Chapter 9

The possibilities for creating new

utterances are virtually limitless.
6. Dynamic: Languages constantly
evolve.
Language
- is the use of an organized means of
combining words in order to
The Basic Components of Words
communicate with those around us. - Language is made up of various

- Psycholinguistics: psychology of our smaller units, similar to how molecules

language as it interacts with the human can be broken down into basic

mind. elements.
- Phone is the smallest unit of speech

Properties of Language sound

- Phoneme is the smallest unit of
1. Communicative: Language permits us
speech sound that can be used to
to communicate with one or more
distinguish one utterance in a given
people who share our language.
language from another.
2. Arbitrarily symbolic: Language
- Phonetics is the study of how to
creates an arbitrary relationship
produce or combine speech sounds,
between a symbol and what it
while phonemics focuses on the
represents: an idea, a thing, a process,
phonemes of specific languages.
a relationship, or a description.
- Morpheme is the smallest unit of
3. Regularly structured: Language has a
meaning within a particular language.
structure; only particularly patterned
- content morphemes are the
arrangements of symbols have
words that convey the bulk of
meaning, and different arrangements
the meaning of a language
yield different meanings.
- function morphemes adds
4. Structured at multiple levels: The
detail and nuance to the
structure of language can be analyzed
meaning of the content
at more than one level (e.g., in sounds,
morphemes
meaning units, words, and phrases).
- Syntax refers to the way in which we
5. Generative, productive: Within the
put words together to form sentences.
limits of a linguistic structure, language
users can produce novel utterances.
Language Comprehension - The Motor Theory of Speech
Perception
- The ability to understand the
- People perceive spoken words
different elements of spoken, by identifying the vocal tract
language or written language. gestures with which they are
pronounced rather than by
identifying the sound patterns.
The View of Speech Perception
as Ordinary
- The same process as when we
Understanding Meaning:
perceived other sounds. Semantics
- Phonetic Refinement Theory - Denotation
- The importance of the context - Literal or primary meaning
or the words. In this theory, the - Connotation
initial sound that establishes - Word's underlying meanings
the set of possible words we
have heard need not be the first
phoneme alone.

Understanding Sentences:
Syntax
The View of Speech Perception
- Syntax is the systematic way in which
as Special
words can be combined and
- Categorical Perception sequenced to make meaningful
- Helps us to detect the phrases or words.
differences between things. - Syntactical Priming
- Occurs when a person begins
- we spontaneously tend to use
to perceive items belonging to a
syntactical structures and read
category as being more similar
faster sentences that parallel
to each other and less similar to
the structures of sentences we
items from other categories.
have just heard
- Speech Errors Reading
- May be used intentionally for
humorous effect, as with When Reading Is a
spoonerisms.
Problem—Dyslexia
- Analyzing Sentences:
Phrase-Structure Grammar - Reading is a cognitive process that
- They analyze the structure of involves decoding symbols to arrive at
phrases as they are used. meaning
- When we compose sentences, - Dyslexia is a learning disorder that
we seem to analyze and divide involves difficulty reading due to
them into functional problems identifying speech sounds
components. This process is and learning how they relate to letters
called parsing. and words (decoding).
- A New Approach to Syntax: - Several different processes may be
Transformational impaired in dyslexia:
- is a derivational approach to - Phonological awareness -
syntax that developed from the awareness of the sound
extended standard theory of structure
generative grammar. - Phonological reading -
- Relationships between Syntactical reading words in isolation
and Lexical Structures - Phonological coding -
- The syntax or grammatical remembering strings of
structure of a language. For phonemes
example, nouns, verbs, - Lexical access - ability to
adjectives, and adverbs
retrieve phonemes from
make up a sentence or
lexical structure in the long-term memory.

English language. - Developmental Dyslexia is difficulty in

- While syntactic refers to the reading that starts in childhood and
arrangement of words and typically continues throughout
phrases in a sentence,
adulthood.
following grammatical rules
and principles. - Acquired Dyslexia is typically caused
by traumatic brain damage
 Perceptual Issues in Reading - how quickly we can retrieve
word-related information from
- The very basic and important step in
long-term memory
reading is our ability to recognize
letters. That is called Orthography
- Lexical processes are used to identify
Understanding Conversations
letters and words. They also activate and Essays: Discourse
relevant information in memory about
- Discourse
these words.
- involves units of language
- Comprehension processes are used
larger than individual sentences
to make sense of the text as a whole
- It is the bigger context of the
Lexical Processes in Reading
sentences.
- Fixations and Reading Speed
- Comprehending Known Words:
- When reading, our eyes move
Retrieving Word Meaning from
in rapid jumps called
Memory
saccades, punctuated by
- Semantic encoding
fixations on groups of words.
- where we take sensory
- Factors that affect the duration of
information (the written
fixations:
words we see/hear) into
- Word length
a meaningful
- Familiarity
representation.
- Sentence Context
- Comprehending Unknown Words:
- Lexical Access
Deriving Word Meanings from
- is a crucial aspect of reading,
Context
involving the identification of
- Using context cues, we
words to retrieve their meanings
formulate the meaning based
from memory.
on the existing information
- 3 Levels of Processing in Interactive-
stored in memory.
Activation Model:
- Comprehending Ideas: Propositional
- Feature
Representations
- letter
- According to psychologist
- Word Levels
Walter Kintsch, we don’t try to
- Intelligence and Lexical-Access
remember every single word we
Speed
read. Instead, we focus on
 understanding the main ideas
and storing those ideas in a
simpler form in our memory.
These main ideas are called
propositions, the briefest unit
of language that can be
independently found to be true
or false.
- Macroproposition: the central
proposition.
- Comprehending Text Based on
Context and Point of View
- Representing the Text in Mental
Models
- Inference:
- preliminary conclusions
or judgments