Psycholinguistics - Introduction and Syntax

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from the introductory lecture on psycholinguistics and syntax, focusing on language structure, acquisition, and processing.

Psycholinguistics

The examination of the psychological processes that underlie our language abilities.

Linguistics

Deals with human language competence; what we know about the language that allows us to speak and understand.

Phonology

The study of how sounds are used in a language.

Phonetics

The study of speech sounds and production

Syntax

The study of the structure of language; how words are arranged to create sentences.

Semantics

The study of meaning in language.

Pragmatics

The study of language use in context.

Morphology

The study of words and word formation.

Linguistic performance

What we do with our language knowledge; how knowledge is used.

Modularity

The concept that the mind is composed of independent, specialized modules.

Language nativism

The idea that humans are born with innate knowledge of language.

Critical Period

A specific time in development during which exposure to language is crucial for normal language acquisition.

Poverty of the stimulus

The argument that children do not receive enough data to learn language from exposure alone.

Universal grammar

A set of linguistic rules proposed to be hardwired in the brain.

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.

Syntactic recursion

One constituent can be embedded inside another constituent of the same type.