LANGUAGE

• Language


  A system of communication in which thoughts are transmitted using sounds (as in speech and music) or symbols (as in written words and gestures)
• Communication


  The exchange of thoughts and feelings through language or non-verbal means (gestures, facial expressions, etc.)
• Psycholinguistics


  The study of the psychological processes involved in the use of language. It considers both production and comprehension of language.
• Areas of focus of psycholinguistics

  • Comprehension
  • Speech production
  • Representation
  • Acquisition
• Properties of language


  • Communicative
  • Arbitrariness
  • Regularly structured
  • Structured at multiple levels
  • Generativity
  • Dynamic
• Fundamental aspects of language

  • Encoding
  • Decoding
  • Verbal comprehension
  • Verbal fluency
• Components of words


  • Phonemes
  • Morpheme
  • Lexicon
• Formal elements of language


  • Phonology
  • Syntax
  • Semantics
• Speech perception


  The process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted, and understood
• Coarticulation


  The pronunciation of a sound in a word is affected by the sounds before and after
• Phonetic refinement theory


  • Starts with an analysis of auditory sensations and shifts to higher-level processing
  • Identify words based on successively paring down the possibilities for matches between each of the phonemes and the words we already know from memory
• TRACE model


  • Speech perception begins with three levels of feature detection: the level of acoustic features, the level of phonemes, and the level of words
• Word frequency effect


  We respond more rapidly to high-frequency words than to low-frequency words
• Lexical ambiguity


  Words can often have more than one meaning
• Categorical perception


  People more reliably distinguish physically different stimuli when the stimuli come from different categories than when they come from the same category
• Motor theory of speech perception


  • We use the movements of the speaker's vocal tract to perceive what he/she says
  • McGuck Effect - occurs when a person perceives that another's lip movements do not correspond to what that individual is saying
• Syntax


  The systematic way in which words can be combined and sequenced to make meaningful phrases and sentences
• Grammar


  • The study of language in terms of noticing regular patterns
  • Prescriptive grammar prescribes the "correct" ways in which to structure the use of written and spoken language
• Denotation


  The strict dictionary definition of a word
• Connotation


  An idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning
• Language acquisition by age

  • Prenatal: Responsiveness to human voice
  • First 6 months: Cooing
  • 12 months: Babbling
  • 1-3 years: Vocabulary, one-word utterances, two-word utterances, telegraphic speech
  • 3-4 years: Simple sentences
  • 4 years: Basic adult sentence structure
• Types of bilingualism


  • Balanced bilingualism
  • Additive bilingualism
  • Subtractive bilingualism
  • Simultaneous bilingualism
  • Sequential bilingualism
• Pidgin


  Created in situations when there is no common language between speakers. Does not have any native speakers, but just a second language to facilitate communication
• Creole


  An intermixture of two speech communities, a pidgin becomes the first language of later generations, ultimately displacing both the original languages
• Protolanguage


  Primitive or parent form of a language
• Dialect


  A form of the language that is spoken in a particular part of the country or by a particular group of people
• Slips of the tongue

  Inadvertent linguistic errors in what people say, may occur at any level of linguistic analysis
• Freudian slip


  Verbal slips that reflect unconscious processing and often indicate repressed emotions
• Kinds of slips


  • Anticipation
  • Perseveration
  • Substitution
  • Reversal/Transposition
  • Spoonerisms
  • Malapropism
  • Insertions of sounds or other linguistic elements
  • Deletions
• Reading


  Involves perception, language, memory, thinking, and intelligence
• Dyslexia


  A disorder that involves difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words (decoding)
• Processes impaired for people with dyslexia

  • Phonological awareness
  • Phonological reading
  • Phonological coding
  • Lexical access
• Phonological awareness


  Awareness of sound structure
• Assessing phonological awareness


  • Phoneme-deletion task
  • Phoneme counting
• Developmental Dyslexia


  Difficulty in reading that starts in childhood and typically continues throughout adulthood
• Acquired Dyslexia


  Typically caused by traumatic brain damage
• Orthographic


  Our ability to recognize letters
• Lexical Processes in Reading

  1. Fixations and Reading Speed

  2. Lexical Access
• Saccade


  Rapid sequential movements of the eye as they fixate on successive clumps of text
• Fixation


  The point where your eye movement slowed down during the reading process