BC3 Language

Phonetics

The study of the physical, acoustic, and articulatory properties of speech sounds.

Phonology

The language-specific organization of speech sounds and their contrasts.

Phoneme

A speech-sound category that can distinguish word meaning, such as /k/ and /b/.

Morpheme

The smallest unit carrying meaning or grammatical function.

Morphology

The structure of words and how roots and affixes combine.

Derivational affix

An affix that forms a new word or changes its grammatical category.

Inflectional affix

An affix marking grammatical properties such as tense, number, or agreement.

Orthography

The writing system of a language, including letters and permitted spelling patterns.

Mental lexicon

The mental system containing word forms and their links to meaning and grammar.

Semantics

The meaning of words, sentences, and other linguistic expressions.

Syntax

Rules and processes for combining words into structured sentences.

Pragmatics

Interpretation of intended meaning using social, situational, and discourse context.

Prosody

Speech rhythm, stress, timing, and pitch patterns that convey structure or emotion.

Left-hemisphere language dominance

Most people's language networks are predominantly left-lateralized.

Right-hemisphere language contributions

Supports emotional prosody, discourse, metaphor, and aspects of pragmatic meaning.

Broca's area

Left inferior frontal region, especially BA44/45, involved in language selection and grammar.

Wernicke's area

Classically, posterior superior temporal cortex associated with language comprehension.

Arcuate fasciculus

A white-matter pathway connecting temporal and frontal language regions.

Wernicke–Geschwind model

A classic model linking posterior comprehension regions to frontal production regions.

Distributed language network

Interacting cortical and white-matter systems supporting multiple language functions.

Aphasia

An acquired impairment of language production and/or comprehension.

Anomia

Difficulty retrieving names despite potentially preserved object recognition.

Broca's aphasia

Slow, effortful, nonfluent speech with grammatical difficulties and relatively preserved simple comprehension.

Agrammatism

Impaired grammatical structure, often involving omitted function words or inflections.

Telegraphic speech

Short, effortful utterances with many grammatical function words omitted.

Wernicke's aphasia

Fluent but often meaningless speech with impaired word and sentence comprehension.

Conduction aphasia

Relatively fluent speech and fair comprehension with markedly impaired repetition.

Dysarthria

Impaired speech articulation caused by weak or poorly coordinated speech muscles.

Apraxia of speech

Difficulty planning and sequencing speech movements despite adequate basic muscle function.

Developmental verbal dyspraxia

A developmental impairment in planning and coordinating speech movements.

KE family

A family with inherited speech-motor and language difficulties associated with FOXP2 mutation.

FOXP2

A gene found in humans and other vertebrates; certain mutations impair speech and language development.

Segmentation problem

Determining word boundaries in continuous speech without reliable pauses.

Coarticulation

Overlapping articulation of adjacent speech sounds, causing their acoustic properties to influence one another.

Speech variability problem

Recognizing the same speech categories despite differences in speaker, accent, rate, and acoustics.

Categorical perception

Grouping continuous acoustic variation into discrete phoneme categories.

Perceptual narrowing

Language experience strengthens sensitivity to native speech contrasts and reduces some nonnative sensitivity.

Heschl's gyrus

Contains early auditory cortex, which responds to sounds generally.

Superior temporal sulcus (STS)

Temporal region showing sensitivity to speech-relevant auditory structure.

Speech versus nonspeech contrast

An experimental comparison used to identify processing more specific to speech.

Words versus pseudowords

A contrast testing effects of familiar lexical entries while retaining speech-like structure.

Time-reversed speech

Speech played backward to disrupt familiar temporal patterns and intelligibility.

fMRI

Measures blood-oxygenation changes to estimate where task-related neural activity occurs.

EEG / ERP

Records scalp electrical activity; event-related potentials reveal the timing of processing.

Word-superiority effect

Letters are recognized more accurately within real words than comparable nonword strings.

Interactive-activation model

A recognition model with feedforward and feedback influences between features, letters, and words.

Visual word-form area (VWFA)

Left ventral occipitotemporal region involved in learned written-word and letter-pattern recognition.

Alexia

An acquired impairment of reading ability.

Letter-by-letter reading

Very slow reading through sequential identification of individual letters.

Morphemic organization of the lexicon

Word representations are structured partly by shared meaningful roots and affixes.

Lexical frequency

How commonly a word occurs; frequent words are generally recognized and produced faster.

Lexical neighborhood

The set of words similar in sound or form to a target word.

Lexical competition

Simultaneously activated word candidates compete during recognition or selection.

Semantic relationships in the lexicon

Meaningfully related concepts have linked representations that influence processing.

Lexical access

Activation of possible word representations from incoming language information.

Lexical selection

Choosing the intended word representation from activated candidates.

Lexical integration

Incorporating a selected word's meaning into sentence or discourse context.

Lexical-decision task

A task requiring rapid judgments about whether a presented string is a real word.

Lexical neighborhood density effect

In the lecture's task, many similar competitors slowed word recognition.

Semantic priming

Faster recognition of a target after a semantically related prime.

Spreading-activation theory

Activation of a concept spreads to associated concepts within a semantic network.

Collins and Loftus model

A semantic network model explaining priming through spreading activation between related concepts.

Feature-based semantic representations

Concepts represented through distributed properties such as shape, function, and action.

Semantic dementia

Progressive deterioration of conceptual knowledge, often producing increasingly general naming.

Category-specific semantic deficit

Disproportionate impairment of knowledge about a particular semantic category.

Patient E.W.

Animal-specific naming and spoken-word recognition deficits indicating cross-modal semantic impairment.

N400

A negative ERP around 400 ms, typically larger for semantically unexpected or incongruent words.

Kutas and Hillyard sentence experiment

Semantically inappropriate sentence endings produced an enhanced N400 response.

Incremental parsing

Building and updating sentence structure as successive words are encountered.

Syntactic agreement violation

A grammatical mismatch, such as incorrect subject–verb agreement.

P600 / syntactic positive shift

A positive ERP around 600 ms, often associated with syntactic anomalies or reanalysis.

Garden-path sentence

A sentence encouraging an initial interpretation that later requires syntactic revision.

Syntactic processing network

A network involving left inferior frontal and superior temporal regions.

Macroplanning

Deciding the overall communicative intention and message to express.

Microplanning

Organizing information and perspective for expression in an utterance.

Conceptual preparation

Constructing a preverbal representation of the intended message.

Lemma selection

Retrieving an abstract word representation with grammatical properties.

Morphological encoding

Combining a word's root with appropriate grammatical or derivational affixes.

Phonological encoding

Organizing a word's speech sounds and metrical structure.

Phonetic encoding

Preparing coordinated articulatory gestures for speech.

Motor execution in speech

Performing the planned articulatory movements to produce spoken output.

Semantic speech error

Producing a meaning-related word instead of the intended word.

Phonological speech error

Producing an incorrect speech sound or sound sequence within an utterance.