Chapter 8 - Language

Affective Priming: A process where exposure to one stimulus influences the emotional response to a subsequent stimulus, usually by activating associated emotional concepts.

Anomic Aphasia: A type of aphasia characterized by difficulty in finding the right words, particularly nouns, despite having relatively preserved comprehension and grammar.

Anticipation Error: A type of speech error where a later part of a word or phrase is produced prematurely, typically in place of an earlier part.

Aphasia: A language disorder caused by brain damage, affecting speaking, understanding, reading, or writing, depending on the type and location of the damage.

Bilingualism: The ability to use two or more languages fluently, with varying degrees of proficiency in each language.

Broca’s Aphasia: A type of aphasia associated with damage to Broca's area in the frontal lobe. It results in non-fluent speech, difficulty in producing grammatical sentences, but typically with relatively preserved comprehension.

Broca’s Area: A region in the frontal lobe (typically in the left hemisphere) that is involved in speech production and language comprehension, particularly grammar.

Cognitive-Functional Linguistics: A theoretical approach that emphasizes the connection between cognitive processes and language use, viewing language as deeply rooted in human experiences and mental representations.

Common Ground: Shared knowledge, assumptions, or beliefs between individuals, which is crucial for effective communication.

Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion: A theory proposing that emotions are not innate, but are constructed through cognitive processes that interpret bodily sensations based on context.

Content Morphemes: Morphemes that carry meaning, typically nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. They contrast with function morphemes, which convey grammatical relationships.

Creole Language: A stable natural language that has developed from a mixture of different languages, often emerging in multilingual communities, and typically spoken as a mother tongue.

Critical Period: A theoretical window of time during early development when certain skills or abilities, particularly language acquisition, must be learned or they will not develop properly.

Curse of Knowledge: A cognitive bias where an individual, knowing something well, has difficulty imagining what it’s like for someone who doesn’t have the same knowledge.

Deep Structure: In generative grammar, the underlying syntactic structure of a sentence that represents its core meaning, which can be transformed into different surface structures.

Fast Mapping: The process by which children learn the meaning of a word after only a brief exposure to it, often through context.

Finite State Grammars: A type of grammar in which the next state of a system is determined by the current state and input, often used to model simple language processing systems.

Function Morphemes: Morphemes that serve a grammatical function, such as prepositions, articles, and auxiliary verbs, as opposed to content morphemes.

Garden Path Sentences: Sentences that initially seem grammatically correct but become confusing or nonsensical once the reader reaches the end, due to temporary ambiguity in structure.

Generativity: The ability of a language to produce an infinite number of sentences and ideas from a finite set of elements (such as words or phonemes).

Global Aphasia: A severe form of aphasia that involves significant impairments in both language production and comprehension, often resulting from extensive damage to language areas in the brain.

Grammatical Morpheme: Morphemes that contribute to the grammatical structure of a sentence, such as tense markers or plural forms, typically function morphemes.

Kindergarten Path Sentence Effect: A psychological phenomenon where the complexity of sentence structure affects the ease with which children can comprehend a sentence.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD): A hypothetical mental mechanism, proposed by Noam Chomsky, that enables humans to acquire language naturally, suggesting an innate ability for language learning.

Lexical Access: The process of retrieving a word from the mental lexicon (a mental store of words) when it is needed for speech or writing.

Lexical Decision Task: An experimental task where participants are presented with a string of letters and must decide whether it forms a valid word or not, used to study lexical access and word recognition.

Markov Models: Mathematical models that describe systems in which the next state depends only on the current state, used in computational linguistics and speech recognition.

Mental Lexicon: The mental database of knowledge about words, including their meanings, pronunciations, and syntactic properties.

Modular: The concept that certain cognitive processes or abilities are distinct and operate independently of one another within the brain.

Morphemes: The smallest units of meaning in a language, which can be words or parts of words (e.g., prefixes, suffixes).

Morphology: The study of the structure and form of words, including how they are built from morphemes.

Mutual-Exclusivity Constraint: A cognitive principle that suggests children assume that each object has one name, leading them to avoid giving two different words to the same object.

Native Language Magnet Effect: A phenomenon in speech perception where infants' sensitivity to speech sounds becomes attuned to the phonetic categories of their native language.

Negative Evidence: Information about what is not grammatically correct or permissible in a language, often used by language learners to refine their linguistic rules.

Noun Phrase: A phrase centered around a noun, typically including a determiner and any modifiers (e.g., "the big red ball").

Orthographically: Refers to the written representation of language, including spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.

Overgeneralization: A language error where a child applies a rule too broadly, such as using "goed" instead of "went" or "mouses" instead of "mice."

Parse: To analyze a sentence’s syntactic structure, identifying the grammatical relationships between its components.

Phonemes: The smallest units of sound in a language that can distinguish words, such as the difference between /p/ and /b/.

Phonemic Restoration Effect: The phenomenon where listeners can "fill in" missing phonemes in speech based on context or surrounding sounds, making it seem as though the missing sound was actually heard.

Phonetic Categories: Distinct groups of sounds in a language that are perceived as similar by native speakers (e.g., the distinction between /s/ and /sh/ sounds).

Phonologically: Refers to the sounds of language, including how they are produced, perceived, and organized in the brain.

Phonology: The study of the sound system of a language, including how sounds are produced, perceived, and how they pattern together.

Phrase Structure: The hierarchical arrangement of words and phrases in a sentence, often depicted in tree diagrams in syntactic analysis.

Pidgin Language: A simplified form of language that develops as a means of communication between speakers of different native languages, typically with limited vocabulary and simplified grammar.

Poverty of the Stimulus: The theory that children are able to learn complex aspects of language (e.g., syntax) despite not being exposed to sufficient or explicit linguistic input, suggesting some innate mechanisms.

Pragmatics: The study of how language is used in context, including how speakers convey meaning beyond the literal interpretation (e.g., through tone, gestures, or cultural norms).

Productivity: The ability to create and understand an infinite number of new and novel sentences from a finite set of linguistic elements.

Prosody: The rhythm, intonation, and stress patterns of speech, which convey meaning and emotional tone beyond individual words.

Psycholinguistics: The study of the mental processes involved in language production, comprehension, and acquisition, integrating psychology and linguistics.

Recursion: The ability to embed structures within similar structures, allowing for the generation of complex sentences (e.g., "The dog that chased the cat ran fast").

Referential Communication Task: A task in experimental psychology where individuals must convey information clearly to others, often used to study how people communicate about objects, events, and concepts.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: A theory suggesting that language shapes thought and perception of the world, with different languages providing different frameworks for interpreting experiences.

Semantic Priming: A phenomenon in which the presentation of one word (the prime) makes it easier to recognize or process a related word (the target) due to shared semantic associations.

Semantics: The study of meaning in language, including how words, phrases, and sentences represent ideas, concepts, and relationships.

Shape Bias: The tendency of young children to generalize the names of objects based on their shape, rather than other features like color or texture.

Speech Errors: Mistakes made in speech production, such as slips of the tongue, where sounds or words are mistakenly swapped or omitted.

Speech Segmentation: The process of identifying the boundaries between words in continuous spoken language.

Spreading Activation Models: A theory in cognitive psychology that suggests activating one concept in memory can spread to related concepts, making them more accessible.

Surface Structures: The specific syntactic form of a sentence, as opposed to the underlying deep structure that represents its core meaning.

Syntax: The rules governing the structure of sentences, including word order, agreement, and hierarchical relationships.

Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon: A feeling of knowing the information but being temporarily unable to retrieve it, often experienced when trying to recall a word.

Transformational Grammar: A theory of syntax, developed by Noam Chomsky, that focuses on how deep structures can be transformed into different surface structures.

Tree Diagram: A graphical representation of syntactic structures, showing how words and phrases are hierarchically organized within a sentence.

Universal Grammar: The theory that all human languages share a common underlying structure, which is part of our innate biological endowment for language.

Usage-Based Linguistics: An approach to language acquisition and grammar that emphasizes the role of usage and experience in shaping linguistic patterns.

Verb Phrase: A phrase that consists of a verb and any accompanying objects, complements, or modifiers (e.g., "has eaten the cake").

Wernicke’s Aphasia: A type of aphasia associated with damage to Wernicke’s area in the brain, resulting in fluent but nonsensical speech and impaired comprehension.

Wernicke’s Area: A region in the left temporal lobe involved in language comprehension, particularly in understanding spoken and written language.

Whole-Object Constraint: A principle in early language development suggesting that children assume a new word refers to a whole object rather than its parts or properties.

Williams Syndrome: A rare genetic disorder characterized by cognitive impairments, especially in spatial reasoning, but with relatively strong language abilities, often resulting in highly social personalities.

Word Frequency Effect: The phenomenon where people respond more quickly and accurately to high-frequency words than to low-frequency words in tasks like word recognition or lexical decision.