Language II Stability and Flexibility

Flashcards covering the concepts of language conventions, speech perception stability and flexibility, selective adaptation experiments, and the Reordered Access Model of lexical ambiguity.

Community membership

The concept that language users make strong assumptions about what is mutually known based on shared belonging to groups of various sizes.

Conventions

A regularity $R$ for a population $P$ in situation $S$, such as driving on the right side of the road or using specific words for objects.

Speech perception

The process of understanding speech which includes word recognition, lexical access, parsing (recovering grammatical structure), and applying context.

Stability

A property of the perceptual system that captures long-term probabilities to produce the same analysis despite irrelevant variations in input.

Flexibility

A property of the perceptual system that allows for adjustments based on current probabilities and changing conditions.

Selective adaptation

A phenomenon where feature detectors (e.g., for voicing) become less sensitive after repeated exposure to the same linguistic feature, causing a shift in the identification of ambiguous sounds.

Eimas & Corbit (1973)

Researchers who suggested that humans have feature detectors tuned to voicing that adapt or become less sensitive when a sound like $/da/$ or $/ta/$ is heard repeatedly.

Test Continuum

A series of sounds created for experiments that transition from one phonetic category (e.g., $/ba/$) to another (e.g., $/wa/$) through several intermediate steps.

Baseline Identification Test

A procedure where randomized test items from a continuum are presented to a participant to establish their initial categorization of sounds.

Adaptation Effect

The shift in identification that occurs after one sound is played repeatedly (e.g., 30-40 iterations), causing the listener to label ambiguous sounds differently than during the baseline.

Samuel & Dumay (2021)

A study demonstrating that while adaptation effects recover over minutes and hours, a small significant shift remains even at a $5.5\,hour$ delay.

Lexical ambiguity

A situation where a single word has multiple meanings, such as "bank" (financial institution vs. side of a waterway).

Balanced ambiguities

Ambiguous words where no single meaning is dominant; the resting activation of both meanings is roughly equivalent.

Biased/Unbalanced ambiguities

Ambiguous words that have a dominant meaning and a subordinate meaning.

Reordered Access Model

A model proposing that for biased ambiguities, the dominant meaning is always accessible irrespective of context, while context can boost the activation of the subordinate meaning.

Paul et al. (1992)

A study that used a Stroop-like naming task to show that dominant meanings are inherently more accessible than subordinate meanings and that context influences that accessibility.