Language Lecture Flashcards
(31 cards)
What is psycholinguistic?
A sub discipline that deals with psychology of language, combining cognitive psychology and linguistics
What does naming mean?
Assign names to objects ideas and concepts for identification
What does displacement mean in linguistics?
can talk about things other than the present moment
What does productivity mean in linguistics?
Inherently novel activity, generate sentences rather than repeat
Is language a species specific human quality?
Non humans are unable to learn human language, humans have the ability to perceive human speech and to learn language without being taught
How is the brain specialised for processing language?
In the left hemisphere - brocas and wernicke area, sensory motor areas for speech production and comprehension
What is language?
A collection of symbols and rules which allow us to create an infinite set of well-formed sentences
What is grammar of language?
A finite set of rules to generate sentences
What are phonological rules?
Rules that describe the sound structure of a language
What are phonemes?
The most basic units of sound in a language
What are morphological rules?
Rules that describe how words can be formed by combining 1 or more morphemes
What are syntactic rules?
Rules that specify how wards are put together to form phrases and sentences
What are semantic rules?
Rules that specify meanings of individuals morphemes
What are pragmatic rules?
Rules that specify the social interactions regarding language
What is the initial step of understanding language?
Speech perception. The perception of the sequence of phonemes and how they are organised into syllables and words
Why is speech perception a complex process?
Variability in acoustic signal including different instances of a particular phoneme
Examples of obvious sources of variability
Extraneous noises, different speakers, different speaking rates
Examples of non-obvious sources of variability
Context conditioned variation in phonemes - a result of co articulation
What is a segmentation problem?
A problem that occurs where patterns of sound silence do not regularly mark word boundaries
How do you overcome speech variability?
Categorical perception of phonemes, a perceptual predisposition that is modified by early experience
What is mental lexicon?
The mental dictionary of words and their meanings
What is a morpheme?
The smallest unit of language that has meaning
What is parsing?
The process of figuring out how words should be grouped together to determine the phrase structure of a sentence
Why is parsing important?
Because the phrase structure provides a guide to meaning relations in a sentence
