Chapter 11: Language

arcuate fasciculus

A band of fibers in the brain that connect Wernicke's and Broca's areas.

anaphoric inference

An inference that connects a reference to an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in a different sentence.

backward inference

A kind of inference in discourse processing in which previous information is needed in order to process current information.

casual inference

An inference about a causal relationship between information in one sentence regarding information in another sentence.

child-directed speech (CDS) or infant-directed speech (IDS)

Speech that is tailored to a young infant or child.

clause

Group of words that express a full idea of someone or something.

creole

A fully expressive novel language consisting of a combination of two preexisting languages, typically generated by children of immigrants who are exposed to their parent's language alongside that of their current residence.

developmental verbal dyspraxia

A disorder that affects the ability to pronounce syllables and words.

discourse processing

Comprehension of naturalistic text, either spoken or written, made up of many sentences in sequence.

elaborative inference

A kind of inference in discourse processing in which the inferred information is not necessary in order to properly understand the text.

garden-path sentence

A sentence that tends to induce the wrong parsing.

head-turn task

A behavioral task used to test infant language in which babies are conditioned to turn their heads when they hear a change in a speech sound.

homographs

Words that are spelled identically but have different meanings.

homophones

Words that are pronounced identically but have different meanings.

instrumental inference

A form of elaborative inference in discourse processing in which the tool or instrument that is typically used to perform a task is inferred from the text.

late closure

A tendency when parsing to attach incoming words to the current phrase.

lexical decision task (LDT)

A psychological task in which a participant makes a speedy judgment about whether a given string of letters is a legitimate word or not.

lexical processing

Determining the meaning of individual words.

linguistic relativity

The theoretical perspective that holds that the language someone speaks effects other areas of cognition.

linguistic universalists

The theoretical perspective that holds that the language one speaks does not effect other areas of cognition.

morphemes

The smallest meaningful units of speech.

motherese

An infant-directed way of speaking that uses sing-song like speech cadences, exaggerated vowel pronunciations, and repetition.

natural language processing (NLP)

A subfield of artificial intelligence specifically concerned with machines understanding and producing language.

neurolinguistics

A branch of linguistics concerned with the relationship between linguistic behavior and the structures of the brain.

parsing

Breaking up language into its constituent parts.

phonemes

The smallest unit of speech that can change the meaning of a word.

phonemic restoration effect

A perceptual phenomenon in which sound that is missing or obscured is still perceived if it is highly predictable.

pidgin

A quasi-language that does not contain a full grammar, typically generated by adult immigrants to a location with a different language.

poverty of the stimulus

A proposed phenomenon that states that there is insufficient data for children to learn the rules of grammar based on experience alone.

productivity (or digital infinity)

A feature of human language in which an effectively infinite number of grammatical sentences are possible.

prosody

The patterns of stress and intonation (change in pitch) of a speaker.

psycholinguistics

The subfield of psychology concerned with linguistic behavior including how we learn, understand and produce language.

sequence-to-sequence learning

A type of machine-learning task in which both the inputs and outputs are sequences, such as strings of words represented numerically.

syntax-first approach

A theory of language parsing that holds that grammar alone is used to parse a sentence before considering other factors

Turing test

A test proposed by Alan Turin to determine whether a machine can "think" based on fooling a human conversing with the machine that it is another human

universal grammar

A theorized set of syntactic linguistic rules that is common across all human natural languages