The Psychology of Language

Students

Glossary

Acoustics: the study of the physical properties of sounds.

Acquired disorder: a disorder caused by brain damage is acquired if it affects an ability that was previously intact (contrasted with developmental disorder).

Activation: can be thought of as the amount of energy possessed by something. The more highly activated something is, the more likely it is to be output.

Adjective: a describing word (e.g., “red”).

Adverb: a type of word that modifies a verb (e.g., “quickly”).

Affixes: a bound morpheme that cannot exist on its own, but that must be attached to a stem (e.g., re-, -ing). It can come before the main word, when it is a prefix, or after, when it is a suffix.

Agent: the thematic role describing the entity that instigates an action.

Agnosia: disorder of object recognition.

Agrammatism: literally, “without grammar”; a type of aphasia distinguished by an impairment of syntactic processing (e.g., difficulties in sentence formation, inflection formation, and parsing). There has been considerable debate about the extent to which agrammatism forms a syndrome.

Allophones: phonetic variants of phonemes. For example, in English the phoneme /p/ has two variants, an aspirated (breathy) and unaspirated (non-breathy) form. You can feel the difference if you say the words“pit” and “spit” with your hand a few inches from your mouth.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD): Alzheimer’s disease or dementia—often there is some uncertainty about the diagnosis, so this is really shorthand for “probable Alzheimer’s disease” or “dementia of the Alzheimer's type.”

American Sign Language (ASL): American Sign Language (sometimes called AMESLAN).

Anaphor: a linguistic expression for which the referent can only be determined by taking another linguistic expression into account—namely the anaphor’s antecedent (e.g., “Vlad was happy; he loved the vampire”—here he is the anaphor and Vlad is the antecedent).

Aneurysm: dilation of blood vessel (e.g., in the brain), where a sac in the blood vessel is formed and presses on surrounding tissue.

Anomia: difficulty in naming objects.

Antecedent: the linguistic expression that must be taken into account in order to determine the referent of an anaphor (“Vlad was happy; he loved the vampire”—here he is the anaphor and Vlad the antecedent). Often the antecedent is the thing for which a pronoun is being substituted.

Aphasia: a disorder of language, including a defect or loss of expressive (production) or receptive (comprehension) aspects of written or spoken language as a result of brain damage.

Apraxia: an inability to plan movements, in the absence of paralysis. Of particular relevance is speech apraxia, an inability to carry out properly controlled movements of the articulatory apparatus. Compare with dysarthria.

Aspect: the use of verb forms to show whether something is finished, continuing, or repeated. English has two aspects: progressive (e.g., “we are cooking dinner”) versus non-progressive (e.g., “we cook dinner”), and perfect involving forms of the auxiliary “have” (e.g., “we have cooked dinner”), versus non-perfect (without the auxiliary).

Aspirated: a sound that is produced with an audible breath (e.g., at the start of “pin”).

Assimilation: the influence of one sound on the articulation of another, so that the two sounds become slightly more alike.

Attachment: attachment concerns how phrases are connected together to form syntactic structures. In “the vampire saw the ghost with the binoculars” the prepositional phrase (“with the binoculars”) can be attached to either the first noun phrase (“the vampire”) or the second (“the ghost”).

Attentional (or controlled) processing: processing requiring central resources. It is non-obligatory, generally uses working memory space, is prone to dual-task interference, is relatively slow, and may be accessible to consciousness. (The opposite is automatic processing.)

Attractor: a point in the connectionist attractor network to which related states are attracted.

Audience design: the idea that speakers tailor their productions to address the specific needs of their listeners.

Auditory short-term memory (ASTM): a short-term store for spoken material.

Automatic processing: processing that is unconscious, fast, obligatory, facilitatory, does not involve working memory space, and is generally not susceptible to dual-task interference. (The opposite is attentional processing.)

Auxiliary verb: a linking verb used with other verbs (e.g., in “You must have done that”, “must” and “have” are auxiliaries).

Babbling: an early stage of language, starting at the age of about 5 or 6 months, where the child babbles, repetitively combining consonants and vowels into syllable-like sequences (e.g., “bababababa”).

Back-propagation: an algorithm for learning input–output pairs in connectionist networks. It works by alternately reducing the error between the actual output and the desired output of the network.

Basic level: the level of representation in a hierarchy that is the default level (e.g., “dog” rather than “terrier” or “animal”).

Bilingual: speaking two languages.

Bilingualism: having the ability to speak two languages. There are three types depending on when L2 (the second language) is learned relative to L1: simultaneous (L1 and L2 learned about the same time), early sequential (L1 learned first but L2 learned relatively early, in childhood), and late (in adolescence onwards).

Body: the same as a rime—the final vowel and terminal consonants.

Bootstrapping: the way in which children can increase their knowledge when they have some—such as inferring syntax when they have semantics.

Bottom-up: processing that is purely data-driven.

Bound morphemes: a morpheme that cannot exist on its own (e.g., un, ent).

Brain imaging: techniques for looking at what the brain is doing when we carry out some activity.

Broca’s aphasia: a type of aphasia that follows from damage to Broca’s region of the brain, characterized by many dysfluencies, slow, laborious speech, difficulties in articulation, and by agrammatism.

Cascade model: a type of processing where information can flow from one level of processing to the next before the first has finished processing; contrast with discrete stage model.

Categorical perception: perceiving things that lie along a continuum as belonging to one distinct category or another.

Child-directed speech (CDS): the speech of carers to young children that is modified to make it easier to understand (sometimes called “motherese”).

Class: the grammatical class of a word is the major grammatical category to which a word belongs—e.g., noun, adjective, verb, adverb, determiner, preposition, pronoun.

Clause: a group of related words containing a subject and a verb.

Closed-class item: same as grammatical element.

Co-articulation: the way in which the articulatory apparatus takes account of the surrounding sounds when a sound is articulated; as a result, a sound conveys information about its neighbors.

Cognates: words in different languages that have developed from the same root (e.g., many English and French words have developed from the same Latin root: “horn” [and “cornet”] and “corne” are derived from the Latin “cornu”); occasionally used for words that have the same form in two languages (e.g., "oblige" in English and French).

Competence: our knowledge of our language, as distinct from our linguistic performance.

Complementizer: a category ofwords (e.g., “that”) used to introduce a subordinate clause.

Conjunction: a part of speech that connectswords within a sentence (e.g., “and,” “because”).

Connectionism: an approach to cognition that involves computer simulations with many simple processing units, and where knowledge comes from learning statistical regularities rather than explicitly presented rules.

Consonant: a sound produced with some constriction of the airstream, unlike a vowel.

Constituent: a linguistic unit that is part of a larger linguistic unit.

Content word: one of the enormous number of words that convey most of the meaning of a sentence—nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. Content words are the same as open-class words. Contrasted with function word.

Conversational maxim: a rule that helps us to make sense of conversation.

Co-reference: two or more noun phrases with the same reference. For example, in “There was a vampire in the kitchen; Boris was scared to death when he saw him” the co-referential noun phrases are vampire and him.

Creole: A pidgin that has become the language of a community through an evolutionary process known as “creolization.”

Cross-linguistic: involving a comparison across languages.

Deep dyslexia: disorder of reading characterized by semantic reading errors.

Deep dysphasia: disorder of repetition characterized by semantic repetition errors.

Derivational morphology: the study of derivational inflections.

Determiner: a grammatical word that determines the number of a noun (e.g., “the,” “a,” “an,” “some”).

Developmental disorder: a disorder where the normal development or acquisition of a process (e.g., reading) is affected.

Diphthong: a type of vowel that combines two vowel sounds (e.g., in “boy,” “cow,” and “my”).

Discourse: linguistic units composed of several sentences.

Discrete stage model: a processing model where information can only be passed to the next stage when the current one has completed its processing (contrast with cascade model).

Dissociation: a process is dissociable from other processes if brain damage can disrupt it, while leaving the others intact.

Distributional information: information about what tends to co-occur with what; for example, the knowledge that the letter “q” is almost always followed by the letter “u,” or that the word “the” is always followed by a noun, are instances of distributional information.

Double dissociation: a pattern of dissociations whereby one patient can do one task but not another, whereas another patient shows the reverse pattern.

Dysgraphia: disorder of writing.

Dyslexia: disorder of reading.

Dysprosody: a disturbance of prosody.

EEG: electroencephalography—a means of measuring electrical potentials in the brain by placing electrodes across the scalp.

Episodic memory: knowledge of specific episodes (e.g., what I had for breakfast this morning, or what happened in the library yesterday).

ERP: event-related potential—electrical activity in the brain after a particular event. An ERP is a complex electrical waveform related in time to a specific event, measured by EEG.

Facilitation: making processing faster, usually as a result of priming. It is the opposite of inhibition.

Figurative speech: speech that contains non-literal material, such as metaphors and similes (e.g., “he ran like a leopard”).

Filler: what fills a gap.

fMRI: functional magnetic resonance imaging—a modern method of mapping the brain’s activity by recording blood flow in real time.

Formal paraphasia: substitution in speech of a word that sounds like another word (e.g., “caterpillar” for “catapult”). Sometimes called a form-related paraphasia.

Formant: a concentration of acoustic energy in a sound.

Function word: one of the limited numbers of words that do the grammatical work of the language (e.g., determiners, prepositions, conjunctions – such as “the,” “a,” “to,” “in,” “and,” “because”). Contrasted with content word.

Gap: an empty part of the syntactic construction that is associated with a filler.

Garden path sentence: a type of sentence where the syntactic structure leads you to expect a different conclusion from that which it actually has (e.g., “the horse raced past the barn fell”).

Gating task: a task that involves presenting increasing amounts of a word.

Gender: some languages (e.g., French and Italian) distinguish different cases depending on their gender—male, female, or neuter.

Generative grammar: a finite set of rules that will produce or generate all the sentences of a language (but no non-sentences).

Glottal stop: a sound produced by closing and opening the glottis (the opening between the vocal folds); an example is the sound that replaces the /t/ sound in the middle of “bottle” in some dialects of English (e.g., in parts of London).

Grammar: the set of syntactic rules of a language.

Grapheme: a unit of written language that corresponds to a phoneme (e.g., “steak” contains four graphemes: s t ea k corresponding to the four component sounds).

Hemidecortication: complete removal of the cortex of one side of the brain.

Heterographic homophones: twowordswith different spellings that sound the same (e.g., “soul” and “sole”; “night” and “knight”).

Hidden units: a unit from the hidden layer of a connectionistnetwork that enables the network to learn complex input–output pairs by the back-propagation algorithm. The hidden layer forms a layer between the input and output layers.

Homographs: different words that are spelled the same; they may or may not be pronounced differently, e.g., “lead” (as in what you use to take a dog for a walk) and “lead” (as in the metal).

Homophone: two words that sound the same.

Idioms: an expression particular to a language, whose meaning cannot be derived from its parts (e.g., “kick the bucket”).

Imageability: a semantic variable concerning how easy it is to form a mental image of a word: “rose” is more imageable than “truth.”

Implicature: an inference that we make in conversations to maintain the sense and relevance of the conversation.

Independent models: models in which processing occurs without reference to any external processes or information (e.g. purely bottom-up).

Inference: the derivation of additional knowledge from facts already known; this might involve going beyond the text to maintain coherence or to elaborate on what was actually presented.

Inflectional morphology: the study of inflections.

Inflection: a grammatical change to a verb (changing its tense, e.g., -ed) or noun (changing its number, e.g., -s, or “mice”).

Inhibition: this has two uses. In terms of processing it means slowing processing down. In this sense priming may lead to inhibition. Inhibition is the opposite of facilitation. In comprehension it is closely related to the idea of suppression. In terms of networks it refers to how some connections decrease the amount of activation of the target unit.

Inner speech: that voice we hear in our head; speech that is not overtly articulated.

Interactive models: models where different sorts of information are allowed to influence current processing (e.g. a mixture of bottom-up and top-down).

Intransitive verb: a verb that does not take an object (e.g., “The man laughs”).

Invariance: the same phoneme can in fact sound different depending on the context in which it occurs.

L1: the language learned first by bilingual people.

L2: the language learned second by bilingual people.

Language acquisition device (LAD): Chomsky argued that children hear an impoverished language input and therefore need the assistance of an innate language acquisition device in order to acquire language.

Lemma: a level of representation of a word between its semantic and phonological representations; it is syntactically specified, but does not yet contain sound-level information; it is the intermediate stage of two-stage models of lexicalization.

Lesion: damage to a particular part of the brain.

Lexeme: the phonological word form, in a format where phonology is represented.

Lexical access: accessing a word’s entry in the lexicon.

Lexicalization: in speech production, going from semantics to sound.

Lexicon: our mental dictionary.

LSA: latent semantic analysis—a means of acquiring knowledge from the co-occurrence of information.

MEG: magnetoencephalography—a technique for mapping the brain’s electrical activity by recording the magnetic field produced by the brain.

Malapropisms: a type of speech error where a similar-sounding word is substituted for the target (e.g., saying “restaurant” instead of “rhapsody”).

Manner of articulation: the way in which the airstream is constricted in speaking (e.g., stop).

Maturation: the sequential unfolding of characteristics, usually governed by instructions in the genetic code.

Mediated priming: (facilitatory) priming through a semantic intermediary (e.g., “lion” to “tiger” to “stripes”).

Metaphor: a figure of speech that works by association, comparison, or resemblance (e.g., “he’s a tiger in a fight,” “the leaves swam around the lake”).

Minimal pair: a pair of words that differ in meaning when only one sound is changed (e.g., “pear” and “bear”).

Model: an account of the data that provides an explanation of why the data are as they are and that makes novel, testable predictions.

Modifier: a part of speech that is dependent on another, which it modifies or qualifies in some way (e.g., adjectives modify nouns).

Modularity: the idea that the mind is built up from discrete modules; its resurgence is associated with the American philosopher Jerry Fodor, who said that modules cannot tinker around with the insides of other modules. A further step is to say that the modules of the mind correspond to identifiable neural structures in the brain.

Monosyllabic: a word having just one syllable.

Morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning (e.g., “dogs” contains two, dog + plural s).

Morphology: the study of how words are built up from morphemes.

Nativist: the idea that knowledge is innate.

Natural kind: a category of naturally occurring things (e.g., animals, trees).

Neologism: a “made-up word” that is not in the dictionary. Neologisms are usually common in the speech of people with jargon aphasia.

Nonword: a string of letters that does not form a word. Although most of the time nonwords mentioned inpsycholinguistics refer to pronounceable nonwords (pseudowords), not all nonwords need be pronounceable.

Noun: the syntactic category of words that can act as names and can all be subjects or objects of a clause; all things are nouns.

Noun phrase: a grammatical phrase based on a noun (e.g., “the red house”), abbreviated to NP.

Number: the number of a verb is whether one or more subjects are doing the action (e.g., “the ghost was” but “the ghosts were”).

Object: the person, thing, or idea that is acted on by the verb. In the sentence “The cat chased the dog,” “cat” is the subject, “chased” the verb, and “dog” is the object. Objects can be either direct or indirect—in the sentence “She gave the dog to the man,” “dog” is the direct object and “the man” is the indirect object.

Onset: the beginning of something. It has two meanings. The onset of a stimulus is when it is first presented. The onset of a printed word is its initial consonant cluster (e.g., “sp” in “speak”).

Open-class word: same as content word.

Ostensive: you can define an object ostensively by pointing to it.

Over-extension: when a child uses a word to refer to things in a way that is based on particular attributes of the word, so that many things can be named using that word (e.g., using “moon” to refer to all round things, or “stick” to all long things, such as an umbrella).

Parameter: a component of Chomsky’s theory that governs aspectsof language, and that is set in childhood by exposure to a particular language.

Paraphasia: a spoken word substitution.

Parsing: analyzing the grammatical structure of a sentence.

Participle: a type of verbal phrase where a verb is turned into an adjective by adding -ed or -ing to the verb: “we live in an exciting age.”

Patient: the thematic role of a person or thing acted on by the agent.

Performance: our actual language ability, limited by our cognitive capacity, distinct from our competence.

Phoneme: a sound of the language; changing a phoneme changes the meaning of a word.

Phonetics: the acoustic detail of speech sounds and how they are articulated.

Phonological awareness: awareness of sounds, measured by tasks such as naming the common sound in words (e.g., “bat” and “ball”), and deleting a sound from a word (e.g., “take the second sound of bland”); thought to be important for reading development but probably other aspects of language too.

Phonological dyslexia: a type of dyslexia where people can read words quite well but are poor at reading nonwords.

Phonology: the study of sounds and how they relate to languages; phonology describes the sound categories each language uses to divide up the space of possible sounds.

Phrase: a group of words forming a grammatical unit beneath the level of a clause (e.g., “up a tree”). A phrase does not contain both a subject and a predicate. In general, if you can replace a sequence of words in a sentence with a single word without changing the overall structure of the sentence, then that sequence of words is a phrase.

Pidgin: a type of language, with reduced structure and form, without any native speakers of its own, and which is created by the contact of two peoples who do not speak each other's native languages.

Place of articulation: where the airstream in the articulatory apparatus is constricted.

Polysemous words: words that have more than one meaning.

Pragmatics: the aspectsof meaning that do not affect the literal truth of what is being said; these concern things such as choice from words with the same meaning, implications in conversation, and maintaining coherence in conversation.

Predicate: the part of the clause that gives information about the subject (e.g., in “The ghost is laughing,” “the ghost” is the subject and “is laughing” is the predicate).

Prefix: an affix that comes before the stem (e.g., dis-interested). Contrast with suffix which comes after the stem.

Preposition: a grammatical word expressing a relation (e.g., “to,” “with,” “from”).

Prepositional phrase: a phrase beginning with a preposition (e.g., “with the telescope,” “up the chimney”).

Priming: affecting a response to a target by presenting a related item prior to it; priming can have either facilitatory or inhibitory effects.

Pronouns: a grammatical class of words that can stand for nouns or noun phrases (e.g., “she,” “he,” “it”).

Proposition: the smallest unit of knowledge that can stand alone: it has a truth value—that is, a proposition can be either true or false.

Prototype: an abstraction that is the best example of a category.

Pseudohomophone: a nonword that sounds like a word when pronounced (e.g., “nite”).

Pseudoword: a string of letters that form a pronounceable nonword (e.g., “smeak”).

Psycholinguist: someone who does psycholinguistics.

Psycholinguistics: the psychology of language.

Recognition point: the point at which we recognize a word.

Recurrent network: a type of connectionist network that is designed to learn sequences. It does this by means of an additional layer of units called context units that stores information about past states of the network.

Reduced relative: a relative clause that has been reduced by removing the relative pronoun and “was” (“The horse raced past the barn fell”).

Reference: what things refer to.

Refractory period: after firing, a unit, cell, or organ is much less likely to fire again during the refractory period, until it has recovered.

Relative clause: a clause normally introduced by a relative pronoun that modifies the main noun (“The horse that was raced past the barn fell”—here the relative clause is “that was raced past the barn”).

Repetition priming: (facilitatory) priming by repeating a stimulus.

Rime: the end part of a word that produces the rhyme (e.g., the rime constituent in “rant” is “ant,” or “eak” in “speak”): more formally, it is the VC or VCC (vowel–consonant or vowel–consonant–consonant) part of a word.

Saccade: a fast movement of the eye, for example to change the fixation point when reading.

Schema: a means for organizing knowledge.

Script: a script for procedural information (e.g., going to the doctor’s).

Segmentation: splitting speech up into constituent phonemes.

Semantic feature: a unit that represents part of the meaning of a word.

Semantic memory: a memory system for the long-term storage of facts (e.g., a robin is a bird; Paris is the capital of France).

Semantic paralexia: a reading error based on a word’s meaning.

Semantic priming: priming, usually facilitatory, obtained by the prior presentation of a stimulus related in meaning (e.g., “doctor” – “nurse”).

Semantics: the study of meaning.

Sentence: a group of words that expresses a complete thought, indicated in writing by the capitalization of the first letter, and ending with a period (full stop). Sentences contain a subject and a predicate (apart from a very few exceptions, notably one word sentences such as “Stop!”).

Sequential bilingualism: L2 acquired after L1—this can be either early in childhood or later.

Simultaneous bilingualism: L1 and L2 acquired simultaneously.

SOA: short for stimulus–onset asynchrony—the time between the onset (beginning) of the presentation of one stimulus and the onset of another. The time between the offset (end) of the presentation of the first stimulus and the onset of the second is known as stimulus offset–onset asynchrony.

Span: the number of items (e.g., digits) that a person can keep in short-term memory.

Specific language impairment: a developmental disorder affecting just language.

Speech act: an utterance defined in terms of the intentions of the speaker and the effect that it has on the listener.

Spoonerism: a type of speech error where the initial sounds of two words get swapped (named after the Reverend William A. Spooner, who is reported as saying things such as “you have tasted the whole worm” instead of “you have wasted the whole term”).

Stem: the root morpheme to which other bound morphemes can be added.

Stochastic: probabilistic.

Subject: the word or phrase that the sentence is about—the clause about which something is predicated (stated). The subject of the verb: who or what is doing something. More formally it is the grammatical category of the noun phrase that is immediately beneath the sentence node in the phrase-structure tree; the thing about which something is stated.

Sublexical: correspondences in spelling and sound beneath the level of the whole word.

Sucking habituation paradigm: a method for examining whether or not very young infants can discriminate between two stimuli. The child sucks on a special piece of apparatus; as the child habituates to the stimulus, their sucking rate drops, but if a new stimulus is presented, the sucking rate increases again, but only if the child can detect that the stimulus is different from the first.

Suppression: in comprehension, suppression is closely related to inhibition. Suppression is the attenuation of activation, while inhibition is the blocking of activation. Material must be activated before it can be suppressed.

Syllable: a rhythmic unit of speech (e.g., po-lo contains two syllables); it can be analyzed in terms of onset and rime (or rhyme), with the rime further being analyzable into nucleus and coda. Hence in “speaks,” “sp” is the onset, “ea” the nucleus, and “ks” the coda; together “eaks” forms the rime.

Syndrome: a medical term for a cluster of symptoms that cohere as a result of a single underlying cause.

Syntax: the rules of word order of a language.

Tachistoscope: a device for presenting materials (e.g., words) for extremely short durations; tachistoscopic presentation therefore means an item that is presented very briefly.

Telegraphic speech: a type of speech used by young children, marked by syntactic simplification, particularly in the omission of function words.

Tense: the tense of a verb is whether it is in the past, present, or future (e.g., “she gave,” “she gives,” and “she will give”).

Thematic roles: the set of semantic roles in a sentence that conveys information about who is doing what to whom, as distinct from the syntactic roles of subject and object. Examples include agent and theme.

Theme: the thing that is being acted on or being moved.

Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT): when you know that you know a word, but you cannot immediately retrieve it (although you might know its first sound, or how manysyllablesit has).

TMS: transcranial magnetic stimulation—producing activity in certain brain regions using locally applied magnetic fields.

Top-down: processing that involves knowledge coming from higher levels (such as predicting a word from the context).

Transcortical aphasia: a type of language disturbance following brain damage characterized by relatively good repetition but poor performance in other aspects of language.

Transformation: a grammatical rule for transforming one syntactic structure into another (e.g., turning an active sentence into a passive one).

Transformational grammar: a system of grammar based on transformations, introduced by Chomsky.

Transitive verb: a verb that takes an object (e.g., “The cat hit the dog”).

Unaspirated: a sound that is produced without an audible breath (e.g., the /p/ in “spin”).

Uniqueness point: the point at which a word is unique and differs from all its neighbors.

Universal grammar: the core of the grammar that is universal to all languages, and which specifies and restricts the form that individual languages can take.

Unvoiced: a sound that is produced without vibration of the vocal cords, such as /p/ and /t/—the same as voiceless and without voice.

Verb: a syntactic class of words expressing actions, events and states, and which have tenses.

Verb-argument structure: the set of possible themes associated with a verb (e.g., a person gives something to someone—or agent–theme–goal).

Voice onset time (VOT): the time between the release of the constriction of the airstream when we produce a consonant, and when the vocal cords start to vibrate.

Voicing: consonants produced with vibration of the vocal cords.

Vowel: a speech sound produced with very little constriction of the airstream, unlike a consonant.

Wernicke’s aphasia: a type of aphasia resulting from damage to Wernicke’s area of the brain, characterized by poor comprehension and fluent, often meaningless speech with clear word-finding difficulties.

Word: the smallest unit of grammar that can stand alone.

Working memory: in the USA, often used as a general term for short-term memory. According to the British psychologist Alan Baddeley, working memory has a particular structure comprising a central executive, a short-term visual store, and a phonological loop.