cognitive psychology ch. 10 flashcards

sentence

a sequence of words that conforms to the rules of syntax (and so has the right constituents in the right sequence)

morpheme

the smallest unit that carries meaning. psycholinguists distinguish content (or “free”) types which are the primary carriers of meaning, from function (or “bound”) types which specifies the relations among words

phoneme

a unit of sound that distinguishes one word (or one morpheme) from another; for example, the words “peg” and “beg” differ in their initial ______; some contrasts in sound however do not involve these units: they may indicate speaker emphasis or involve an accent, but don’t change the identity of the words being spoken (subphonemic)

voicing

one of the properties that distinguishes different categories of speech sounds; a sound is considered “voiced” if the vocal folds are vibrating while the sound is produced; if the vocal folds start vibrating sometime after the sound begins (i.e., with a long voice-onset time), the sound is considered “unvoiced”

manner of production

the way in which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound; for example, the airflow can be fully stopped for a moment, as in the “t” or “b” sound; or the air can continue to flow, as in the pronunciation of “f” or “v”

place of articulation

the position at which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound; for example, the place of articulation for the “b” sound is the lips; the place of articulation for the “d” sound is where the tongue briefly touches the roof of the mouth

speech segmentation

the process through which a stream of speech is “sliced” into its constituent words and, within words, into the constituent phonemes

coarticulation

a trait of speech production in which the way a sound is produced is altered slightly by the immediately preceding and immediately following sounds. because of this “overlap” in speech production, the acoustic properties of each speech sound vary according to the context in which that sound occurs

phonemic restoration effect

a pattern in which people “hear” phonemes that actually are not presented but that are highly likely in that context; for example, if one is presented with word “legislature” but with the “s” sound replaced by a cough, one is likely to hear the “s” sound anyhow

categorical perception

the pattern in which speech sounds are heard “merely” as members of a category — the category of “z” sounds, the category of “p” sounds, and so on; because of categorical perception, perceivers are highly sensitive to the acoustic contrasts that distinguish sounds in different categories; people are much less sensitive to the acoustic contrast that distinguish sounds within a category

generativity

the trait that enables someone to combine and recombine basic units to create (or “generate”) new and more complex entities; linguistic rules, for example, are generative because they enable a person to combine and recombine a limited set of words to produce a vast number of sentences

syntax

rules governing the sequences and combinations of words in the formation of phrases and sentences

phrase-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 describing how things are supposed to be instead of how they are; often called “normative rules”

descriptive rules

rules that simply describe the regularities in a pattern of observations, with no commentary on whether the pattern is “proper,” “correct,” or “desirable”

parse

to divide an input into its appropriate elements — for example, dividing the stream of incoming speech into its constituent words — or a sequence of words into its constituent phrases; in some settings, parsing also includes the additional step of determining each element’s role within the sequence

garden-path sentence

a sentence that initially leads the reader to one understanding of how the sentence’s words are related but then requires a change in this understanding to comprehend the full sentence (for example, “the old man ships”)

extralinguistic context

the social and physical setting in which an utterance is encountered; usually, cues within this setting guide the interpretation of the utterance

prosody

the pattern of pauses and pitch changes that characterize speech production; prosody can be used to emphasize elements of a spoken sentence, to highlight the sentence’s intended structure, or to signal the difference between a question and an assertion

pragmatic rules

principles describing how language is ordinarily used; listeners rely on these principles to guide their interpretation of what they hear; for example, listeners rely on these rules when they interpret the question “can you pass me the salt?” as a request for the salt and not an inquiry about someone’s arm strength

common ground

the set of (usually unspoken) beliefs and assumptions shared by conversational partners; in a conversation, speakers and listeners count on this shared knowledge as a basis for making inferences about points not explicitly mentioned in the conversation, and also as a basis for interpreting elements of the conversation that would otherwise be unclear or ambiguous

broca’s area

an area in the left frontal lobe of the brain; damage here typically causes nonfluent aphasia

nonfluent aphasia

a disruption of language, caused by brain damage, in which a person loses the ability to speak or write with any fluency

wernicke’s area

an area in the temporal lobe of the brain, where the temporal and parietal lobes meet; damage here typically causes fluent aphasia

fluent aphasia

a disruption of language caused by brain damage in which afflicted individuals are able to produce speech but the speech is not meaningful, and the individuals are not able to understand what is said to them

specific-language impairment

a disorder in which individuals seem to have normal intelligence but experience problems in learning the rules of language

overregularization error

in speech production in which a person produces a form that is consistent with a broad pattern, even though that pattern does not apply to the current utterance; alternatively, in perception or in memory, an error in which someone perceives or remembers a word or event as being closer to the “norm” than it really is; for example, misspelled words are read as though they were spelled correctly; atypical events are misremembered in a way that brings them closer to more-typical events

linguistic 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