Knowledge - Language

Sentence

A sequence of words that conforms to the rules of syntax.

Morpheme

The smallest LANGUAGE unit that carries MEANING.

Phoneme

A unit of SOUND that distinguishes one word (or morpheme) from another.

Voicing

A sound is considered ____ when the vocal folds vibrate while the sound is being made. It is considered un-____ if the vocal folds start to vibrate after the sound begins. 

Manner of Production

The way in which the speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound.

Place of Articulation

The position in which the speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound (Tongue positioning). 

Speech Segmentation

The process in which a stream of words is ‘sliced’ into its constituent words, and words are ‘sliced’ into their phonemes.

Coarticulation

A trait of speech production in which the way something is produced through speech is altered based on the immediately preceding and immediately following sounds.

Phonemic Restortation Effect

A pattern in which people ‘hear’ phonemes that are not actually presented but highly likely in the context.

Categorical Perception

The pattern in which speech sounds are heard as ‘merely’ members of a category. 

Generativity

The trait that allows someone to combine and recombine basic units to create (or generate) new and more complex entities. 

Syntax

Rules governing the sequences and combinations of words in the formation of phrases and sentences. 

Phase-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.

Tree Structure

A style of depiction often used to indicate hierarchical relationships, such as the relationships among the words in a phrase or sentence.

Prescriptive Rules

Rules defining how things are supposed to be instead of how they are. These many change over time.

Descriptive Rules

Rules defining how things are; they define the regularities in a pattern of observations. This never changes.

Parse

To divide an input into its appropriate parts, for example, dividing a stream of incoming speech into its constituent words. 

Garden-Path Sentence

A sentence that initially guides the reader to one understanding of how the sentence’s words are related, but then requires a change in this comprehension to understand the sentence.

Extralinguistic Context

The social and physical setting in which an utterance is encountered.

Prosody

The pattern of pauses and pitch changes that characterizes speech production.

Pragmatic Rules

Principles desrcibing how language is normally used.

Common Ground

The set of (usually unspoken) beliefs and assumptions shared by conversational partners. 

Broca’s Area

An area in the left frontal lobe of the brain; damage here is associated with nonfluent aphasia.

Nonfluent Aphasia

A disruption of language in which a person loses the ability to speak and write fluently. 

Wernicke’s Area

An area in the temporal lobe of the brain that is associated with, when damaged, fluent aphasia.

Fluent Aphasia

A disruption of language in which a person can produce speech, but the speech is not meaningful, and the individual is unable to understand what is said to them. 

Specific-Language Impairment (SLI)

A disorder in which a person seems to have normal intelligence but has problems with learning the rules of language. 

Overregularization Error

In speech production, an error in which a person produces a form that is consistent with a broad pattern, even though the pattern does not apply to the current utterance.

Lingusitic 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.