PSYCH CHAP 10 Flashcards
(27 cards)
American Sign Language (ASL)
The manual-visual language used by most deaf persons in the United States.
aphasia
Any of a number of linguistic disorders caused by injury to or malformation of the brain. See also fluent aphasia, nonfluent aphasia.
basic level
A concept at some accessible, middling degree of abstractness or inclusiveness (e.g., dog, spoon). See also subordinates, superordinates.
case marker
A word or affix that indicates the semantic role played by some noun phrase in a sentence. English case marks pronouns (e.g., he versus him) but usually marks semantic roles by word order, e.g., the first noun phrase in simple sentences usually plays the actor role. Many languages case mark all noun phrases and thus word order may be quite free in these languages.
content morpheme
A morpheme that carries the main semantic and referential content of a sentence. In English content morphemes are usually nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs. See also function morpheme.
crib bilingual
A prelinguistic infant who is exposed to two or more languages in the home environment.
definitional theory of word meaning
The theory that mental representations of word meanings consist of a necessary and sufficient set of semantic features. The representation of apple, for example, might be [round], [edible], [sweet], [red], [juicy].
family resemblance structure
An overlapping set of semantic features shared by members of a category, such that no members of the category need to have all of the features but all members have at least one of them.
function morpheme
A morpheme that, while adding such content as time, mode, individuation, and evidentiality, also serves a grammatical purpose (e.g., the suffixes ?s and ?er, or the connecting words and or if). See also content morpheme.
garden path
A premature, false syntactic analysis of a sentence as it is being heard or read, which must be mentally revised when later information within the sentence falsifies the initial interpretation, as in, e.g., Put the ball on the floor into the box.
morpheme
The smallest significant unit of meaning in a word (e.g., the word boys has two morphemes, boy and -s).
phoneme
The smallest significant unit of sound in a language. Alphabetic characters roughly correspond to phonemes (e.g., apt, tap, and pat are all made up of the same phonemes).
phrase structure description
A tree diagram or labeled bracketing that shows the hierarchical structure of a sentence.
predicate verb phrase
The verb phrase immediately descending from the root of the sentence tree. In simple English sentences, this verb phrase usually expresses the action or state of the agent or actor.
proposition
(1) A statement relating a subject and a claim about that subject. (2) A predicate-argument structure. In a sentence, the verb is the predicated act or state and the noun phrases are its arguments, playing various semantic roles.
prototype
The typical or most familiar example of a category (e.g., a robin is a prototypical bird for many Americans but an auk might be the prototype for Laplanders). See also prototype theory.
prototype theory
A theory in which concepts and word meanings are formed around average or typical values. Some prototype theories comprise feature representations, but without the necessary and sufficient conditions of definitional theory, but some are exemplar representations. In both cases, centrality in the category is measured by closeness to an ideal or average. See also prototype.
rules of syntax (or grammar)
The regular principles governing how words can be assembled into sentences.
semantic feature
A basic semantic category or concept that cannot be decomposed into smaller or less inclusive categories. According to several strict theories (e.g., Hume, 1739), the basic features are all sensory-perceptual.
semantic role
The part that each phrase plays in the “who did what to whom” drama described by a sentence. One word takes the role of being the cause of the action, another, its effect, and so on.
sensitive period
An early period during the development of an organism when it is particularly responsive to environmental stimulation. Outside of this period, the same environmental events have less impact and may yield imperfect learning even after lengthy exposure and practice.
Specific Language Impairment
(SLI) A syndrome of unknown etiology in which the course of development of a first language is unusually protracted despite otherwise normally developing cognitive functions. The language problems may eventually diminish or disappear but sometimes persist throughout life.
subject noun phrase
The noun phrase immediately descending from the root of the sentence tree. In simple English sentences, this noun phrase usually plays the semantic role of actor or agent of the action.
subordinates
Concepts that are less abstract or more particular than basiclevel concepts (e.g., poodle, soup spoon). See also basic level, superordinates.
