Language and Communication Flashcards

Flashcards for reviewing key vocabulary related to Language, Communication, and Psycholinguistics.

Psycholinguistics

Examines the psychological processes underlying our language abilities, focusing on linguistic performance and how knowledge is used.

Linguistics

Deals with human language competence, focusing on what we know about language that enables us to speak and understand.

Phonology

The study of how sounds are used in a language.

Phonetics

The study of speech sounds and their production.

Syntax

The study of word order and sentence structure.

Semantics

The study of meaning in language.

Pragmatics

The study of language use in context.

Morphology

The study of words and word formation.

Modularity (in language)

Refers to the idea that the mind is composed of independent, specialized modules, one of which is dedicated to language.

Language Nativism

The theory that humans are born with innate knowledge or predispositions that facilitate language acquisition.

Critical Period (Language Acquisition)

A sensitive period during which language acquisition is most efficient and natural.

Poverty of the Stimulus

The argument that children cannot learn language from exposure alone because the input is degenerate and insufficient.

Universal Grammar

A theory by Noam Chomsky suggesting that humans are born with an innate understanding of the basic principles of language structure.

Constituent

A group of words that functions as a unit within a sentence.

Parsing

Breaking a sentence into its component parts and indicating the relationships between these components.

Phrase Structure Diagrams

Tree diagrams that show hierarchical relations between constituents in a sentence.

Generative Grammar

A set of rules that define what is syntactically legal, deriving deep syntactic structure from surface form.

Speech Variability

Differences in acoustic waveforms caused by speaker rate, intonation, noise, distortion, and accent.

Phones

Basic units of sound in speech; speech segments with distinct physical or perceptual properties.

Phonemes

Set of phones that are cognitively equivalent and serve to distinguish words.

Allophones

Different phones that are perceptually equivalent in a language, such as the /p/ in 'pin' and 'spin'.

Ganong Effect

A top-down effect in phoneme perception where categorical boundaries and voice onset time are modulated by context.

Phoneme Restoration Effect

A top-down effect where missing phonemes are perceptually restored based on context.

McGurk Effect

A multimodal speech perception phenomenon where visual speech perception influences the audio stream.

Lexical Access

The process of matching a string of letters/phonemes/syllables to a word in the lexicon.

Cohort Model

A model of lexical access involving an access stage, a selection stage, and an integration stage.

Uniqueness Point

The point in a word at which it can be uniquely identified.

TRACE (Interactive Activation) Model

A model of speech perception with interconnected feature, phoneme, and word detectors.

Bilingualism

The ability to fluently use two languages.

Code Switching

Substituting words or phrases from one language with another.

Language Attrition

The loss of proficiency in a language due to disuse.

Separate Store Models

Models of bilingual lexical representation in which each language has its own lexicon.

Common Store Models

Models of bilingual lexical representation in which both languages share a single lexicon.

Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM)

A model of bilingual lexical representation featuring asymmetric links between L1 and L2.

Orthography

The conventional spelling system of a language.

Shallow Orthography

A writing system with a one-to-one relationship between letters and phonemes.

Deep Orthography

A writing system where the same letter can signify different sounds in different contexts.

Dual Route Theory

A theory of reading proposing that there are two routes to visual word recognition: assembled and direct.

Dyslexia

Specific reading disability with no obvious cause for lack of reading mastery.

ERP Components

Scalp-recorded neural activity generated in a specific neuroanatomical module when a computational operation is performed.

N400

A negative-going ERP component with a peak latency around 400ms, sensitive to semantic congruity.

Orthographic Neighbourhood

The set of words that can be formed by changing one letter of a given word.