2. Intro to Comprehension Flashcards
(19 cards)
What is language?
- an exchange of information
What is global aphasia?
- able to speak fluidly but problems accessing words and understanding others
What is mental representation for production?
- input
- activation: meaning within existing lexicon then quickly link to existing representations of sound
- output: speech, writing, gesture
How do the building blocks of language for comprehension differ to that for production?
- same but occur in opposite order
What are the three levels of ambiguity?
- in the speech stream: don’t know when a word ends and another starts
- at word level: words that sound the same/similar but have different meanings
- at the phoneme level: words that change the way they sound depending on their environment
What are homonyms?
- words that sound and are spelt the same
e.g the bank and a river bank
What are homophones?
- words that sound the same
e.g muscle and mussel
What are homographs?
- words that are spelt the same
e.g bow (tie) and bow (bend at waist)
How does ambiguity at the phoneme level occur?
- air is pushed up the vocal tract and hits the point in the mouth that form an obstruction resulting in different types of consonants
What is coarticulation?
- sounds become blurred/blended
What is categorical perception?
- ability to distinguish between sounds based on their voice onset time (VOT)
How is voice defined?
- the point at which vocal cord vibrations start relative to the release of a closure
Do different accents affect ambiguity?
yes
- range of sounds allowable for a single phoneme differs depending on the accent spoken
What is the invariance problem?
- there are many ways to pronounce phonemes: can’t be categorised in same way
- inability to define the acoustic properties
How does top-down processing disambiguate the ambiguity?
- fills in gaps
- activation of the existing lexical representations may help us understand words, dialects, foreign accents etc
How can lexical access differ?
- faster for words that are short and frequent
- slower for words with lots of neighbours (words that sound similar/differ by one phoneme) increasing competition
What is neighbour activation?
How does lexical decision tasks test lexical access?
- decide if word is a real word or not
- press key for a word or non-word
- speed assesses how activated it is
What is the priming paradigm?
- words that are semantically related allow other words to become active when presented
