Language
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Created by:
Alisonjean22 on November 8, 2011
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43 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Linguist | The scientific study of human language |
| Noam Chomsky | Psycholinguist, United States linguist whose theory of generative grammar redefined the field of linguistics (born 1928) |
| transformational grammar | language comes in groupings and they can be altered by moving them within the structure or by modifying them to express diffrerent meanings. |
| deep structure | an abstract syntactic representation of the sentence. |
| advantage of first mention | items mentioned first get first processing. |
| semanticity | language conveys meaning |
| arbitrariness | There is no inherent connection between the units used in a language and their meanings. |
| onomatopoeia | Word imitates the sound it represents |
| flexibility of symbols | because the connection between symbol and meaning is arbitrary, we can change those connections and invent new ones. |
| naming | assign names to all the objects in our environment, to all the feelings and emotions we experience, to all the ideas and concepts we conceive of. |
| displacement | the ability to talk about something other than the present moment. |
| productivity | language is a productive and inherently novel activity, that we generate utterances rather than repeat them. |
| cultural transmission | language is learned due to culture. |
| dance of the bees | genetic behavior by bees to communicate where food source is. |
| Von Frish | Discovered the genetic dance of the bees as a communication of where the food source is. |
| Washoe | First non-human taught American Sign Language |
| Gardner & Gardner | Taught washoe to communicate using ASL |
| KoKo | Taught sign language by penny patterson, displayed displacement when she communicated that she missed her kitten, "all ball" |
| Alex the African Gray Parrot | Subject of a 30 year experiment by Irene Pepperberg. Some researchers are skeptical of this study in that they believe Alex's language skills are a product of Operant Conditioning. |
| Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis | The hypothesis, credited to Whorf, that one's language determines or influences what one can think about. |
| Dani | The New Guinea tribe tested by Eleanor Rosch and found that colors were better remembered when they were focal colors as opposed to nonfocal colors. ie "really really red" is better remembered that "somewhat red" |
| Eleanor Rosch | Studied the Dani tribe of New Guinea using the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. |
| Phoneme | The basic sounds that compose a language. |
| Categorical Perception | all sounds falling within a set of boundaries are perceived as the same, despite physcial differences among them. |
| Voice-onset time | length of time between when air passes through lips and when vocal cords start vibrating |
| morpheme | in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix) |
| Problem of Invariance | variability in sounds |
| coarticulation | more than one sound is articulated at a time |
| Top-down/bottom-up processing | speech recognition is both data driven and conceptually driven. |
| motor theory of speech perception | people percieve language in part by comparing the sounds that they are hearing with how they would move their own vocal apparatus to make those sounds. |
| phonemic discrimination | you can be insensitive to differences of other languages if your own language doesn't make that distinction. ie Spanish speaking people have a hard time discrimination phonemes in ice and eyes. |
| Syntax | The arrangement of words as elements in a sentence to show their relationship to one another; or sentence structure. |
| Subject-Verb Agreement | every sentence must contain a subject and verb and they must agree in number. |
| grammar | complete set of rules that characterizes a language. |
| pyscholinguistics | The study of language behavior and processes. |
| rewrite rules | In a phrase structure grammar, the rules that specify the individual components of a phrase |
| surface structure | the actual form of a sentence |
| language acquisition device | Chomsky's concept of an innate, prewired mechanism in the brain that allows children to acquire language naturally. |
| Broca's Aphasia | Loss of function associated with damage to a specific area of the left frontal lobe, demonstrated by impairment in producing understandable speech. |
| Wenicke's Aphasia | can produce language and speech, cannnot comprehend language (damage to rear left temporal) |
| Conduction Aphasia | A disruption of language in which the person is unable to repeat what has just been heard. |
| Arcuate fasiculus | connects Broca's area to wernicke's -relationship between speech and language |
| anomia | A disruption of word finding or retrieval, caused by a brain disorder or injury. |
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