CH11: LANGUAGE

a system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences

One of the properties of human language is __________

the means that it consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units

the means that these components can be arranged in certain ways but not in other ways

two properties of language that makes it possible to create new and unique sentences

the need to communicate using language because it occurs wherever there are people

No matter what the culture or the particular language, children generally begin babbling at about

the first multiword utterances occur at about age

patients with brain damage led to the proposal that an area in the frontal lobe is responsible for the production of language

an area in the temporal lobe is responsible for comprehension

he proposed that language is learned through reinforcement. he is also the main proponent of behaviorism

he proposed that human language is coded in the genes, and disagreed with the behaviorist idea

the field concerned with the psychological study of language with the goal to discover the psychological processes by which humans acquire and process language

The four major concerns of psycholinguistics

This includes how people process language sounds; how they understand words, sentences, and stories expressed in writing, speech, or sign language; and how people have conversations with one another.

This includes how people group words together into phrases to create meaningful sentences and how they make connections between different parts of a story.

This includes the physical processes of speech production and the mental processes that occur as a person creates speech.

This includes not only how children learn language but also how people learn additional languages, either as children or later in life.

this is all of the words we know, which has also been called our “mental dictionary.”

This is the meaning of language. This is important for words, because each word has one or more meanings.

this is the meaning of words

The frequency with which a word appears in a language

refers to the fact that we respond more rapidly to high-frequency words than to low-frequency words

in which the task is to decide as quickly as possible whether strings of letters are words or nonwords; this is one way to illustrate processing differences between high- and low-frequency words

the perception of individual words even though there are often no pauses between words.

a situation where words can often have more than one meaning

is priming that involves the meaning of words; occurs when a word is followed by another word with a similar meaning

priming occurs when seeing a stimulus makes it easier to respond to that stimulus when it is presented again

basic principle of this is that the first presentation of a stimulus activates a representation of the stimulus, and a person can respond more rapidly if this activation is still present when the stimulus is presented again

the presence of this indicates whether two words have similar meanings in a person's mind.

lexical priming condition where a word is presented as a noun followed by a noun probe stimulus

lexical priming condition where a word is presented as a verb followed by a noun probe stimulus

he and his coworkers showed that people briefly access multiple meanings of ambiguous words before the effect of context takes over.

The relative frequency of the meanings of ambiguous words

in which one meaning occurs more often than the other

in which one meaning and other meaning are equally alike

the structure of a sentence; the structural characteristic of language

a process where meaning is created by the grouping of words into phrases

sentences which begin appearing to mean one thing but then end up meaning something else

Garden path sentences illustrate this because first one organization is adopted and then—when the error is realized—the person shifts to the correct organization.

approach proposed by Lynn Frazier to explain parsing, and garden path sentences; states that as people read a sentence, their grouping of words into phrases is governed by a number of processing mechanisms

a rule that can be applied rapidly to make a decision; a number of processing mechanisms governing the grouping of words into phrases

one of these syntax-based principles which states that when a person encounters a new word, the person’s parsing mechanism assumes that this word is part of the current phrase, so each new word is added to the current phrase for as long as possible

The idea that information in addition to syntax participates in processing as a person reads or hears a sentence

a technique which involves determining how information in a scene can influence how a sentence is processed; involves measuring eye movements as they saw objects on a table

information provided by the scene; participants take into account not only information provided by the syntactic \nstructure of the sentence but also this

The embedded clause is called embedded, because it is inside the main clause. the subject is both of both the main clause and the embedded clause

the senator is the subject of the main clause, as before, and is also replaced by who in the embedded clause, but is the object in this clause. The senator is the object because he is the target who was spotted.

they did an experiment that showed that the participants were making predictions as they were reading a sentence by measuring their eye movements.

determining what the text means by using our knowledge to go beyond the information provided by the text

the representation of the text in a person’s mind that creates clear relations between parts of the text and the main topic of the story.

connect objects or people in one sentence to objects or people in another sentence

An inference about tools or methods that occurs while reading text or listening to speech

in which you infer that the events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous sentence

as people read or hear a story, they create a _________ _____, which simulates the perceptual and motor (movement) characteristics of the objects and actions in a story

component of event-related potential (ERP) which is a negative response that occurs about 400 msec after a word is heard or read; the response is larger when a word in a sentence is unexpected

the most common form of language production

states that a speaker should construct sentences so that they include given and new information

information that the listener already known

information that the listener is hearing for the first time

the mental knowledge and beliefs shared among conversational parties

a task in which two people are exchanging information in a conversation, when this information involves reference

identifying something by naming or describing it

synchronization between the two partners; a result of creating common ground

an effect where we consider how conversational partners can end up coordinating their grammatical constructions

hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction

the ability to understand what others feel, think, or believe, and also the ability to interpret and react to the person’s gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other things that provide cues to meaning

each person in a conversation has to anticipate when it is appropriate to enter the conversation

the pattern of intonation and rhythm in spoken language

notes of a melody are organized around the note associated with the composition’s key

expectation is that a song that begins with the tonic will end on the tonic

a component of event-related potential (ERP) that is a positive response that occurs 600 msec after the onset of a word; it becomes larger in response to violations of syntax

difficulty in understanding sentences with complex syntax

a condition where patients who are born having problems with music perception have severe problems with tasks such as discriminating between simple melodies or recognizing common tunes.

Three major types of inference