Exam #3: Chapters 8-10 Study Guide; PSY 207

Chapter 8:

• Intrusion errors 

  • Memory errors where information not originally part of an event is mistakenly recalled as being part of it.

• DRM paradigm 

  • A commonly used experimental design, named after its originators (Deese, Roediger, and McDermott), for eliciting and studying memory errors. In this procedure, a person sees or hears a list of words that are related to a single theme; however, the word that names the theme is not itself included. Nonetheless, people are very likely to remember later that the theme word was presented.

• Schema 

  • Knowledge describing what is typical or frequent in a particular situation. For example, a "kitchen schema" would stipulate that a stove and refrigerator are likely to be present, whereas a coffeemaker may be or may not be present, and a piano is not likely to be present.

• Misinformation Effect 

  • An effect in which reports about an earlier event are influenced by misinformation that the person received after experiencing the event. In the extreme, misinformation can be used to create false memories concerning an entire event that actually never occurred.

• Retention Interval

  • The amount of time that passes between the initial learning of some material and the subsequent memory retrieval of that material.

• Decay Theory of Forgetting 

  • The hypothesis that with the passage of time, memories may fade or erode.

• Interference Theory

  • The idea that forgetting occurs because similar memories interfere with each other, especially during retrieval.

• Retrieval Failure 

  • A mechanism that probably contributes to a great deal of forgetting. Retrieval failure occurs when a memory is, in fact, in long-term storage but the person is unable to locate that memory when trying to retrieve it.

• TOT Phenomenon

  • An often-observed effect in which people are unable to remember a particular word, even though they are certain that the word (typically identified via its definition) is in their vocabulary. People in this state often can remember the starting letter for the word and its number of syllables, and they insist that the word is on the "tip of their tongue" (therefore, the "TOT" label).

• Autobiographical Memory

  • The aspect of memory that records the episodes and events in a person's life.

• Consolidation

  • The biological process through which new memories are "cemented in place, acquiring some degree of permanence through the creation of new (or altered) neural connections.

• Flashbulb Memories

  • A memory of extraordinary clarity, typically for some highly emotional event, that is retained over many years. Despite their remarkable vividness, flashbulb memories sometimes are inaccurate.

Chapter 9:

• Exemplar

  • A specific example stored in memory used to represent a category based on past experiences.

• Prototype

  • A single "best example, or average, identifying the "center" of a category.

• Family resemblance

  • The idea that members of a category (e.g., all dogs, all games) resemble one another. In general, family resemblance relies on some number of features being shared by any subset of category members, even though these features may not be shared by all members of the category. Therefore, the basis for family resemblance may shift from one subset of the category to another.

• Typicality

  • The degree to which a particular case (an object, situation, or event) is typical for its kind.

• Graded membership

  • The idea that some members of a category are "better" members and therefore are more firmly in the category than other members.

• Collins and Quillian Hierarchy Model

  • A semantic memory model where concepts are organized in a hierarchical network, with broader categories at higher levels and more specific traits at lower levels.

• Propositional Networks

  • Mental representations of information where ideas are connected in nodes and links that represent relationships between concepts.

• Parallel Distributed Processing Model

  • A system of handling information in which many steps happen at once (i.e., in parallel) and in which various aspects of the problem or task are represented only in a distributed way.

• Sentence Verification Task

  • A method used to study semantic memory by asking participants to quickly decide if a sentence is true or false (e.g., "A robin is a bird").

• Production Task 

  • An experimental procedure used in studying concepts, in which the participant is asked to name as many examples (e.g., as many fruits) as possible.

• Rating Task 

  • A task in which research participants must evaluate some item or category with reference to some dimension, usually expressing their response in terms of some number. For example, they might be asked to evaluate birds for how typical they are within the category "birds," using a "1" response to indicate "very typical" and a "7" response to indicate "very atypical."

• Basic-Level Categorization 

  • A level of categorization hypothesized as the "natural" and most informative level, neither too specific nor too general. People tend to use basic-level terms (such as "chair," rather than the more general "furniture" or the more specific "armchair") in their ordinary conversation and in their reasoning.

• Exemplar-Based Reasoning

  • Reasoning that draws on knowledge about specific category members, or exemplars, rather than drawing on more general information about the overall category.

• Anomia

  • A disorder, often arising from specific forms of brain damage, in which the person loses the ability to name certain objects.

• Hub and Spoke Model 

  • A proposal for how concepts might be represented in the brain, with tissue in the anterior temporal lobes serving as the "hub"-a brain location that connects and integrates information from many other brain areas. The "spokes" represent more specific elements of the concept-with (for example) visual information relevant to the concept stored in visual areas; relevant action information stored in motor areas; and so on.

• Propositions

  • The smallest unit of knowledge that can be either true or false. Propositions are often expressed via simple sentences, but this is merely a convenience; other modes of representation are available.

• Connectionist Networks 

  • Proposed systems of knowledge representation that rely on distributed representations, and that therefore require parallel distributed processing to operate on the elements of a representation.

Chapter 10:

• What language is

  • A structured system of symbols and rules used for communication and expression of thoughts.

• Phoneme 

  • A unit of sound that distinguishes one word (or one morpheme) from another. For example, the words "peg" and "beg" differ in their initial phoneme- [p] in one case, [b] in the other. Some contrasts in sound, however, do not involve phonemes; these contrasts might indicate the speaker's emphasis or might involve a regional accent, but they do not change the identity of the words being spoken. (These contrasts are sometimes said to be "subphonemic.")

• Morpheme 

  • The smallest language unit that carries meaning. Psycholinguists distinguish content (or "free") morphemes (the primary carriers of meaning) from function (or "bound") morphemes (which specify the relations among words).

• Syntax

  • Rules governing the sequences and combinations of words in the formation of phrases and sentences.

• Semantics

  • The study of meaning in language, including the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences.

• Pragmatics

  • The study of how context and social factors influence the interpretation of language.

• Descriptive Rules

  • Rules that simply describe the regularities in a pattern of observations, with no commentary on whether the pattern is "proper," "correct," or "desirable."

• Prescriptive Rules

  • Rules describing how things are supposed to be instead of how they are. Often called "normative rules" and contrasted with descriptive rules.

• Coarticulation 

  • A trait of speech production in which the way a sound is produced is altered slightly by the immediately preceding and immediately following sounds. Because of this "overlap" in speech production, the acoustic properties of each speech sound vary according to the context in which that sound occurs.

• Categorical Perception

  • The pattern in which speech sounds are heard "merely" as members of a category-the category of [z] sounds, the category of [p] sounds, and so on. Because of categorical perception, perceivers are highly sensitive to the acoustic contrasts that distinguish sounds in different categories; people are much less sensitive to the acoustic contrasts that distinguish sounds within a category.

• Phonemic Restoration

  • A pattern in which people "hear" phonemes that actually are not presented but that are highly likely in that context. For example, if one is presented with the word "legislature" but with the [s] sound replaced by a cough, one is likely to hear the [S] sound anyhow.

• Parsing

  • To divide an input into its appropriate elements-for example, dividing the stream of incoming speech into its constituent words-or a sequence of words into its constituent phrases. In some settings, parsing also includes the additional step of determining each element's role within the sequence.

• Garden Path Sentences

  • A sentence that initially leads the reader to one understanding of how the sentence's words are related but then requires a change in this understanding to comprehend the full sentence. Examples are "The old man ships" and "The horse raced past the barn fell."

• Extralinguistic Context

  • The social and physical setting in which an utterance is encountered; usually, cues within this setting guide the interpretation of the utterance.

• Prosody

  • The pattern of pauses and pitch changes that characterize speech production. Prosody can be used (among other functions) to emphasize elements of a spoken sentence, to highlight the sentence's intended structure, or to signal the difference between a question and an assertion.

• Broca’s Area

  • An area in the left frontal lobe of the brain; damage here typically causes nonfluent aphasia.

• Nonfluent Aphasia

  • A disruption of language, caused by brain damage, in which a person loses the ability to speak or write with any fluency. Often contrasted with fluent aphasia.

• Wernicke’s Area

  • An area in the temporal lobe of the brain, where the temporal and parietal lobes meet; damage here typically causes fluent aphasia.

• Fluent Aphasia

  • A disruption of language, caused by brain damage, in which afflicted individuals are able to produce speech but the speech is not meaningful, and the individuals are not able to understand what is said to them. Often contrasted with nonfluent aphasia.

• Specific Language Impairment 

  • A disorder in which individuals seem to have normal intelligence but experience problems in learning the rules of language.

• Overregularization Error

  • In speech production, an error in which a person produces a form that is consistent with a broad pattern, even though that pattern does not apply to the current utterance. Examples would include uttering the word "foots" (applying the general pattern for plurals to the word "foot") or uttering the word "runned" (applying the general pattern for the past tense to the word "run"). Alternatively, in perception or in memory, an error in which someone perceives or remembers a word or event as being closer to the "norm" than it really is. For example, misspelled words are read as though they were spelled correctly; atypical events are misremembered in a way that brings them closer to more-typical events.

• Linguistic Relativity

  • The proposal that the language people speak shapes their thought, because the structure and vocabulary of their language create certain ways of thinking about the world.

• Sentence 

  • ​​A sequence of words that conforms to the rules of syntax (and so has the right constituents in the right sequence).

• Voicing

  • One of the properties that distinguishes different categories of speech sounds. A sound is considered "voiced" if the vocal folds are vibrating while the sound is produced. If the vocal folds start vibrating sometime after the sound begins (i.e., with a long voice-onset time), the sound is considered "unvoiced."

• Manner of Production 

  • The way in which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound. For example, the airflow can be fully stopped for a moment, as in the [t] or [b] sound; or the air can continue to flow, as in the pronunciation of [f] or [v].

• Place of Articulation

  • The position at which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound. For example, the place of articulation for the [b] sound is the lips; the place of articulation for the [d] sound is where the tongue briefly touches the roof of the mouth.

• Speech Segmentation 

  • The process through which a stream of speech is "sliced into its constituent words and, within words, into the constituent phonemes.

• Generativity

  • The trait that enables someone to combine and recombine basic units to create (or "generate") new and more complex entities. Linguistic rules, for example, are generative because they enable a person to combine and recombine a limited set of words to produce a vast number of sentences.

• Phrase-Structure Rules

  • Grammatical rules that describe how words and phrases are arranged to form valid sentences in a language.

• Tree Structure 

  • A style of depiction often used to indicate hierarchical relationships, such as the relationships (specified by phrase-structure rules) among the words in a phrase or sentence.

• Pragmatic Rules

  • Principles describing how language is ordinarily used; listeners rely on these principles to guide their interpretation of what they hear. For example, listeners rely on these rules when they interpret the question "Can you pass me the salt?" as a request for the salt, not an inquiry about someone's arm strength.

• Common Ground

  • The set of (usually unspoken) beliefs and assumptions shared by conversational partners. In a conversation, speakers and listeners count on this shared knowledge as a basis for making inferences about points not explicitly mentioned in the conversation, and also as a basis for interpreting elements of the conversation that would otherwise be unclear or ambiguous.