PSU12160 Language - Introduction to Psycholinguistics

Vocabulary flashcards covering core definitions, theoretical perspectives, and quantitative figures from the introductory lecture on Psycholinguistics.

Psycholinguistics

The scientific study of the psychology of language, focusing on the relationship between language and the human mind, including how language is acquired, understood, produced, and affected by ageing or brain damage.

Linguistics

The field of study that investigates how sentences are constructed from individual words and how words are constructed from smaller units, studying language itself as a structure within a rationalist intellectual tradition.

Lexicon

The mental dictionary within a language system containing a person's knowledge of words.

Syntax

The system of rules for combining individual words to construct structured sentences.

Speech Bottleneck

The concept describing speech as the information bottleneck of the human condition and the most efficient medium of communication for transmitting information across generations since DNA.

Linguistic Rationalism

The intellectual tradition of linguistics that relies on theoretical argumentation regarding how sentences and language structures are constructed.

Psychological Empiricism

The intellectual tradition of psychology that relies on hypothesis testing, experimental design, and data collection to study cognitive processes.

Arbitrariness of Language

The structural property of language as a code where the relationship between meaning, sound, and visual appearance is non-direct and arbitrary.

How many words do people know on average?

40k words known on average

2/3 words spoken per second

Human Speech Error Rate

The frequency of linguistic mistakes during normal rapid production, occurring at a rate of only one speech or word error per million words.