Chapter 9

Question 1

Psycholinguistics

Answer 1

an interdisciplinary field that examines how people use language to communicate ideas

Question 2

Phoneme

Answer 2

basic unit of spoken language

Question 3

Morpheme

Answer 3

basic unit of meaning

Question 4

Morphology

Answer 4

the study of morphemes; examines how we create words by combining morphemes

Question 5

Syntax

Answer 5

the grammatical rules that govern how we organize words into sentences

Question 6

Grammar

Answer 6

encompases both morphology and syntax; it therefore examines both word structure and sentence structure

Question 7

Semantics

Answer 7

the area of psycholinguistics that examines the meanings of words and sentences

Question 8

Semantic memory

Answer 8

our organized knowledge about the world

Question 9

Pragmatics

Answer 9

our knowledge of the social rules that underlie language use; pragmatics takes into account the listener’s perspective

Question 10

Modular

Answer 10

people have a set of specific linguistic abilities that is separated from other cognitive processes, such as memory and decision making

Question 11

Surface structure

Answer 11

represented by the words that are actually spoken and written

Question 12

Deep structure

Answer 12

the underlying, more abstract meaning of a sentence

Question 13

Transformational rules

Answer 13

convert deep structure into a surface structure that they can speak or write

Question 14

Ambiguous sentences

Answer 14

when two sentences have identical surface structures, but very different deep structures; context usually helps us resolve these ambiguities

Question 15

Cognitive functional approach

Answer 15

emphasizes that the function of human language in everyday life is to communicate meaning to other individuals

Question 16

Nested structure

Answer 16

one phrase is embedded within another phrase (often leads to memory overload)

Question 17

Good-enough approach to language comprehension

Answer 17

we frequently process only part of a sentence and this strategy usually works well for us

Question 18

Neurolinguistics

Answer 18

the discipline that examines how the brain processes language

Question 19

Aphasia

Answer 19

difficulty communicating, caused by damage to speech areas of the brain

Question 20

Broca’s aphasia

Answer 20

primarily characterized by an expressive-language-deficit— or trouble producing language and may have some trouble with language comprehension

Question 21

Wernike’s area

Answer 21

typically produces serious difficulties understanding language

Question 22

Wernike’s aphasia

Answer 22

severe problems with language comprehension that they cannot understand basic instructions such as “point to the telephone”

Question 23

Lateralization

Answer 23

each hemisphere of the brain has somewhat different functions

Question 24

Language-localizer task

Answer 24

a new technique that compensates for the problem of individual differences

Question 25

Mirror system

Answer 25

a network of neurons in the brain’s motor cortex; these neurons are activated when you watch someone perform an action

Question 26

Dual-rout approach to reading

Answer 26

specifies that skilled readers employ both (1) a direct-access route and (2) and indirect-access route

Question 27

Direct-access route

Answer 27

you recognize this word directly through vision, without “sounding out” the words

Question 28

Indirect-access route

Answer 28

as soon as you see a word, you translate the ink marks on the page into some form of sound, before you can access a words and its meaning

Question 29

Whole word approach

Answer 29

argues that readers can directly connect the written word–as an entire unit– with the meaning that this word represents

Question 30

Phonics approach

Answer 30

states that readers recognize words by trying to pronounce the individual letters in the word. (sound-it-out)

Question 31

Whole language approach

Answer 31

reading instruction should emphasize meaning, and it should be enjoyable, to increase children’s enthusiasm about learning to read

Question 32

Discourse

Answer 32

interrelated units of language that are larger than a sentence

Question 33

Inferences

Answer 33

conclusions that go beyond the isolated phrase or sentence

Question 34

Theory of mind

Answer 34

in everyday life, we try to figure out the mental state of other people in our lives

Question 35

Metacognition

Answer 35

your knowledge about your cognitive processes, as well as your control of these cognitive processes

Question 36

Metacomprehension

Answer 36

refers to your thoughts about comprehension

Question 37

Latent semantic analysis (LSA)

Answer 37

an artificial intelligence program that can perform many fairly sophisticated language tasks