Chapter 11: Language Flashcards
(19 cards)
Elements of a Language
Feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences
Comprehension
Understanding, written, and spoken language
Production
The physical and mental processes necessary to create spoken and written language
Representation
How language is represented in the brain
Acquisition
How do people learn both first and second languages
Hierarchical
Composed of small units that can be combined to make larger units
Productive (Generativity)
A finite number of units that can be used to create an infinite number of utterances and meanings
Dynamic
Language is passed from one user to the next and evolves to meet the needs of its users
Symbolic
No relationship exists between a sound or an image and its meaning
Displacement
Language can be used to communicate ideas about things that are not immediately present
Phone
- Sounds that do not influence meaning
- Not a unit of speech
Phoneme
- Sounds used to produce letters
- Smallest unit of sound that influences meaning of a word
- Number varies from language to language
Morpheme
Smallest unit of language that has meaning
Example: Bed, Truck, Table. Then Bedrooms, Trucks, Tabled
Lexicon
A person’s knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words
Syntax
The set of rules that determines what words can be placed in which order
Top-Down Processing
Processing that involves a person’s knowledge or expectations. Also joined with knowledge based processing
Context Effect (Marslen-Wilson, 1990)
Words that are expected read faster
Lexical Ambiguity
Words that have more than one meaning slow us down
Word Frequency Effect
The phenomenon of faster reading tie for high-frequency words than for low-frequency words
