Chapter 9: Language
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
"the slithy toves"
Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky begins with the line "T'was brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe." In this sentence, which of the following is a noun phrase?
Coarticulation
Occurs when phonemes or other units are produced in a way that overlaps them in time
Lexical access
Of the following processes that can be impaired in dyslexia, which one refers to being able to recognize a word on sight readily via retrieval from long-term memory?
saccades
Our eyes move when reading in what kind of motion?
Sociolinguistics
The study of the relationship between social behavior and language
Neurolinguistics
The study of the relationships among the brain, cognition, and language
perceptual, lexical, and comprehension processes
What are the three different processes that contribute to our ability to read?
lexical processes and comprehension processes
When learning to read, novice readers must master what two basic kinds of processes?
up to 50; fewer than one
When listening to our native language, we can perceive ________ phonemes per second; when listening to non-speech sounds, we can perceive ________ sound(s) per second.
Lexical access
Which entails one's ability to retrieve phonemes from long term memory; how fast a reader can recognize a word when seen
Phonological reading
Which entails reading words in isolation; individuals with dyslexia often have more trouble recognizing the words in isolation than in context
The phonics approach
Which method of reading instruction teaches the correspondence between speech sounds and alphabet letters?
Phonological awareness
Which refers to awareness of the sound structure of spoken language; recognizing the different sounds that make up a word
Semantics
Which word is the name for the study of meaning in a language?
Generative, productive
Within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances. The possibilities for creating new utterances are virtually limitless
You will recall more details about features; your classmate will recall more details about condition
You and a classmate both read a piece of text giving a description of a car, which includes its features (cruise control, GPS, etc.); and its condition (it was once in an accident, it needs new tires, etc.) You read it from the perspective of someone wanting to sell the car; your classmate reads it from the perspective of someone who might buy it. Research into text comprehension and viewpoints predicts which of these?
Speech segmentation
The process of trying to separate the continuous sound stream into distinct words
Psycholinguistics
The psychology of our language as it interacts with the human mind
Phoneme; morpheme
The smallest unit of distinguishable speech sound in a language is a ____, and the smallest unit of meaning in a language is a ____
Phoneme
The smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance in a given language from another
Morpheme
The smallest unit that denotes meaning within a particular language
Structured at multiple levels
The structure of language can be analyzed at more than one level
Phonetics
The study of how to produce or combine speech sounds or to represent them with written symbols
Grammar
The study of language in terms of noticing regular patterns
Linguistics
The study of language structure and change
Computational linguistics and psycholinguistics
The study of language via computational methods
Semantics
The study of meaning in a language
syntax
The study of sentence structure and systematic uses of it
perception, language, memory, thinking, and intelligence
What are the complex processes involved in reading?
Phonological awareness, phonological reading, phonological coding, and lexical access
What are the processes that may be impaired in dyslexia?
Communication
Exchange of thoughts and feelings
Connotation
A word's emotional overtones, presuppositions, and other nonexplicit meanings
Dynamic
Languages constantly evolve
Denotation
The strict dictionary definition of a word
Descriptive grammar
To describe the structures, functions, and relationships of words in language
Propositions
In Kintsch's model of reading comprehension, our working memory for text contains not words, but
Surface structure
A level of syntactic analysis that involves the specific syntactical sequence of words in a sentence and any of the various phrase structures that may result
Function morphemes
A morpheme that adds detail and nuance to the meaning of the content morphemes or helps the content morphemes fit the grammatical context
McGurk Effect
Demonstrates how we integrate what we hear with what we see
Principle of Contrast
Different words have different meanings
Dyslexia
Difficulty in deciphering, reading, and comprehending text
Categorical perception
Discontinuous categories of speech sounds
Rapid, sequential; clumps of text
During reading, saccades are our ________ eye movements between fixations on ________.
Discourse
Encompasses language use at the level beyond the sentence, such as in conversation, paragraphs, stories, chapters, and entire works of literature
250 to 300
How many words per minute does the average adult read?
deep structure; surface structure
In his theory of transformational grammar, Noam Chomsky (1957) proposed that underlying propositions include things like the infinitive (uninflected form) of a verb (e.g., be); and that transformations performed on them include forms indicating the person, number, and tense of a verb (e.g., were). From the definitions given in this chapter, you can infer that the former infinitive is an example of ________, while the latter specific form is an example of ________.
when more similarity to text is in the model
In mental models, under which condition(s) is reading comprehension of a text passage facilitated most?
People generate new sentences matching the syntactic structure of the prime, and they also rate sentences they hear that are structurally like the prime as more grammatical.
In syntactic priming, what have researchers found people do when they are primed by hearing a sentence, and then asked to generate their own new sentences?
bidirectionally
In the interactive-activation model of word recognition, information is processed
a tentative inference
In the view of reading comprehension as representing text in mental models, a given is that to construct a mental model, we first need to make
special; continuous, discontinuous; categorical perception
In the view of speech perception as ________, we can translate ________ speech sounds into ________ through ________.
ordinary; segmentation, phonemic-restoration; coarticulation
In the view of speech perception as ________, we can use ________ and the ________ effect to understand speech despite ________.
Phonological coding
In working memory; when people have difficulty storing phonemes in working memory and tend to confuse them more often, reading becomes increasingly difficult
Transformational grammar
Involves the study of transformational rules that guide the ways in which underlying propositions can be rearranged to form various phrase structures
right
Lack of correspondence between what the ____ side of the mouth says and what is heard are the more likely to lead to the McGurk effect
Arbitrarily symbolic
Language creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and what it represents: an idea, thing, process, relationship, or a description.
Regularly structured
Language has a structure; only particularly patterned arrangements of symbols have meaning, and different arrangements yield different meanings
Communicative
Language permits us to communicate with one or more people who share our language
living things
People who have sustained damage in regions that are involved in perceptual processing have trouble recognizing ____
manmade things
People with lesions in areas that are involved in the processing of functional information have more trouble recognizing manmade things
more quickly
Readers of all ages access lexical information ________ when they have larger vocabularies, compared to lexical access by readers with smaller vocabularies.
4 characters, 14-15 characters; 7-9 characters
Reading comprehension is affected by saccadic eye movements and fixations of the eyes on text portions. The perceptual window from which we can get useful information spans about ________ to the left of a fixation point, and about ________ to its right, while our saccades jump about ________, on average, between fixations. Thus, we extract some information that may prepare us for the next fixation.
Deep structure
Refers to an underlying syntactic structure that links various phrase structures through the application of various transformation rules
Syntax
Refers to the way in which users of a particular language put words together to form sentences
Semantic encoding
The process by which we translate sensory information into a meaningful representation
Phonemic restoration effect
Sounds that are missing from a speech signal are constructed by the brain so it seems to the listener that he actually heard the missing sound
Principle of Conventionality
States that meanings of words are determined by conventions- they have a meaning upon which people agree.
Adults with bigger vocabularies use a clearly formulated strategy to discern meanings, whereas adults with smaller vocabularies appear to use no strategy at all.
Studies of how adults discern meanings of unfamiliar words from context cues have found which of the following?
fewer; a longer time; relevant
Suppose you read a passage of text. In Kintsch's model of text comprehension, you will comprehend what you read better if the text has ________ propositions, if you keep it in your working memory ________, and if the propositions are ________ to the theme of the passage.
Noun phrase
Syntactic structure that contains at least one noun (often the subject of the sentence) and includes all the relevant descriptors of the noun
Verb phrase
Syntactic structure that contains at least one verb and whatever the verb acts on, if anything
Phrase structure grammar
Syntactical analysis of the structure of phrases as they are used
Lexicon
The entire set of morphemes in a given language or in a given person's linguistic repertoire
Lexical access
The identification of a word that allows us to gain access to the meaning of the word from memory
Referent
The thing or concept in the real world that a word refers to
Language
The use of an organized means of combining words to communicate
a meaningful context.
The word-superiority effect and the sentence-superiority effect both demonstrate the influence of
Memory; context
To comprehend words we read or hear that we know, we use ________; to comprehend words we read or hear that we do not know, we use ________.
Lexical processes
Used to identify letters and words
Comprehension processes
Used to make sense of the text as a whole
Thematic roles
Ways in which items can be used in the context of communication
semantics, the context; syntax, the structure
We understand meaning through ________, using information from ________; we understand sentences through ________, using information from ________.
The arbitrary symbolism of language
We use words to name things like truth, which we could not convey as well using pictures. To which property of language does this relate?
Communicative, arbitrarily symbolic, regularly structured, structured at multiple levels, generative/productive, dynamic
What are the characteristics of all languages
prescriptive grammar
prescribes the "correct" way in which to structure the use of written and spoken language
