MODULE 6

• Language


  is the use of an organized means of combining words in order to communicate with those around us. It also makes it possible to think about things and processes we currently cannot see, hear, feel, touch, or smell.
• Communication encompasses other aspects—nonverbal communication, such as gestures or facial expressions, can be used to embellish or to indicate. Glances may serve many purposes. For example, sometimes they are deadly, other times, seductive. Communication can also include touches, such as handshakes, hits, and hugs. These are only a few of the means by which we can communicate.
• Psycholinguistics is the psychology of our language as it interacts with the human mind. It considers both production and comprehension of language (Gernsbacher & Kaschak, 2003a, 2003b; Wheeldon, Meyer, & Smith, 2003).
• Linguistics


  The study of language structure and change.
• Neurolinguistics


  The study of the relationships among the brain, cognition, and language.
• Sociolinguistics


  The study of the relationship between social behavior and language.
• Computational linguistics and psycholinguistics


  The study of language via computational methods.
• Chomsky's theory of language acquisition argues that human brain structures naturally allow for the capacity to learn and use languages. Chomsky believed that rules for language acquisition are innate (inborn) and strengthen naturally as humans grow and develop.
• A phoneme is the smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance in a given language from another.
• Phonetics is the study of how to produce or combine speech sounds or to represent them with written symbols (Roca, 2003a).
• A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning within a particular language.
• Content morphemes are the words that convey the bulk of the meaning of a language.
• Function morphemes add detail and nuance to the meaning of the content morphemes or help the content morphemes.
• Semantics is the study of meaning in a language fit the grammatical context.
• The lexicon is the entire set of morphemes in a given language or in a given person’s linguistic repertoire.
• Syntax refers to the way in which we put words together to form sentences. It plays a major role in our understanding of language.
• Phonetic Refinement Theory says that we start with an analysis of auditory sensations and shift to higher-level processing.
• According to the 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. According to this theory, speech perception is highly interactive.
• The Word-Superiority Effect, letters are read more easily when they are embedded in words than when they are presented either in isolation or with letters that do not form words. This effect is sometimes called the Reicher-Wheeler effect, named for two researchers who did early investigations of this effect (Reicher, 1969; Wheeler, 1970).
• Sentence-Superiority Effect -the observed superior identification of a post-cued word in a briefly presented sequence of words when the sequence is syntactically correct.
• Neurolinguistics is the discipline that examines how the brain processes language (Treiman et al., 2003). Research in this area has become increasingly active in recent years, and it demonstrates that the neurological basis of language is impressively complex.
• Aphasia is a language disorder that makes it hard for you to read, write, and say what you mean to say. Sometimes it makes it hard to understand what other people are saying, too. Aphasia is not a disease. It's a symptom of damage to the parts of the brain that control language.
• Broca aphasia is a non-fluent aphasia in which the output of spontaneous speech is markedly diminished and there is a loss of normal grammatical structure. Specifically, small linking words, conjunctions, such as and, or, and but, and the use of prepositions are lost.
• Wernicke's aphasia or receptive aphasia is when someone is able to speak well and use long sentences, but what they say may not make sense. They may not know that what they're saying is wrong, so may get frustrated when people don't understand them. The Wernicke area is located in the posterior third of the upper temporal convolution of the left hemisphere of the brain
• The reading difficulties of people with dyslexia often relate to problems with the perceptual aspects of reading. Reading comprises two basic kinds of processes:

  (1) lexical processes, which include sequences of eye fixations and lexical access; and

  (2) comprehension processes.