Language

Question 1

Language

Answer 1

A necessary function that allows humans to think and behave in complex social ways

Question 2

Is Language Unique to Humans?

Answer 2

Other animals have forms of communication but they lack productivity. So Yes, Human language is unique.

Question 3

How is Animal Communication Limited?

Answer 3

Quantity (restricted topics), Quality (can’t discuss abstract), Structure (no grammar). Lack productivity.

Question 4

Productivity

Answer 4

The ability to combine words in infinite ways. Animals lack this.

Question 5

Nurture/Behaviourist on Language Acquisition

Answer 5

Language is acquired through the same mechanisms as learning - Trial and Error.

Question 6

Naturists on Language Acquisition

Answer 6

We are born with innate capacity to learn language.

Question 7

Universal Grammar Concept

Answer 7

Humans have basic scaffolding for syntax, but specific details need to be learned through experience.

Question 8

FOXP2 Gene

Answer 8

A gene that is important in human language development.

Question 9

Developmental Verbal Dyspraxia

Answer 9

Affects the ability to pronounce syllables and words.

Question 10

Poverty of the Stimulus

Answer 10

The linguistic input children receive is too limited for them to fully learn the complex grammar of a language. Suggests that children have an innate biological capacity for language.

Question 11

Child-Directed Speech (CDS)

Answer 11

Involves Mothereses (sing-song cadence, long vowels, repetition).

Question 12

Head-Turn Task

Answer 12

Babies are conditioned to turn their heads when they hear a change in speech sound.

Question 13

3 Basic Aspects of Language Comprehension

Answer 13

Phonological (sound), Lexical (Words), Parsing (Full sentences).

Question 14

Phoneme

Answer 14

Smallest unit of speech that distinguish one word from another.

Question 15

Phonological Rules

Answer 15

How to combine phoneme to form words.

Question 16

Morphemes

Answer 16

Smallest meaningful units of language.

Question 17

Content Morphemes

Answer 17

Things or events (dog, jump)

Question 18

Function Morphemes

Answer 18

Grammatical function (and, or, re, s)

Question 19

Morphological Rules

Answer 19

How to combine morpheme to form words.

Question 20

Syntactical Rules

Answer 20

How words can be combined to form phrases and sentence.

Question 21

Phonic Properties

Answer 21

The actual sounds the speaker is making.

Question 22

Phonemic Restoration Effect

Answer 22

Our brain ability to fill in the blanks when missing words.

Question 23

Lip Reading

Answer 23

An auxiliary speech processing mechanisms both when sound is an is not available.

Question 24

McGurk Effect

Answer 24

Occurs when we view visual articulations of a phoneme while hearing audiotory signals from a different phoneme.

Question 25

Speech Segmentation

Answer 25

Figuring out where one morpheme begins and the other ends.

Question 26

Lexical Ambiguity

Answer 26

Lexical processing can be difficult since words often have multiple meanings.

Question 27

Homophones

Answer 27

Words that sound the same but mean different things.

Question 28

Homographs

Answer 28

Words that are spelled the same but have multiple meaning.

Question 29

Lexical Decision Task

Answer 29

Participants decide if string of letters represents a real word or not.

Question 30

Parsing

Answer 30

Breaking up a sentence into its constituent parts to determine meaning.

Question 31

Syntax-First Approach

Answer 31

Parsing of a sentence is first derived based on principles of grammar alone, regardless of the meaning of the words.

Question 32

Prosody

Answer 32

A speakers pattern of stress and intonation.

Question 33

Discourse Processing

Answer 33

The ability to understand language that is at least several sentences long.

Question 34

Anaphoric Inference

Answer 34

A guess about which word in a first sentence (antecedent) is being referred to by another word (anaphor).

Question 35

Causal Inference

Answer 35

The assumption that something mentioned at one stage in a sequence leads to something later one.

Question 36

Necessary Inference

Answer 36

The only way to make sense of certain phrases is based on referring to previous information.

Question 37

Elaborative Inference

Answer 37

Information is inferred from the text even though it is not necessary to understand the text itself.

Question 38

Online Processing

Answer 38

Inference actively being generated while people are listening to or reading a text.

Question 39

Offline Processing

Answer 39

Inference taking place in memory after initial encoding.

Question 40

Instrumental Interference

Answer 40

The instrument or tool that is likely to be used for a task in inferred even though it is not vital to text understanding.

Question 41

Existing Knowledge

Answer 41

The information people use to make inferences often comes from existing knowledge.

Question 42

Arcuate Fasciculus

Answer 42

An extensive band of fibres deep in the brain that connect Wernicke and Broca directly.

Question 43

Hemispheric Specialization

Answer 43

Language production mainly occur in the left hemisphere, but the right hemisphere seems to be important for higher-order language processing.

Question 44

Linguistic Relativity

Answer 44

The specific language we speak determines the kinds of thought we can and do have (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)

Question 45

Linguistic Universalists

Answer 45

Differences among languages are fairly superficial and tend to express the same basic ideas in different ways.