Intro to Language
This is the system of communication used by humans to convey thoughts, emotions, and ideas through symbols like words and gestures.
What is language?
This is the smallest unit of sound in a language that can distinguish words from each other.
What is a phoneme?
The mental process of grouping words into phrases to determine sentence meaning.
What is parsing?
When a word has multiple meanings, it leads to this type of ambiguity.
What is lexical ambiguity?
This theory suggests that comprehension involves the active construction of meaning based on linguistic and non-linguistic information.
What is the interactive activation model?
This aspect of language involves the study of sounds and their role in communication.
What is a phonology?
This theory suggests that humans are able to differentiate between speech sounds because they develop the ability to categorize these sounds as they grow.
What is categorical perception?
This refers to the basic structure of a sentence, including the subject, verb, and object.
What is syntactic structure?
Inferences that connect pronouns to previously mentioned subjects are known as this.
What are anaphoric inferences?
This hypothesis states that the meaning of a word is processed in context, considering both its current use and past experiences.
What is the contextualist approach?
The structure of language that governs the rules for word formation is known as this.
What is morphology?
This phenomenon occurs when listeners misinterpret speech sounds, often due to acoustic properties that overlap with other sounds.
What is phonemic restoration?
This term describes a type of sentence where the meaning depends on the way words are arranged in a syntactically correct order.
What is sentence structure ambiguity?
This type of processing involves using context and prior knowledge to interpret meaning.
What is top-down processing?
This theory proposes that humans understand language through a mental "map" of sentence structure and word meanings.
What is the transformational grammar theory?
This term refers to the set of rules that govern the structure of sentences in a particular language.
What is syntax?
This term refers to the ability to recognize spoken words despite various distortions such as accents or background noise.
What is speech perception?
This phenomenon occurs when readers or listeners misinterpret a sentence due to its syntactic structure.
What is a garden path sentence?
The ambiguity that occurs when a sentence structure allows for multiple possible meanings.
What is syntactic ambiguity?
According to this theory, comprehension happens by breaking down the meaning of a sentence into individual components, then reassembling them.
What is the modular approach to sentence comprehension?
These are the smallest units of meaning in a language, such as prefixes or root words.
What is morphemes?
This process refers to the gradual improvement in phoneme recognition as a listener becomes familiar with a speaker's voice and pronunciation.
What is speaker normalization?
When a sentence can have multiple possible interpretations due to its structure, it is called this.
What is syntactic ambiguity?
This is the term for the ability to understand the meaning of words, sentences, and entire texts.
What is language comprehension?
This theory suggests that different types of information are processed independently but may later interact during comprehension.
What is the garden path model?