Chapter 10

Glossary

Comprehension Refers to the outcome of a range of linguistic processes, from acoustic to semantic and syntactic, which contribute to the way that a linguistic message is understood.

Fingerspelling A way of signing information in which the letters of the alphabet are mapped onto different finger shapes.

Lexical decision task An experiment in which participants are given a target item (typically written), and asked to decide whether it is a real word or not. Lexical decision tasks are used as the amount of time taken to give a response can indicate how the target item is being processed: this response can be used in combination with other tasks, e.g. priming.

Morphemes Units of meaning within words. A word like ‘descendant’ contains a number of morphemes which contribute to its meaning (‘de-’ = from, ‘-scend-’ = climb, ‘-ant’ = person with the property of).

Phoneme The smallest unit of speech which contributes to its linguistic meaning: changing a phoneme will change the meaning of a word.

Phonotactics (aka. phonotactic legality) Rules which govern how phonemes can be combined and sequenced in any one language – for example, a syllable can start with ‘dw-’ in English, but a syllable cannot end ‘-dw’.

Regular orthography Refers to a writing system in which there is a direct correspondence between speech sounds and letters. In irregular orthographies, like English, the relationship between speech sounds and letters is more opaque and variable.

Semantics The meanings of words and the ways that this knowledge is structured and interpreted. Sentences can be ungrammatical but fully semantically comprehensible (e.g. I don’t want you to turn me down! I want you to turn me yes!).

Sign language A visual language, normally arising in deaf communities, in which the hands are used to express linguistic information. Sign languages are not just sequences of pantomimed gestures, nor are they typically visual forms of existing spoken languages – for example, British Sign Language has very little in common with spoken British English, having a very different syntax and rules for combining words. In sign language, the face is often used to replace the role of prosody and intonation in spoken language, being used to convey emphasis and emotion.

Speech Spoken form of a language: a way of conveying linguistic information with the human voice.

Spreading activation Demonstration of how semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonological levels are permitted to affect each other when spoken.

Syntax Grammatical rules of a language. These rules govern the ways that words can be combined (and declined). Syntax can be independent of meaning: a sentence can be syntactically correct but meaningless (e.g. ‘colourless green dreams sleep furiously’).

Word A word is a lexical unit which can stand alone in terms of its use in a language and its meaning. Words have meanings which map onto things and ideas: words are the level at which languages convey meaning.

Writing A visual system for representing a language. Writing systems can be alphabetic (where one symbol corresponds roughly to one speech sound), syllabic (where one symbol corresponds to one syllable), or ideographic/logographic (where individual symbols correspond to one word).

Summary

Speech is an extremely complex sound and way of expressing language: other ways include written language and sign language.
Languages have structure at a number of different levels from phonetic, morphological, lexical, semantic and syntactic, through to pragmatic meaning.
Linguistics aims to understand language as a complex system, and psychologists have been interested in identifying how this can inform human language use. There may be some important differences in these approaches, not least because linguists have historically tended to underplay a role for learning.
Several different factors have been implicated in how we recognize written and spoken words, and data base approaches have opened up the possibility of analyses these influences in a complex multifactorial way.
Sentence comprehension has been strongly influenced by models from psycholinguistics, however approaches influences by research into word recognition has shown important roles for biasing effects of probabilities and contexts in sentence comprehension.
In models of language processing, there is a tension between approaches which favour symbolic, rule-based processing models, and approaches which favour a more interactive, connectionist approach. Past tense verbs in English has been identified as key in testing claims in this debate.
Speech production involves a number of different kinds of representation and the extent to which these may or may not interact when speaking is debated.
Using speech in conversation is highly complex, and social and affiliative behaviors start to interact with cognitive and linguistic processes at this level.