language
auditory/speech based capacity and written capacity
psycholinguistics
studying the use of language
phonemes
smallest unit of sound in a language
co-articulation
everytime you say a phoneme it’s different depending upon what’s before and after
morphemes
smallest units of meaning in a language
- not every language has words but every language has morphemes
semantics
word or sentence meaning
- combination of morphemes
syntax
rules for combining words in language
pragmatics
how language is used socially
discourse
anything that is a bigger unit of language than a sentence (lecture, stories, email, etc)
language perception and comprehension
perception and comprehension are not synonymous
- context and processing make differences
verbal transformation effect
identically repeated auditory stimulus will yield changes in perception over time (can really only happen with an auditory loop)
- cognitive processes assume that there must be different meaning/sounds so we hear different things
accented speech
takes a bit to adjust and understand accents we aren’t used to
polysemy
more than one meaning
ambiguity
more than one meaning in the context being used
syntactic ambiguity
ability to move connections in sentence around to find more meaning
phonemic restoration effect
when you don’t hear a particular sound at all but restoring the phoneme and hearing it anyways
lexical ambiguity
when word in context can mean more than one thing
lexical decision
is it a word?
comprehension in discourse
speakers are not good w/ coherence
local coherence
sentence by sentence coherence
- flow of overall conversation
global coherence
understanding the overall content
language production stages
1st: conceptualize what you want to say (pre-language)
2nd: formulate a linguistic plan (come up w/ words and phrases you want to express)
3rd: articulate (includes writing)
4th: monitoring (not always agreed upon, but catching errors and making sure it fits plan)
speech errors/slips of the tongue
messing up articulation of the plan through cognitive mechanisms
malapropism
using wrong word and not knowing its the wrong word
- different than a speech error