PSYCH 120A – Cognitive Psychology, Lecture 9: Language

Vocabulary flashcards covering major concepts from Lecture 9 on Language: basic linguistic units, perceptual phenomena, experimental tasks, developmental mechanisms, brain disorders, and broader themes such as music-speech parallels and linguistic relativity.

Generativity (in language)

Property of human language that allows an indefinite number of ideas to be expressed by combining symbols in new ways.

Phoneme

The smallest unit of speech sound, such as individual vowels or consonants.

Voiced phoneme

A speech sound produced with vibration of the vocal folds (e.g., /b/, /d/, /g/).

Unvoiced phoneme

A speech sound made without vocal-fold vibration (e.g., /f/, /k/, /s/).

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful linguistic unit; may be a whole word or part of a word (e.g., -ed, -s).

Speech segmentation

The process of identifying individual words within a continuous stream of spoken language.

Phonemic restoration

Top-down filling-in of missing speech sounds using contextual information.

Lexical decision task

Experimental task in which participants decide whether a string of letters is a real word or a non-word.

Word frequency effect

Faster recognition of common words than rare words in a lexical decision task.

Conceptual priming

Improved processing of a stimulus (e.g., a word) when it is preceded by semantically related items.

Spreading activation theory

Model proposing that activation of one word or concept partially activates related nodes, increasing their accessibility.

Fast mapping

Children’s rapid learning of a word’s meaning after only a few exposures.

Whole-object constraint

Heuristic in word learning that a new label refers to an entire object rather than to its parts or attributes.

Shape bias

Tendency to extend a new noun to objects that share the same shape rather than color or size.

Mutual exclusivity

Assumption that each object has only one label, so a new word likely refers to an unlabeled object.

Critical period (language)

Hypothesized developmental window during which language exposure is crucial for normal acquisition.

Statistical learning

Implicit learning of patterns (e.g., grammar) by tracking the frequencies of elements in input.

Self-directed speech

Talking to oneself, either aloud (private speech) or silently (inner speech), to guide thought and behavior.

Aphasia

Loss or impairment of language abilities due to brain damage.

Broca’s aphasia

Language disorder involving difficulty producing speech, typically from left-frontal damage.

Wernicke’s aphasia

Language disorder marked by fluent but nonsensical speech and poor comprehension, linked to left-temporal damage.

Anomic aphasia

Type of aphasia characterized by difficulty naming objects despite fluent speech.

Global aphasia

Severe impairment in both language production and comprehension.

Prosody

Patterns of pitch, rhythm, and loudness that convey meaning and emotion in speech.

Music-speech connection

Idea that music and speech share tools such as pitch and rhythm for expressing emotion and social information.

Written language

Human communication system that must be explicitly taught and did not evolve biologically like spoken language.

Linguistic relativity

Proposal that the language one speaks can subtly influence perception and cognitive processes.

Generative communication in bees

Example of nonhuman symbolic communication: the waggle dance conveys distance and direction of food.

Shape of hierarchical language structure

Levels from phoneme → morpheme → word → phrase → sentence in spoken language.