Language intro

Question 1

Describe the relationship between language and thought.

Answer 1

Thought: the ability to have ideas and to infer new ideas from old ones
Language: the ability to encode those ideas into signals for communication to someone else

Question 2

Can thinking occur without language?

Answer 2

Yes - both evidence from animals and patients with global aphasia (inability to produce or understand language, but still able to solve logic problems)

Question 3

What are phonemes?

Answer 3

The smallest unit of sound that distinguishes words from each other, e.g., cat has 3: k-a-t

Question 4

What are morphemes?

Answer 4

The smallest meaningful unit in a language that cannot be broken into smaller parts (a word can be one or more morphemes combined, e.g. decode)

Question 5

What are prosody?

Answer 5

The rhythmic and intonational aspect of language.

Question 6

What are the McGurk effect?

Answer 6

• Cross-modal effect resulting from conflicting info coming from different sensory modalities, namely sight and hearing
• effect is stronger when the quality of auditory info is poor, and so visual info partially overides auditory info

Question 7

How are words stored?

Answer 7

As mental lexicons