Language (CH. 10)

Question 1

What is Psycholinguistics?

Answer 1

The study of the mental aspects of language, acquisition, production, comprehension, and representation

Question 2

What is a Sentence?

Answer 2

A coherent sequence of words

Question 3

What is a Phrase?

Answer 3

A group of words that serve a single grammatical function

Question 4

What is a Word?

Answer 4

A complete, discrete unit of meaning in a language

Question 5

What is a Morpheme?

Answer 5

The smallest language unit that carries meaning

Question 6

What is a Phoneme?

Answer 6

The smallest unit of sound that serves to distinguish between words in a language

Question 7

What is Manner of Production?

Answer 7

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]

Question 8

What is Voicing?

Answer 8

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”

Question 9

What is Place of Articulation?

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What is Speech Segmentation?

Answer 10

The process through which a stream of speech is “sliced” into its constituent words and, within words, into the constituent phonemes

Question 11

What is Coarticulation?

Answer 11

• Adjacent phonemes are blended
• Makes speech production faster and more fluent

Question 12

What is the Phonemic Restoration Effect?

Answer 12

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

Question 13

What is Categorical Perception?

Answer 13

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

Question 14

What is Generativity?

Answer 14

The capacity to create an essentially endless series of new combinations, all built from the same set of basic units

Question 15

What is Syntax?

Answer 15

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

Question 16

What is Generativity Through Syntax?

Answer 16

The way that we generate new sentence is through our use and understanding of the language’s syntax

Question 17

What are Phrase-Structure Rules

Answer 17

Constraints that govern what elements must be contained within a phrase and, in many languages, what the sequence of those elements must be

Question 18

What is Tree Structure?

Answer 18

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

Question 19

What are Prescriptive Rules?

Answer 19

Rules describing how things are supposed to be instead of how they are. Often called “normative rules”

Question 20

What are Descriptive Rules?

Answer 20

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

Question 21

What Does it Mean to Parse?

Answer 21

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

Question 22

What are Garden-Path Sentences?

Answer 22

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”

Question 23

Pollack Pickett (1964) Aids to Phoneme Perception

Answer 23

The more words that you are given in an audio object, the easier it is for you to correctly recall the first word of the trial sentence

Question 24

What are Semantics?

Answer 24

Aspects of language related to meaning

Question 25

What is Prosody?

Answer 25

The patterns of pauses and pitch changes that characterize speech production

Question 26

What is Pragmatic Language?

Answer 26

Beyond the conventional rules of language (e.g., specific words, morphemes, phrases, syntax, etc.), the ability to use language effectively in order to achieve a specific purpose (e.g., body language, context, inferences about listeners comprehension)

Question 27

What is Linguistic Nativism?

Answer 27

• First prominently suggested by Chomsky
• Not blank slates; possess universal grammar that provides foundation for language learning
• Learning simply requires universal grammar to be tuned to native language

Question 28

What is Poverty of Stimulus?

Answer 28

• Brown and Hanlon (1970)
• Parents reinforced semantic correctness, but not syntactic correctness
• No training other aspects of language like speech segmentation

Question 28

What is Linguistic Empiricism?

Answer 28

Language and grammar are only acquired using basic learning mechanisms (e.g., conditioning, etc.) following exposure to the language

Question 29

What is Broca’s Area?

Answer 29

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

Question 30

What is Non-fluent Aphasia?

Answer 30

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

Question 31

What is Wernicke’s Area?

Answer 31

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

Question 32

What is Fluent Aphasia?

Answer 32

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

Question 33

What is Specific-Language Impairment (SLI)?

Answer 33

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

Question 34

What is an Overregularization Error?

Answer 34

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.