Cognition 2: Exam Practice Questions – Language

Flashcards about language and cognition.

Lexical Bias Effect

The lexical bias effect refers to the observation that speech errors tend to result in real words more frequently than non-words.

SLIP (Spoonerisms of Laboratory -Induced Predisposition) technique

A widely used experimental method to study the lexical bias effect. Participants silently read pairs of words, typically constructed to encourage phoneme transpositions when later read aloud.

Self-monitoring theory

Speakers possess an internal monitoring mechanism that evaluates speech before it is spoken aloud. According to this theory, speech errors resulting in non-words are more likely to be intercepted and corrected internally before they reach articulation.

Dell’s Interactive Activation Model

This model envisions speech production as a multi-layered system where activation spreads in both directions between semantic, lexical, and phonological levels.

High-Amplitude Sucking (HAS)

A technique where researchers measure changes in an infant’s sucking rate in response to auditory stimuli to test phoneme discrimination.

Segmentation problem

The challenge infants face in identifying individual words within the continuous stream of spoken language, which lacks explicit boundaries.

Statistical learning

Infants can track the probability with which syllables occur together. High transitional probabilities suggest that syllables belong to the same word, while low probabilities indicate word boundaries.

Prosodic bootstrapping

Infants use rhythm, stress, and intonation to infer word boundaries.

Fast mapping

A child can form a connection between a new word and its referent after minimal exposure.

Mutual exclusivity

Children assume that each object has only one label, which helps them rule out known terms when hearing a new word.

Syntactic bootstrapping

Inferring word meaning based on grammatical structure

Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH)

There is a biologically constrained window, generally considered to be before puberty, during which language acquisition occurs most efficiently.

Broca’s aphasia

Affects syntactic encoding.

Anomia

Reflects lexical retrieval problems.

Lexical route

Allows for the direct recognition of whole words from the mental lexicon.

Non-lexical route

Relies on grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, enabling the decoding of regular and novel words.

Surface dyslexia

Damage to the lexical route results in regularisation errors.

Phonological dyslexia

Damage to the non-lexical route impairs the ability to read non-words.

Visual Word Form Area (VWFA)

Located in the left fusiform gyrus, plays a central role in reading by facilitating rapid recognition of orthographic patterns.