Section One, Lesson Five: Human Language

Question 1

human language

Answer 1

A structured symbol system (words/gestures) used to convey meaning and express thoughts/emotions/ideas.

Question 2

the hierarchical nature of language

Answer 2

Language is built in levels (phonemes → morphemes → words → phrases), with higher levels formed from lower ones.

Question 3

what supports the universal need to use language

Answer 3

Evidence across cultures shows language is fundamental for social interaction and maintaining relationships.

Question 4

psycholinguistics

Answer 4

Study of how language is processed in the mind (production, comprehension, acquisition).

Question 5

the lexicon

Answer 5

Your mental dictionary of all known words.

Question 6

semantics

Answer 6

The study of meaning in language.

Question 7

lexical semantics

Answer 7

Meaning of words and how word meanings relate to each other.

Question 8

word frequency

Answer 8

How often a word occurs in language.

Question 9

the word frequency effect

Answer 9

High-frequency words are processed faster/more efficiently than low-frequency words.

Question 10

what did Rayner & Duffy (1986) find about fixation duration

Answer 10

Reading time is influenced by word frequency; readers fixate longer on less common words.

Question 11

speech segmentation

Answer 11

Identifying word boundaries in continuous speech.

Question 12

why is speech segmentation hard (lack of silence)

Answer 12

Spoken language is continuous with few clear pauses between words.

Question 13

lexical ambiguity

Answer 13

Words with multiple meanings.

Question 14

lexical priming

Answer 14

Exposure to one word influences processing of related words.

Question 15

what did Tanenhaus investigate (general)

Answer 15

How context affects speed of accessing meanings of ambiguous words during comprehension.

Question 16

meaning dominance

Answer 16

The relative frequency/strength of a word’s meanings in memory.

Question 17

biased dominance

Answer 17

One meaning is much more common/dominant than others.

Question 18

balanced dominance

Answer 18

Two meanings are similarly common/dominant.

Question 19

syntax

Answer 19

Rules/principles governing sentence structure.

Question 20

parsing

Answer 20

Breaking a sentence into components to understand meaning.

Question 21

the garden path model of parsing

Answer 21

People initially choose the simplest/most likely structure; if wrong, they must reanalyze.

Question 22

heuristics

Answer 22

Mental shortcuts/rules of thumb that simplify decisions.

Question 23

the visual world paradigm

Answer 23

Psycholinguistics method tracking eye movements while listening to sentences to reveal real-time processing/parsing.

Question 24

what did Tanenhaus et al. (1995) show

Answer 24

Context influences online processing of ambiguous sentences (using eye tracking).

Question 25

prediction in sentence understanding

Answer 25

Anticipating upcoming words/phrases based on context and prior knowledge.

Question 26

making inferences

Answer 26

Deriving new info from existing knowledge while reading/listening.

Question 27

narrative (in inference context)

Answer 27

The structure/sequence of events in a story.

Question 28

coherence

Answer 28

Logical connections that make a narrative make sense.

Question 29

anaphoric inference

Answer 29

Linking pronouns/noun phrases to their antecedents (e.g., “she” → a named person earlier).

Question 30

instrument inference

Answer 30

Inferring tools/methods implied by a sentence (e.g., “He stirred the coffee” → probably used a spoon).

Question 31

a situation model

Answer 31

A mental representation of what’s happening in a narrative (who/what/where/why).

Question 32

a referential communication task

Answer 32

A task studying how speakers/listeners communicate to identify objects and build shared meaning.

Question 33

common ground

Answer 33

Shared knowledge/assumptions between speakers and listeners that helps communication.

Question 34

syntactic coordination

Answer 34

People align/reuse similar sentence structures during conversation.

Question 35

syntactic priming

Answer 35

Tendency to reuse a syntactic structure after hearing/using it recently.