Final Exam Study Guide: Ch 11, Ch 12, & Bilingualism

Vocabulary flashcards covering discourse models, inferences, pragmatics, Gricean maxims, and bilingualism based on final exam lecture notes.

Mental Models (Situation Models)

Rich conceptual representations of a situation described in discourse, containing information about space, time, goals, and perceptual details.

Proposition

The bare logical content of a sentence, as opposed to the richer mental model derived from it.

Bridging Inference

A necessary inference required for coherence that connects a new sentence to something established earlier in the discourse.

Elaborative Inference

An optional enrichment that adds detail to a discourse (e.g., inferring a 'knife' was used when someone is 'stabbed') but is not strictly required for coherence.

Presupposition

Background information that a sentence treats as given, often triggered by definite articles, factive verbs, or change-of-state verbs.

Accommodation

The process by which readers silently update their mental model to accept a presupposition provided by the speaker.

Repeated-name penalty

A reading delay encountered when a speaker uses a full name (e.g., 'Bruno') for a highly salient character instead of a pronoun (e.g., 'He').

Categorization Theory (Metaphor)

The theory that a metaphor like 'X is Y' is a category claim where the vehicle (Y) denotes an abstract category to which the topic (X) is assigned.

Analogy Theory (Metaphor)

The theory that metaphors align relational structures between two domains (e.g., lawyer/opponent mapping to shark/prey) while ignoring surface features.

Activation & Suppression (Metaphor)

The account that context boosts relevant features of a metaphor (e.g., 'tenacious') and suppresses irrelevant literal features (e.g., 'fins').

Semantic Meaning

The hard meaning of a sentence that is literally entailed, stable across contexts, and cannot be cancelled.

Pragmatic Meaning

The soft meaning a speaker conveys beyond the literal words, which is inferred from the speaker's choice and can be cancelled.

Maxim of Quality

Grice's expectation that speakers do not say what they believe to be false or that for which they lack adequate evidence.

Maxim of Quantity

Grice's expectation that speakers provide as much information as needed, but no more than is required.

Maxim of Relation

Grice's expectation that a speaker's contribution to a conversation should be relevant.

Maxim of Manner

Grice's expectation that speakers should be clear, orderly, brief, and avoid ambiguity.

Conversational Implicature

The extra meaning a listener infers when a speaker appears to break a Gricean maxim while remaining cooperative.

Implicit Theory of Mind (ToM)

An early-emerging, fast, and automatic system for tracking others' beliefs and intentions, observed even in toddlers.

Explicit Theory of Mind (ToM)

A later-emerging, slow, and verbal system for reasoning about false beliefs that depends on language and cognitive control.

Social Gating

The phenomenon where live human interaction is necessary for certain types of language learning in infants, such as Mandarin phonetic contrasts.

Audience Design

The process by which speakers adapt their language production to meet the specific needs or knowledge of their listener.

Conceptual Pacts

Partner-specific agreements on how to describe an object (e.g., calling a dog 'the cocker spaniel') that persist within a conversation.

Interactive Alignment

A model of dialogue where partners coordinate automatically through priming rather than strategic mind-reading.

Egocentric Account

The view that language processing is initially self-centered and only incorporates the partner's perspective during late-stage monitoring.

Interdependence Hypothesis

Cummins's theory that academic and linguistic skills developed in a heritage or first language transfer to a second language.

Code-Switching

The systematic and rule-governed practice of alternating between two or more languages within a single conversation or utterance.

Visual World Paradigm

An eye-tracking method used to investigate language processing by monitoring where participants look in a visual scene as they hear speech.

Pupillometry

A method of measuring pupil dilation as an index of cognitive effort, such as the effort required to process code-switches or accented speech.