Language

Question 1

What are linguistics?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

What are psycholiguistics?

Answer 2

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

Question 3

How does linguistics work?

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

What is Iconicity?

Answer 4

resemblance between form and meaning

Question 5

What is systematicity?

Answer 5

any statistical regularity between phonological structure and meaning

Question 6

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

Answer 6

Phonemes and phonetics

Question 7

What are phonemes?

Answer 7

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

Question 8

What are phonetics?

Answer 8

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

Question 9

What is prosody?

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What is morphology?

Answer 10

word structure and formation

Question 11

What are the types of morphology?

Answer 11

The “free” morpheme
“Bound” morpheme

Question 12

What is The “free” morpheme?

Answer 12

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

Question 13

What is The “Bound” morpheme?

Answer 13

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”

Question 14

What is syntax?

Answer 14

The system of rules specifying how words are combined in sentences

Question 15

is the english rule for syntax?

Answer 15

Subject-Verb-Object

Question 16

What are semantics?

Answer 16

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)

Question 17

What is lexical ambiguity in semantics?

Answer 17

○ 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”

Question 18

What is pragmatics?

Answer 18

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

Question 19

What is speech perception?

Answer 19

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

Question 20

How does speech perception work?

Answer 20

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)

Question 21

What are problems with speech perception?

Answer 21

• 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

Question 22

What are helpful cues for speech perception?

Answer 22

• 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

Question 23

What processing is involved in reading?

Answer 23

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

Question 24

What processing is involded in reading?

Answer 24

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

Question 25

How are eye movements used in reading?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

What does the automatic reading of words aid?

Answer 26

letter identification (orthographic processing)

Question 27

What is the word superiortity effect?

Answer 27

A top-down process from the word to letter level

Question 28

What is phonological processing in reading?

Answer 28

- 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

Question 29

What are the effects of phonological processing in reading?

Answer 29

- 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).

Question 30

What is the role of working memory in text reading?

Answer 30

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

Question 31

What is the role of inferential processing in text reading?

Answer 31

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

Question 32

What are the kinds of speech errors?

Answer 32

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

Question 33

What is a unit speech error?

Answer 33

- 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”)

Question 34

What are mechanisms of speech error?

Answer 34

- 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”).

Question 35

What are spoonerisms of speech error?

Answer 35

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

Question 36

What are Malapropisms of speech error?

Answer 36

are phonological word substitutions

Question 37

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

Answer 37

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.

Question 38

What is verbal self-monitoring?

Answer 38

- 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

Question 39

What are verbal self-monitoring accounts?

Answer 39

The perceptual loop model The forward model

Question 40

What is the Picture-word interference paradigm?

Answer 40

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

Question 41

What is the Continuous naming paradigm?

Answer 41

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

Question 42

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

Answer 42

- 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

Question 43

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

Answer 43

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

Question 44

What is the role of working memory in speech planning?

Answer 44

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