's appearance in your thoughts and make it much more likely that you'll be reminded of other forms having similar appearance - make some attributes more prominent and others less (EX. the cat's head rather than the whiskers) - putting your thoughts into imagery can literally shape the flow and sequence of your ideas - the duck/rabbit example reminds us that images are inherently organized in a way that pictures are not, and this organization can influence the sequence of your thoughts- with your understanding of the image (EX. where is the "top and "front)

organizing language

- language can combine and recombine the units to produce novel utterances-assembling phonemes into brand-new morphemes or assembling words into brand-new phrases - some sequences are not acceptable however; you cannot configure some sentences into different ways

visual imagery and the brain

- many of the brain structures required for vision are also crucial for imagery - the pattern of brain activation is roughly the same in the perception and imagery condition - "Decoding" patterns of brain activation in people who are holding visual information - patterns of first viewing each pictures - told to remember and maintain each image - compare the activation patterns while visualizing and while seeing each image

imagery and perception

- overlap between imaging and perceiving; certain mental processes involved in both activities - participants are less successful in detecting dim visual stimuli if they're simultaneously trying to hold a visual image before their "mind's ear"

mental-folding task

- participant is asked to imagine refolding the squares to form a cube, and then has to decide whether the two "arrow tips" would meet in the now-created cube - those who are successful in this task are not particularly skilled in tasks like mental rotation; involve different mechanisms than just spatial reasoning - gender difference; men are faster and more accurate than women - men genetically are better; ways they choose to explore their environment (exploratory habits) - training for these types of tasks can reduce the gender difference (video game training)

the diversity of concepts

- people are guided by their beliefs about categories has yet another implication - natural things are as they are because forces of nature are consistent (stable) - artifacts however, can be made to different compositions because they are human-made - evident in other contexts; characterized by a goal - what is considered a "diet food"; losing weight

putting the pieces together

- people have a prototype for most of their concepts as well as a set of remembered exemplars, and that people use these various elements for a range of judgements about the relevant category - set of beliefs about each concept they hold, and these beliefs reflect the individuals' understanding of cause-and-effect relationships- for example, why drunks act as they do, or how a chemical found in grass might transfer to cows

how does vivid imagery matter?

- people really do differ in the nature of their imagery experience - some report they can see images as a routine part of their inner experience - some report that when they close their eyes, they are unable to call up an image of a scene they've seen countless times - less likely to feel as if they can relive their memories (autobiographical memory) - potential link between vivid visual imagery and some aspects of emotion and even mental health; those with more vivid imagery tend to experience stronger emotions - people diagnosed with phobias sometimes experience troubling images

combining phonemes

- phonemes can be combined and recombined to produce many different morphemes (small units of language) - some phonemes uttered after one another produce different sounds; the "s" in "books" sounds different than the "s" in "pills"

resemblance depends on properties

- resemblance does depend on shared properties, but- more precisely- it depends on whether the objects share important, essential properties 1) make judgments about resemblance 2) how much the object resembles the prototype or exemplar 3) decisions about what's essential

spatial and visual images

- response times with blind research participants are proportional to the amount of rotation needed, just as with participants who have normal vision - people blind since birth produce results just like those from people who can see (normal imagery) - for blind people, the "spatial imagery" might be represented in the mind in terms of a series of imagined movements, so that it's body imagery or motion imagery rather than visual imagery - blind individuals use spatial imagery to carry out the tasks we've been discussing; sighted people can use either visual or spatial imagery to carry out these tasks - those who have lost their color vision and also lost their ability to perceive motion can still imagine movement - visual imagery relies on brain areas also needed for vision, with the result that damage to these areas disrupts both imagery and vision. Spatial imagery, in contrast, relies on different brain areas, and so damage to visual areas won't interfere with this form of imagery, and damage to brain sites needed for this imagery won't interfere with vision

a combination of exemplars and prototypes

- routinely "tune" their concepts to match the circumstances EX. you think about birds differently when considering tropical birds than when thinking about North American birds - rely on exemplars; after all, different settings, or different perspectives, would trigger different memories and so bring different exemplars to mind - conceptual knowledge includes prototypes and exemplars, because each has its own advantages - may vary from person to person and from concept to concept

transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)

- series of strong magnetic pulses at a specific location on the scalp; temporary disruption in the brain region directly below this scalp area - parallels between visual perception and visual imagery - how people pay attention to visual inputs and to visual images

the complexity of similarity

- sometimes, category judgments are independent of typicality; you judge some candidates to be category members even though they don't resemble the prototype at all (EX. painted lemon) - you also judge some candidates not to be in the category even though they do resemble the prototype (counterfeit money) - your judgement depends on your beliefs about that category You need to make a judgment of resemblance- how much does Mike resemble your prototype for "bully" - "Resemblance from shared properties" won't work - compare a plum to a lawn mower; common sense says they aren't similar however, they do share common properties such as weighing less than a ton, can be found on Earth, etc (but this doesn't change the basic assessment that there's not a close resemblance)

the complexity of speech perception

- speech is based off of more than just identifying the different features - speech segmentation; the process through which a stream of speech is "sliced" into its constituent words and, within words, into the constituent phonemes - the illusion of "pauses" in speech - we "hear" pauses that mark word boundaries, but they do not actually exist - this can be noticed when trying to understand a foreign language (why speech sounds so fast)

the production of speech

- speech is produced by airflow from the lungs that passes through the larynx and from there through the oral and nasal cavities - different vowels are created by movements of the lips and tongue that change the size and shape of the oral cavity - constants are produced by movements that temporarily obstruct the airflow through the vocal tract - two flaps of muscular tissue called the "vocal folds" (aka "vocal cords")

traveling through the network to retrieve knowledge

- the associative links don't just tie together the various bits of knowledge; they also help represent the knowledge - the link between George Washington and President - you'll need less time to retrieve knowledge involving closely related ideas, and more time to retrieve knowledge about more distant ideas - EX. sentence verification task; obviously true sentences mixed with various false sentences and in response, they had to hit "true" or "false" - this task allows participants to "travel" through networks and seeking a connection between nodes; once the connection is found, theres an associative link - these systems reduce redundancy by storing information into properties of other things (EX. all animals have hearts) - speed of knowledge is determined by how many connections and networks the brain has to go through - associative links play a pivotal role in knowledge representation

category knowledge guides your interference

- there are some limits on the inferences you'll consider, and this is another arena in which we see the effects of typicality - people are willing to make inferences from the typical case to the whole category, but not from an atypical case to the category - inferences also guided by your broad set of beliefs- beliefs that tell you among other things, how categories are related to each other EX. grass contains a certain chemical, people are willing to believe that cows have the same chemical inside them (cause and effect)

the difference between typicality and categorization

- understanding of basic concepts includes two types of knowledge; a prototype for the concept, and also some number of exemplars for that concept - judgements of typicality and judgments of category membership should go hand in hand - some basis for judging category membership that's not tied to typicality, we need to specify what the basis is

two types of imagery

- visual and spatial; they can visualize and they can spatialize (not everyone can do both?) - depending on the task; a task asking for color would not rely on spatial imagery - people differ in their conscious experience of imaging; some people view and remember things a lot more vividly than others

mental images as "picture-like"

- what information is included, as well as what information is prominent, depends on the mode of presentation; as the mode of representation changes, so does the pattern of information availability - for a description, features that are prominent will be those that are distinctive and strongly associated with the objects being described - for a depiction, in contrast, size and position will determine what's prominent and what's not

mental rotation

- when you're scanning across a mental image, therefore, or zooming in on one, "traveling" a greater "distance" requires more time - the same applies when we would observe if we asked research participants to move their eyes across an actual map (rather than an image of one) or literally to zoom in on a real picture - similarity between mental images and actual out-in-the-world pictures - more so "mental sculptures" rather than "mental pictures"

syntax and knowledge as guided to parsing

- why do you initially choose one interpretation of a sentence, one parsing, rather than another? - seek the simplest phrase structure that will accommodate the words heard so far - active-voice sentences rather than passive-voice sentences; interpret a sentence's initial noun phrase as the "doer" of the action and not the recipient - parsing is influenced by the function words that appear in a sentence and by various morphemes that signal syntactic role - parsing is also guided by background knowledge, and in general people try to parse sentences in a way that makes sense to them - rely on your (nonlinguistic) knowledge about the world

"wolf children"

- wolf mother in her den together with four cubs; two were baby wolves and two were human children - wolfish in appearance and behavior - none could be rehabilitated to use language normally, although some did learn to speak a few words - language learning may depend on both a human genome and a human environment

perception

- you can view the cube from either above or below, however, your perception of the drawing isn't neutral, and so you perceive the cube as having one interpretation or the other - how does perception go beyond the information given in a stimulus? - configuration in depth - specifies a figure/ground organization - what participants see in their image isnt a "picture"- neutral with regards to interpretation and open to new interpretations - they were not able to reinterpret their images (failed to find the duck in a "rabbit image" or a rabbit in a "duck image") - images are inherently organized, just as precepts are, they are also unambiguous and strongly resistant to reinterpretation

definition: what is a dog?

- you know something akin to a dictionary definition- a dog is a creature, an animal, has four legs - when asked "is Milo a dog" you could use this definition to help you - when told he is an animal, you haven't learned anything new, however, if you were asked what dogs, cats, and horses have in common, you could scan your definition of each one looking for common elements - most common, everyday things don't have definitions EX. a shoe is made of leather made to be worn on your feet, but what about a wooden shoe or a flip flop?? - definitions are good for the most part- the fact that they name relevant features, shared by most members of a category

the mind's eye

- you use your "mind's eye" to try and visualize how certain things might look, remember something, etc (imagery) - an aid for making decisions or remembering

conversations and common ground

- your ability to use language also depends on knowledge separate from language itself; woven with your knowledge of phonemes, morphemes, and syntax- a point that once again calls attention to the complexity of language use - early conversations establish common ground- with speakers reminding each other of shared beliefs, settling on what terms they'll use, and specifying names so that, later in the conversation, they'll know who's means by the pronouns "he" or "she" or "they" - can be difficult due to participants having different backgrounds or views about the nature of their conversation

category knowledge guided your thinking about new cases

- your background knowledge about your various concepts influences you in other ways - someone jumping into a pool with their clothes on at a party= drunk - doing this isn't part of the definition of being drunk, and it's likely to be part of then prototype (but it is how someone who is drunk behaves) - apply the necessary features you think are important to identifying something - color matters when buying an emerald, but not when identifying an animal - your various beliefs also affect how quickly you learn new concepts - learning what does and doesn't fit into a category leads you to infer on other knowledge about the objects

specific-language impairment

a disorder in which individuals seem to have normal intelligence but experience problems with learning the rules of language EX. difficulty completing passages like this one: "I like to blife. Tomorrow I will blife. Yesterday I did the same thing. Yesterday I ____" Most 4-year-olds know that the answer is "yesterday I blifed" but adults with SLI cannot do this task-apparently having failed to learn the simple principle involved in forming the past tense of regular verbs

anomia

a disorder, often arising from specific forms of brain damage, in which the person loses the ability to name certain objects

non-fluent aphasia

a disruption of language, caused by brain damage, in which a person loses the ability to speak or write with any fluency - inability to convey or express speech in any form

fluent aphasia

a disruption of language, caused by brain damage, in which afflicted individuals are able to produce speech but the speech is not meaningful, and the individuals are not able to understand what is said to them - lots of neural tissue that is specialized for language; damage to certain neural pathways can cause great damage and inability to locate certain words!

self-report data

a form of evidence in which a person is asked directly about their own thoughts or experiences - participants could "inspect" their images much as they would a picture, and their descriptions made it clear that they were viewing their images from a certain position and distance - they could "read off" from the image details of color and texture

basic-level categorization

a level of categorization hypothesized as the "natural" and most information level, neither too specific nor too general. People tend to use basic-level terms (such as "chair", rather than more general "furniture" or more specific "armchair") in their ordinary conversation and in their reasoning EX. "how did you get to school?"...you are more likely to say "a car" than "a ford truck" GENERAL

phonemic restoration effect

a pattern in which people "hear" phonemes that actually are not presented but that are highly likely in that context. (EX. if one is presented with the word "legislature" but with the "s" sound replaced by a cough, one is likely to hear the "s" sound anyhow) - insist they heard the same word without the pause - top-down process literally changes what participants hear- leaving them with no way to distinguish what was heard from what was inferred

hub and spoke model

a proposal for how concepts might be represented in the brain, with tissue in the anterior temporal loves serving as the "hub"- a brain location that connects and integrates information from many other brain areas. The "spokes" represent more specific elements of the concept- with (for example) visual information relevant to the concept stored in visual areas; relevant action information stored in motor areas; and so on

eidetic imagery

a relatively rare capacity in which the person can retain long-lasting and detailed visual images of scenes that can be scrutinized as if they were still physically present EX. seeing a cat and being asked how many spots were on the cat's tail

garden-path sentences

a sentence that initially leads the reader to one understanding of how the sentence's words are related but then requires a change in this understanding to comprehend the full sentence EX. "the old man the ships"; first read as "the old man" but is actually saying "the old" are who man the ships - led to one interpretation but this interpretation turns out to be wrong - the information needed in order to understand these sentences arrives only late in the sequence, and so, to avoid an interpretive dead end, you'd be better off remaining neutral about the sentence's meaning until you've gathered enough information

sentences

a sequence of words that conforms to the rules of syntax (and so has the right constituents in the right sequence)

prototype

a single "best example", or average, identifying the "center" of a category - this is applied to family members and how they specify their "center" rather than the boundaries of the category

tree structure

a style of depiction often used to indicate hierarchical relationships, such as the relationships (specified by phrase structure rules) among the words in a phrase or sentence

parallel distributed processing (PDP)

a system of handling information in which many steps happen at once (i.e., in parallel) and in which various aspects of the problem or task are represented only in a distributed way EX. you see red, a hose, and lights and know it is an ambulance without much thought (all at once, quick)

rating task

a task in which participants must evaluate some item or category with reference to some dimension, usually expressing their response in terms of some number. - for example, they might be asked to evaluate birds for how typical they are within the category "birds", using a "1" response to indicate "very typical" and a "7" response to indicate "very atypical"

coarticulation

a trait of speech production in which the way a sound is produced is altered slightly by the immediately preceding and immediately following sounds. Because of this "overlap" in speech production, the acoustic properties of each speech sound vary according to the context in which that sound occurs - speech you encounter daily is rather limited (50 of the most common words used in English make up half of the words you actually hear) - weaves together bottom-up and top-down processes

phonemes

a unit of sound that distinguishes one word (or one morpheme) from another. For example, the words "peg" and "beg" differ in their initial phoneme- (p) in one case, (b) in the other. Some contrasts in sound, however, do not involve phonemes; these contrasts might indicate the speaker's emphasis or might involve a regional accent, but they do not change the identity of the words being spoken (these contrasts are sometimes said to be "subphonemic")

sentence verification task

an experiment procedure used for studying memory in which participants are given simple sentences (e.g., "cats are animals") and must respond as quickly as possible to whether the sentence is true or false

production task

an experiment procedure used in studying concepts, in which the participants is asked to name as many examples (e.g., as many fruits) as possible

image-scanning procedure

an experimental procedure in which participants are instructed to form a specific mental image and then are asked to scan, with their "mind's eye", from one point in the image to another. By timing these scans, the experimenter can determine how long "travel" takes across a mental image - memorize a map with its landmarks and performed a scanning procedure

mental rotation task

an experimental procedure in which participants have to determine whether a shape differs from a target only in its position and orientation or whether the shape has a form different from the shape of the target Participants can also imagine rotations in depth

broca's area

area of the brain for speech an area in the left frontal lobe of the brain; damage here typically causes non-fluent aphasia

bilingualism

children raised bilingually develop specific skills that help them avoid confusing two languages- so that they develop a skill of tuning off one language in this setting so they can speak uncompromised other languages

phrase-structure rules

constraints that govern what elements must be contained within a phrase and, in many languages, what the sequence of those elements must be

demand character

cues within an experiment that signals to participants how they are "supposed to" respond - people try to imagine something, they draw on their knowledge about how an event in the world would actually unfold, and they do their best to simulate this event - how images represent spatial layout - these cues can lead participants to change their behaviors or responses based on what they think the research is about. Demand characteristics are problematic because they can bias your research findings

imagery as being visual imagery

drawing on the same mechanisms and have many of the same traits as actual vision

more typicality and categorization

if we painted a lemon, would it still be a lemon?? Yes, just because it is a different color, etc it is still considered a lemon - experiment where children were asked if they could turn a toaster into a coffeepot?? A raccoon into a skunk?? - people reason differently about naturally occurring items like raccoons and manufactured items like coffeepots - depends on the "deep" features; not it's current features (just because the lemon is discolored or looks different, it is still a lemon) What about a counterfeit dollar bill?? - despite this resemblance, you understand that a counterfeit bill isn't in the category of legitimate money, so here, too, your categorization doesn't depend on typicality

overregularization errors

in speech production, an error in which a person produces a form that is consistent with broad pattern, even though that pattern does not apply to the current utterance. Alternatively, in perception or in memory, an error in which someone perceives or remembers a word or event as being closer to the "norm" than it really is (EX. misspelled words are read as though they were spelled correctly, atypical events are misremembered in a way that brings them closer to more-typical events) EX. "yesterday was goed" or "yesterday I runned"

percepts

internal representations of the world that result from perceiving; percepts are organized depictions - percepts are depictions; shows directly what a stimulus looks like - organized depictions and therefore unambiguous in a way that pictures are not

what does it mean to "know a language"?

language users rely on a further set of principle whenever they perceive and understand linguistic inputs; some are rooted in syntax and others depend on semantics; still others depend on prosody

chronometric studies

literally, "time-measuring" studies; generally, studies that measure the amount of time a task takes. Sometimes used as a way of examining the task's components or as a way of examining which brain events are simultaneous with specific mental events

voicing

one of the properties that distinguishes different categories of speech sounds. A sound is considered "voiced" if the vocal folds are vibrating while the sound is produced. If the vocal folds start vibrating sometime after the sound begins (i.e., with a long voice-onset time), the sound is considered "unvoiced" - we can distinguish between sounds that are voiced- produced with vocal folds vibrating- and those that are not (voiced are v, z, and n...not voiced is k)

direct vs. indirect

other factors can guide your attention, with the result that in many settings these factors will erase any effects that language might have

visual imagery

people describe their thoughts in a variety of ways - their thoughts seem to be formulated by words - a sequence of ideas that lack concrete form - involve a sequence of pictures or sounds or other sensory impressions

pragmatic rules

principles describing how language is ordinarily used; listeners rely on these principles to guide their interpretation of what they hear. (EX. listeners rely on these rules when they interpret the question "can you pass me the salt" as a request for the salt, not an inquiry about someone's arm strength - the meaning of what someone is saying or what they are asking for

connectionist network

proposed systems of knowledge representation that rely on distributed representations, and that therefore require parallel distributed processing to operate on the elements of representation - the idea "computer" needs to trigger the idea "macbook"; this means that many nodes representing the concept "computer" have to manage collectively to activate the many nodes representing "macbook" - must use processes that are similarly distributed, so that one widespread activation pattern can evoke a different pattern

exemplar-based reasoning

reasoning that draws on knowledge about specific category members, or exemplars, rather than drawing on more general information about the overall category

prescriptive rules

rules describing how things are supposed to be instead of how they are. Often called "normative rules" and contrasted with descriptive rules - languages change with the passage of time (EX. "thou" and "ye" are no longer used) - using "they" as a singular pronoun - what is considered "correct"

syntax

rules governing the sequences and combinations of words in the formation of phrases and sentences - syntax is not dependent on meaning (EX. we are able to understand "Me want cookie" even though it has little to no meaning) - we need principles of syntax that are separate from considerations of semantics or sensibility

descriptive rules

rules that simple describe the regularities in a pattern of observations, with no commentary on whether the pattern is "proper", "correct", or "desirable" - many english speakers have somehow internalized these rules and obey them in their use of, and also their judgements about, language EX. a sequence of words lacks an element that should, according to the rules, be in place, you'll probably think there's a mistake in the sequence - phrase-structure rules help you understand the sentences you encounter - focuses on how speakers and writers actually use the language, not on how they should use it

"embodied" or "grounded cognition"

the body's sensory and action systems play an essential role in all our cognitive processes

typicality

the degree to which a particular case (an object, situation, or event) is typical for this kind

graded membership

the idea that some members of a category are "better" members and therefore are more firmly in the category than other members

categorical perception

the pattern in which speech sounds are heard "merely" as members of a category- the category of "z" sounds, the category of "p" sounds, and so on. Because of categorical perception, perceivers are highly sensitive to the acoustic contrasts that distinguish suns in different categories; people are much less sensitive to the acoustic contrasts that distinguish sounds within a category - difficulty telling the difference between "ba" and "pa" - those who do not speak english would not be able to do this; cannot hear or tell the difference between "b" and "p"

prosody

the pattern of pauses and pitch changes that characterize speech production. Prosody can be used (among other functions) to emphasize elements of a spoken sentence, to highlight the sentence's intended structure, or to signal the difference between a question and an assertion - direct the listener's attention by specifying the focus or theme of a sentence - clarify a sentence that would otherwise be entirely confusing

place of articulation

the position at which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound. (EX. the place of articulation for the "b" sound is the lips; the place of articulation for the "d" sound is where the tongue briefly touched the roof of the mouth) - 40 different phonemes in English (but vary from different languages)

linguistic relativity

the proposal that the language people speak shapes their thought, because the structure and vocabulary of their language create certain ways of thinking about the world

common ground

the set of (usually unspoken) beliefs and assumptions shared by conversational partners. In a conversation, speakers and listeners count on this shared knowledge as a basis for making inferences about points not explicitly mentioned in the conversation, and also as a basis for interpreting elements of the conversation that would otherwise be unclear or ambiguous

morphemes

the smallest language unit that carries meaning. Psycholinguists distinguish content (or "free") morphemes (the primary carriers of meaning) from function (or "bound") morphemes (which specify the relations among words) - words like "umpire" and "talk" are units that can stand alone, and they usually refer to particular objects, ideas, or actions - other words bound to these morphemes and add information crucial for interpretation (EX. "ed", and the plural "s")

propositions

the smallest unit of knowledge that can be either true or false. Propositions are often expressed via simple sentences, but this is merely a convenience; other modes of representation are available - your understanding of certain sentences is represented by an interconnected network of propositions, with each proposition being indicated by an ellipse

extralinguistic context

the social and physical setting in which an utterance is encountered; usually, cues within this setting guide the interpretation of the utterance - this is evident in the fact that many aspects of prosody differ from one language to another- and so, when you communicate with someone less familiar with your own language, you often need to shift your vocabulary, your syntax, and also your pattern of pauses and pitch EX. the word "bank" can have different meanings depending on the linguistic and extralinguistic context: a financial institution, a river shore, or a verb to turn

generativity

the trait that enables someone to combine and recombine basic units to create (or generate) new and more complex entities. Linguistic rules, for example, are generative because they enable a person to combine and recombine a limited set of words to produce a vast number of sentences

manner of production

the way in which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound (EX. the airflow can be fully stopped for a moment, an in the "t" or "b" sound; or the air can continue to flow, as in the pronunciation of "f" or "v")

aphantasia

those who lack the capacity for visualization - vivid imagers tend to report how much their image experience is like seeing- their self-reports provides assessment of visual imagery - reflected in brain activation

parse

to divide an input into its appropriate elements- for example, dividing the stream of incoming speech into its constituent words- or a sequence of words into its constituent phrases. In some settings, parsing also includes the additional step of determining each element's role within the sequence - sometimes linguistic ambiguity involves the interpretation of a phrase's organization. Sometimes, though, the ambiguity involved the interpretation of a single word. Sometimes the ambiguity is evident in spoken language but not in written language - analyzing language and determining if it follows rules

categorization

you are likely to categorize something to specific activities, features, etc once you have identified what it is EX. Dog; likes walks, has fur, barks, etc (general knowledge) Reminds us how powerful basic concepts and categories are (and can be applied to other pets and animals)