Talking about language processing

Psycholinguistics

The study of the connections between linguistic and psychological processes, including how language is used, represented, and acquired.

Linguistic Competence

The knowledge of a language that enables speakers to produce and understand sentences.

Linguistic Performance

The actual use of language in concrete situations, which may include errors, hesitations, and paraphrasings.

Comprehension

The process of understanding language, whether spoken or written.

Production

The act of speaking or writing language.

Mental Lexicon

The mental dictionary that stores knowledge about words, including their meanings and interrelations.

Syntactic Processing

The cognitive process that involves understanding how words are structured into phrases and sentences.

Segmentation Problem

The challenge of identifying word boundaries in continuous speech.

Interactive Activation Model

The Interactive Activation Model is a cognitive framework that describes how individuals identify words in language processing. It posits that recognition occurs through a network of interconnected units that represent words and their constituent parts (like phonemes and letters). As each unit is activated by input, it communicates with other units, facilitating the identification of words based on both bottom-up (sensory input) and top-down (contextual knowledge) processes, ultimately leading to faster and more accurate understanding of spoken or written language.

Garden Path Theory

The theory suggesting that listeners tend to interpret sentences using the simplest structure first, potentially leading to misunderstandings.

Alignment in Conversation

The phenomenon where speakers adjust their language use to be more similar during a dialogue, enhancing mutual understanding.

Audience Design

The concept that speakers adjust their language and style based on the perceived knowledge and expectations of their audience.

Morphology

The study of how words are formed and structured from smaller meaningful components called morphemes.

Regressive Eye Movement

A backward movement of the eyes while reading, often used to re-read text.

Fixation

A pause during reading where the eye remains relatively still on a specific word or phrase.

Parsing

The process of analyzing the syntax and structure of sentences in order to derive meaning.

Implicit Causality

The phenomenon where a sentence suggests probable causal relationships based on the participants mentioned.

Saccade

The swift, jerky movements of the eyes when reading or scanning text.

Noam Chomsky

A prominent linguist known for his theories on language structure and the distinction between competence and performance.

Processing Levels in Language

The levels of cognitive processing that include word identification, structural organization, and meaning extraction.