Lecture 11: Language and Cognition

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering language structures, speech production and perception, syntactic rules, pragmatics, linguistic relativity, and non-verbal language systems from Lecture 11.

Language

A collection of symbols and rules for combining them used to create an infinite variety of messages; it allows for idea transfer and serves as the primary source of knowledge acquisition.

Communication

The sending and receiving of information through signs, signals, and facial expressions; also present in non-human animals (e.g., honeybee dance, predator alarm calls).

Symbolic (Property of Language)

The property of language in which sounds or gestures function as arbitrary symbols that refer to specific things, creating a pairing between sound and meaning (e.g., 'rose' \rightarrow /roz/ \rightarrow a picture).

Productive (Property of Language)

The property of language wherein a finite set of components can be recombined to generate an infinite variety of messages.

Regular (Property of Language)

The property of language stating that there are systematic structural rules governing how components can be combined.

Discreteness (Property of Language)

The structural property of language that allows it to be broken down into distinct hierarchical units: sentence \rightarrow phrase \rightarrow word.

Sentence Level

A level of language structure consisting of a coherent sequence of words that conveys an intended meaning.

Phrase Level

A level of language structure where different structural types of word groupings serve distinct grammatical functions.

Lexicon

The mental dictionary of words, in which every word entry is linked to a corresponding concept.

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound in language that can distinguish one word from another (e.g., English has approximately $40$ phonemes).

Morpheme

The smallest unit of meaningful language.

Free Morpheme

A meaningful unit of language that can stand alone as an independent word.

Bound Morpheme

A unit of language that cannot stand alone and must bind to free morphemes to add grammatical or semantic information (e.g., prefixes or suffixes).

Coarticulation

The phenomenon in speech production where the sounds of adjacent phonemes overlap, causing a phoneme's acoustic properties to differ depending on its context (e.g., the /s/ in 'soup' vs. 'seat').

Categorical Perception

The perceptual phenomenon where listeners perceive varying continuous acoustic properties as belonging to discrete categories; listeners are sensitive to differences between categories but insensitive to acoustic differences within a category.

Phonemic Restoration Effect

An auditory illusion where a missing speech sound obscured by noise (such as a cough) is perceptually reconstructed by listeners using context (demonstrated by Warren & Warren, 1970).

The Wug Test (Berko, 1958)

An experiment demonstrating that speakers apply systematic morphological rules rather than relying solely on memorization when forming plurals of novel pseudo-words based on preceding phonemes.

Syntax

The system of rules that governs how words are combined into phrases and sentences; it operates independently of meaning even though elements remain semantically linked.

Phrase Structure

The hierarchical organization of words into syntactic phrases, where different structural groupings can produce different semantic interpretations.

Syntactic Ambiguity

A form of ambiguity where a single sentence can be interpreted in two or more ways due to alternative possible phrase structures.

Lexical Ambiguity

A form of ambiguity that occurs when an individual word within a sentence has two or more distinct meanings.

Phonemic Ambiguity

Ambiguity that arises from the acoustic or phonemic structure of spoken language.

Pragmatics

The study of the social rules and communicative conventions governing how language is used and interpreted in context.

Gricean Maxims

Conversational guidelines formulated by philosopher Paul Grice (Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner) that participants follow and expect their conversation partners to follow.

Maxim of Quantity

A Gricean maxim stating that a speaker should provide as much information as needed, but no more.

Maxim of Quality

A Gricean maxim stating that a speaker must be truthful and not state what they believe to be false.

Maxim of Relation

A Gricean maxim stating that a speaker's contributions must be relevant to the conversation.

Maxim of Manner

A Gricean maxim stating that a speaker should be clear, orderly, and avoid obscurity.

Modularity Hypothesis

The view that language operates as a distinct cognitive module separate from other general thought processes.

Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)

The proposition (Whorf & Sapir, 1956) that if two languages differ in how they discuss a concept, the speakers of those languages will differ in how they think about that concept.

Egocentric Spatial Language

A system of spatial description relative to the observer's body (e.g., 'right of me' or 'left of me', as used in Dutch).

Geocentric Spatial Language

A system of spatial description relative to absolute cardinal or geographical coordinates (e.g., 'north' or 'south', as used in Tzeltal).

Home Sign

An individual, idiosyncratic gestural communication system created by an isolated deaf person prior to exposure to a conventional sign language.

Nicaraguan Sign Language

A sign language system that emerged from individual home signs prior to the 1970s, progressed through a primitive sign stage, and developed into a complex language with discrete, meaningful symbols by its third generation.