Cognitive Psychology - Language

Question 1

A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas and experiences

Answer 1

Language

Question 2

The _______ nature of language means that is consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units

Answer 2

Hierarchical

Question 3

The ____ _____ nature of language means that components within language can be arranged in certain ways, but not in other ways

Answer 3

Rules - based

Question 4

A persons knowledge of what words mean, how they sound and how they are used in relation to other words (all of the words we know/ our “mental dictionary”)

Answer 4

Lexicon

Question 5

The meanings of words

Answer 5

Lexical semantics

Question 6

The frequency with which a word appears in a language

Answer 6

Word frequency

Question 7

We respond more rapidly to high frequency words than to low frequency words

Answer 7

Word frequency effect

Question 8

A task in which participants need to decide as quickly as possible whether strings of letters are words or non words

Answer 8

Lexical decision task

Question 9

The perception of individual words within a continuous flow of sentences, even though there are often no pauses between words

Answer 9

Speech segmentation

Question 10

When a word has more than one meaning- eg, a bug, can mean an insect, a listening device or a problem on a computer program

Answer 10

Lexical ambiguity

Question 11

Priming that occurs when a word is followed by another word with a similar meaning

Answer 11

Lexical priming

Question 12

The relative frequency of the meanings of ambiguous words

Answer 12

Meaning dominance

Question 13

The word “tin”, meaning a type of metal occurs more frequently than the word “tin” meaning a small container

Answer 13

Biased dominance

Question 14

The word “cast” can mean “members of a play” and “plaster cast”- and both meanings are equally likely when hearing the word “cast”

Answer 14

Balanced dominance

Question 15

The mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases.

Answer 15

Parsing

Question 16

A sentence that is temporarily ambiguous or confusing because it contains a word group which appears to be compatible with more than one structural analysis

Answer 16

Garden path sentence

Question 17

Model of parsing that states that as people read a sentence, their grouping of words into phrases is governed by a number of heuristics

Answer 17

Garden path model of parsing

Question 18

An approach to parsing where information in addition to syntax participates as a person reads or hears a sentence

Answer 18

Constraint based approach

Question 19

A technique which involves how information in a scene can influence how a sentence is processed

Answer 19

Visual world paradigm

Question 20

groups of words that contain a subject and a verb

Answer 20

clause

Question 21

a group of words that contains a subject and a verb and can form a complete sentence that makes sense on its own

Answer 21

main clause

Question 22

a clause used in the middle of another clause/or inside the main clause, to give the reader more information about a sentence

Answer 22

embedded clause

Question 23

a sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is also the subject in the embedded clause

Answer 23

subject relative construction

Question 24

a sentence construction in which the subject of the main clause is the object in the embedded clause

Answer 24

object-relative construction

Question 25

in language, the process by which readers create information that is not explicitly stated in the text

Answer 25

inference

Question 26

texts in which there is a story that progresses from one event to another

Answer 26

narrative

Question 27

an important property of a narrative, where the representation of the text in a persons mind creates clear relations between parts of the text and between parts of the text and the main topic of the story

Answer 27

coherence

Question 28

an inference that connects an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence

Answer 28

anaphoric inference

Question 29

an inference about tools or methods that occurs when reading text or listening to speech

Answer 29

instrument inference

Question 30

an inference that results in the conclusion that the events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occured in the previous clause or sentence

Answer 30

causal inference

Question 31

an approach to how we understand sentences that proposes that as people read or hear a story, they simulate the perceptual and motor characteristics of the objects and actions in the story

Answer 31

situation model

Question 32

in a conversation, a speak should construct sentences so that they contain both information that the listener already knows and information that the listener is hearing for the first time

Answer 32

given-new contract

Question 33

the mental knowledge and beliefs shared among two people - the sharing of information means that each person is accumulating knowledge about the topic at hand and accumulating information about what the other person knows

Answer 33

common ground

Question 34

a way of studying how common ground is established, using a task in which two people are exchanging information in conversation, when this information involves a reference - identifying something by naming or describing it

Answer 34

referential communication task

Question 35

the process of creating common ground results in _______ - synchronisation between two partners

Answer 35

entrainment

Question 36

a process by which people use similar grammatical constructions when having a conversation

Answer 36

syntactic coordination

Question 37

priming that occurs when hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the changes that a sentence will be produced with the same construction

Answer 37

syntactic priming