The Basics
This is the basic unit of spoken language, like the sounds of "a," "k," or "th"
What is a phoneme?
In the 1960s, Chomsky proposed we are born with these kinds of language skills
What are innate language skills?
Sentences with these (like "not," "reject," "no") require more processing time than affirmative sentences
What are negatives?
This interdisciplinary field examines how the brain processes language
What is neurolinguistics?
This approach to reading involves recognizing words directly through vision without sounding them out
What is the direct access route?
This is the basic unit of meaning in language, such as the prefix "re-"
What is a morpheme?
According to Chomsky, language is this type of system, meaning linguistic abilities are separate from other cognitive abilities
What is modular?
"I designed an experiment" is easier to understand than "The experiment was designed by me" because it uses this voice
What is active voice?
Damage to this area in the front of the brain results in hesitant speech with isolated words and short phrases
What is Broca's area?
This approach to reading involves translating words into sound before deciding their meaning
What is the indirect access route?
This term examines how we create words by combining morphemes
What is morphology?
The appearance of a sentence is called this type of structure
What is surface structure?
This type of structure embeds one phrase within another, making sentences difficult to understand
What is nested structure?
Damage to this area in the back of the brain causes trouble understanding speech, even simple instructions
What is Wernicke's area?
This reading instruction approach emphasizes that readers should recognize the written word as a whole with its meaning
What is the whole-word approach?
These are the grammatical rules that govern how we organize words into sentences
What is syntax?
The underlying meaning of a sentence is called this type of structure
What is deep structure?
The lady hit the man with an umbrella" is an example of this type of difficulty, where words or phrases can be interpreted in multiple ways
What is ambiguity?
This hemisphere of the brain does most of the language processing work for most people
What is the left hemisphere?
This term refers to your thoughts about your own comprehension while reading
What is metacomprehension?
This component of psycholinguistics involves knowledge about the social rules that govern language and factors in the listener
What is pragmatics?
"The shooting of the hunters was terrible" is an example of this type of sentence, where the same surface structure can have different meanings
What is an ambiguous sentence?
Tanenhaus and colleagues (1995) used this device to measure eye movements while participants listened to syntactically ambiguous sentences
What is an eye tracker?
This network of neurons in the brain's motor cortex is activated both when you perform an action and when you watch someone else perform it
What is the mirror system?
According to this view of inferences, readers draw conclusions about the causes of events and integrate information from prior knowledge and various portions of the text
What is the constructivist view of inferences?