Psycholinguistics
A subfield of cognitive science focusing on language comprehension, development, production, and reading.
Language processing
Involves perceptual processing, word recognition, parsing, semantic interpretation, mental models, and pragmatic interpretation.
Word superiority effect
Context is crucial for identifying letters efficiently.
Universal grammar
Chomsky's theory proposing an innate potential for language learning with specific grammar rules.
Deep and surface structure
Shows the independence of meaning and grammar in language.
Language comprehension
Involves moment-by-moment decoding, word recognition, parsing, and inference for understanding.
Mental lexicon
Contains information about spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and semantics for word recognition.
Parsing
Assigning sentence elements to grammatical classes, which can be challenging without clear clause markers.
Behaviorist critique
Criticism of Skinner's theory of language development.
Linguistic relativity
Hypothesis suggesting that language structures thought, evident in differences between languages like Hopi and Eskimo.