Psycholinguistics
An interdisciplinary field that examines how people use language to communicate ideas.
What is Psycholinguistics?
The observation that when processing language we do not wait until an entire sentence is spoken or read before making judgments about what it means.
Incremental Interpretation
The discipline that examines the underlying neurological structures and systems that support language and language related processes.
Neurolinguistics
brings the center of your retina into position over words you want to read.
Saccadic Eye Movement
The basic unit of spoken language.
What is a phoneme?
The fact that a single word can have multiple meanings.
Lexical Ambiguity
Aphasia
Refers to the number of letters and spaces that we perceive during a fixation.
Perceptual Span
The basic unit of meaning.
What is a morpheme?
Sentence structure that contains no punctuation.
Syntactically Ambiguous Sentences.
Characterized by an expressive-language deficit.
Broca's Aphasia
Refers to the fact that readers can access information about upcoming words even though they are fixated on a word to the left.
Parafoveal Preview
The study of how we create words by combining morphemes.
What is morphology?
This approach to language comprehension suggests that usually only processes part of a sentence.
The Good-Enough Approach
Characterized by an receptive-language deficit
Wernicke's Aphasia
Suggest that people can recognized a word visually, without paying attention to the sound of that word.
The Direct-Access Route
Refers to the grammatical rules that govern how we organize words into a sentence.
What is syntax?
_________ often provides readers or listeners with the ability to arrive at the correct interpretation of an ambiguity.
Context
Each hemisphere of the brain has somewhat different functions.
Lateralization
Suggests that people often translate visual stimuli into sound during reading.
The Indirect-Access Route