Language Flashcards

1
Q

What are linguistics?

A

The study of language structure, variation and change
e.g. Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics

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2
Q

What are psycholiguistics?

A

The psychology of our language as it interacts with the human mind. Perception (speech, reading) and production (speaking, writing, signing)

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3
Q

How does linguistics work?

A
  • From elementary sounds (e.g., phonemes) to words (e.g., morphology)
  • Then combination of words (e.g., syntax)
  • Then meanings (semantics) and beyond (pragmatics)
  • Various types/levels of ambiguity
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4
Q

What is Iconicity?

A

resemblance between form and meaning

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5
Q

What is systematicity?

A

any statistical regularity between phonological structure and meaning

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6
Q

What are the two ways to represent sound patterns in speech (Phonology)?

A

Phonemes and phonetics

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7
Q

What are phonemes?

A

smallest unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another
e.g. lips, slip, spill, pills, and lisp comprise the “same sounds” in different orders

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8
Q

What are phonetics?

A

the physical properties of speech sounds and how they are produced and perceived in different contexts

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9
Q

What is prosody?

A

the tune and rhythm of speech

  • Speech properties typically at a level above that of the individual phoneme/segment (i.e., syllables) and in sequences of words (phrases).
  • At the phonetic level, prosody is characterised by: vocal pitch (fundamental frequency), loudness (acoustic intensity) & rhythm (phoneme and syllable duration) ——– Conveys attitude, emotion, sarcasm, etc
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10
Q

What is morphology?

A

word structure and formation

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11
Q

What are the types of morphology?

A

The “free” morpheme
“Bound” morpheme

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12
Q

What is The “free” morpheme?

A

comprises one meaning.
- It can stand alone as a single word.

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13
Q

What is The “Bound” morpheme?

A

can be derivational or inflectional
· Derivational morphemes can be prefixes and suffixes, e.g. “re-” charge “-able”
· Inflectional morphemes are suffixes, e.g., plural “-s” and regular past tense “-ed”

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14
Q

What is syntax?

A

The system of rules specifying how words are combined in sentences

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15
Q

is the english rule for syntax?

A

Subject-Verb-Object

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16
Q

What are semantics?

A

How word and sentence level meanings are expressed in languages
- Influenced by morphology, syntax and phonology
- Monosemy refers to a word form that has only one meaning (or sense)

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17
Q

What is lexical ambiguity in semantics?

A

○ A homonymis associated with two or more unrelated senses, e.g., “coach” = “bus” or “sports instructor”
○ Polysemy refers to a single word form being associated with two or several related senses, e.g., “the mouth of the river” (a metaphorical relationship)
○ A homophoneis a word that is pronounced similarly to another word but differs in meaning, e.g., “flower” and “flour”

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18
Q

What is pragmatics?

A

How context and other information contribute to meaning
○ Explains how language users can overcome apparent ambiguity
○ Literal versus figurative meanings

19
Q

What is speech perception?

A

Most important form of auditory perception for humans
- So it is both bottom-up and top-down (flexibly dynamic and interactive)

20
Q

How does speech perception work?

A

it is incremental - processing (e.g., semantic, syntactic) occurs while a word is being attended to
it is predictive - listeners devote resources during sentence processing to predicting upcoming words or phrases
Processing stages - Select the relevant speech signal;
○ Decoding (extracting either phonemes, allophones or syllables)
○ Segmentation (word recognition/lexical retrieval)
○ Interpretation (extract/reconstruct meaning)
○ Integrate (with previous speech to construct overall message)

21
Q

What are problems with speech perception?

A
  • It’s noisy, particularly under adverse conditions, making speech segmentation difficult (where does one word end and the next begin if there are no pauses between words?)
  • There is co-articulation: pronunciation of a phoneme depends on the preceding and following phonemes.
  • requires rapid processing
22
Q

What are helpful cues for speech perception?

A
  • Lip reading
  • Sentence context
    ○ Influences phoneme perception and so rapidly influences spoken word perception
  • Prosody
    ○ Intonation helps to direct attention to the potentially most informative parts of speech
23
Q

What processing is involved in reading?

A

○ orthography (the spelling of words);
○ phonology (the sound of words);
○ semantics (word meaning);
○ syntax;
○ higher-level discourse integration.

24
Q

What processing is involded in reading?

A

○ orthography (the spelling of words);
○ phonology (the sound of words);
○ semantics (word meaning);
○ syntax;
○ higher-level discourse integration.

25
Q

How are eye movements used in reading?

A

Most text information we process relates to the word we are currently fixated on

26
Q

What does the automatic reading of words aid?

A

letter identification (orthographic processing)

27
Q

What is the word superiortity effect?

A

A top-down process from the word to letter level

28
Q

What is phonological processing in reading?

A
  • Debate about whether it is essential or just a by-product of reading (i.e., epiphenomenal)
  • Word meaning can be accessed without access to phonology first, unlike speech perception
29
Q

What are the effects of phonological processing in reading?

A
  • Homophone effects (“Is it a flower? ROWS” elicits more errors than “Is it a flower? ROBS”)
  • Phonological neighbourhood effects -number of words that sound similar to a given word
  • Phonological priming effects -words are processed faster when preceded by masked phonologically identical non-word primes than by unrelated primes (e.g., klip-CLIP).
30
Q

What is the role of working memory in text reading?

A

Individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity (the ability to maintain and manipulate information concurrently) are moderately correlated with reading comprehension
- this effect is indirect rather than direct

31
Q

What is the role of inferential processing in text reading?

A

Readers with superior reading skills (including those with high working memory capacity) draw more inferences than other readers

32
Q

What are the kinds of speech errors?

A

Units
Mechanisms
Spoonerisms
Malapropisms
Speech errors exhibit a lexical bias effect
A tip-of-the-tongue (TOT)

33
Q

What is a unit speech error?

A
  • phrases, words (e.g. saying “pass the pepper” instead of “pass the salt”),
  • morphemes, phonemes (e.g. saying “flock of bats” instead of “block of flats”)
  • features (e.g. saying “turn the knop” instead of “knob”)
34
Q

What are mechanisms of speech error?

A
  • Anticipations (e.g. saying “the mirst of May” instead of “the first”)
  • Perseverations (e.g. saying “God rest re merry gentleman” instead of “God rest ye”)
  • Exchanges (e.g. “Guess whose mind came to name?” instead of “name came to mind”)
  • Substitutions (“Get me a fork” instead of knife)
  • Blends (saying “chung” for “children” and “young”).
35
Q

What are spoonerisms of speech error?

A

are exchange errors involving the initial consonants of words
- You have hissed my mystery lecture!

36
Q

What are Malapropisms of speech error?

A

are phonological word substitutions

37
Q

What is a tip-of-the-tongue-state and how is it a speech error?

A

is a noticeable temporary failure to speak, where the word can take considerable time to be produced, if at all. In a TOT state, “you know you know” the word, but cannot access the phonology.

38
Q

What is verbal self-monitoring?

A
  • The set of processes speakers use to inspect their own speech to prevent errors and to intervene when trouble arises
  • Speakers are able to detect and rapidly correct their own speech errors
  • We monitor both their inner and their overt speech
39
Q

What are verbal self-monitoring accounts?

A

The perceptual loop model
The forward model

40
Q

What is the Picture-word interference paradigm?

A

Semantically-related distractor words slow naming compared to an unrelated word = semantic interference effect
Phonologically-related distractor words facilitate naming compared to an unrelated word = phonological facilitation effect

41
Q

What is the Continuous naming paradigm?

A
  • Each additional presentation of an object from the same semantic category results in a ~30 msslowing of naming latencies = semantic interference effect
42
Q

What is syntactic priming in sentence production (speech planning)?

A
  • People are more likely to use a particular syntactic structure if that structure has recently been employed
  • Syntactic (or structural) priming is the facilitation of processing that occurs when a sentence has the same syntactic form as a preceding sentence
43
Q

What kind of process is syntactic priming in sentence production (speech planning)?

A

An automatic, implicit process;
- Effect occurs regardless of lexical overlap
- More efficient than
- generating novel structures

44
Q

What is the role of working memory in speech planning?

A

A concurrent verbal working memory (WM) task does not affect subject-verb-object sentence planning at the abstract–lexical level
○ Involvement of WM may depend on the complexity of the phrasal structure to be parsed
○ WM effects on production are more limited than those on comprehension