Chapter 8 - Language

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

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

  3. 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.

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

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

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

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

  10. 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.

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

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. 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.

  15. 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.

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

  17. 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.

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

  19. 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.

  20. 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).

  21. 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.

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

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

  24. 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.

  25. 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.

  26. 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.

  27. 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.

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

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

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

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

  32. 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.

  33. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  40. 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.

  41. 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).

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

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

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

  45. 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.

  46. 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.

  47. 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).

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

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

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

  51. 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").

  52. 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.

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

  54. 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.

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

  56. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

  62. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

  68. 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.

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

  70. 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.

  71. 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.

  72. 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.

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