Cognitive Psychology: Chapter 8 - Language

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering structural components, comprehension processes, syntactic parsing models, and discourse integration from Chapter 8: Language.

Psycholinguistics

A subfield of cognitive psychology that examines how humans use language by combining concepts from linguistics and cognitive psychology.

Expressive Aphasia (Broca's Aphasia)

A language disorder caused by damage to the left inferior frontal region of the cortex, characterized by slow, effortful, halting speech that typically lacks grammatical function words while comprehension remains intact.

Wernicke's Aphasia

A language disorder caused by damage to the posterior region of the temporal lobe, characterized by relatively fluent, syntactically intact language production alongside severely impaired language comprehension.

Phonology

The structural system and study of the basic sound elements of a language, which originate as physical vibrations in the air.

Orthography

The basic visual elements, letters, and spelling conventions that comprise a written language.

Phoneme

The smallest distinct unit of sound in a spoken language that distinguishes one word or syllable from another.

Morphology

The structural level of language concerning the composition of words from units conveying meaning or grammatical properties, serving as the interface between form, syntax, and semantics.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of language that conveys meaning in spoken language or grammatical properties in written language.

Free Morpheme

A morpheme that can stand alone as an independent word, such as cow, text, or book.

Bound Morpheme

A morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word and must be attached to other morphemes, such as the plural -s or past-tense -ed.

Syntax

The grammatical rules specifying the structural order and arrangement of words and phrases to form legitimate sentences.

Surface Structure

The linear ordering and outward form of words in an articulated or written sentence.

Deep Structure

The underlying abstract syntactic structure of a sentence derived from phrase structure rules prior to transformations into surface form.

Semantics

The aspect of language concerned with meaning, representing the mental concepts and ideas distinct from the word forms themselves.

Pragmatics

The study and use of language within specific contexts, emphasizing what a producer intends to communicate beyond literal meaning.

Producer Meaning

The intended message that a speaker or writer aims to convey, which often differs from the literal sentence meaning.

Coarticulation

The overlapping of sounds that make up phonemes and words in continuous speech, causing an absence of distinct acoustic boundaries between words.

Categorical Perception

The perceptual phenomenon in which continuous acoustic variations of speech sounds are treated as discrete, distinct phonemic categories.

Word Superiority Effect

The finding that individual letters are identified faster and more accurately when embedded in real words than when presented in nonwords or in isolation.

Phoneme Restoration Effect

A top-down perceptual effect where listeners perceptually fill in missing phonemes that have been masked by extraneous noise using semantic and lexical context.

Mental Lexicon

The long-term memory store of word representations (typically $40{,}000$ to $60{,}000$ words for a single-language speaker) organized across semantic and orthographic networks.

Segmentation Problem

The challenge of identifying where individual words start and stop in spoken language due to the lack of acoustic gaps between words.

Lexical-Decision Task

An experimental paradigm in which participants rapidly decide whether a visually presented letter string is a genuine word or a nonword.

Syntactic Parsing

The cognitive process of building an internal abstract grammatical structure by assigning words in a sentence into syntactic categories and relations.

Syntax-First Approach

A sentence comprehension model proposing that an initial syntactic structure is built using strictly grammatical rules—preferring simpler structures with fewer constituent nodes—before contextual and semantic evaluation occur.

Interactive Approach

A parsing model proposing that syntactic structure is constructed using syntactic rules in conjunction with semantic, lexical, and contextual cues simultaneously.

Anaphoric Inference

An inference connecting a pronoun or referring expression in one sentence back to an antecedent in a preceding sentence to maintain discourse cohesion.

Situational Model (Mental Model)

An integrated mental simulation of the situation, events, and individuals described in language, forming the ultimate end product of comprehension.