SECTION 4
GDossafiy
Alzheimer's disease A progressive degeneration of the brain which results, among other things, in the general dissolution of memory, cognition, and language. [86]
American Sign Language (ASL) A language used by the deaf or hearing impaired in the United States. It is based on manual and facial movements. [15]
aphasia The dissolution of language and speech caused by damage to the brain, most typically, in the central area of the left hemisphere: cf. Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia. [73]
aphasiology The study of the verbal behavior of aphasics in an attempt to better understand the ways in which the brain processes and produces language. [76]
articulation The third stage of speech production, after the words and phrases have been conceptualized and formulated. At this stage they are translated into the sounds and syllables of actual speech. [27]
autism A disease, the causes of which are unknown, that is manifested in infancy and characterized by extreme asocial behavior and the absence of normal language acquisition. [83]
Automated Transition Networks (ATNs) A model of neurolinguis-tics which claims that much of language is produced by means of chains of associated words. [65]
autonomic The part of the nervous system that automatically controls the body functions necessary for life, and thus areas of the brain not directly responsible for language and speech. [8]
babbling Strings of consonant-vowel syllable clusters produced by infants. Emerging during the second six months of a baby's life, this stage of language production is the first indication that
GLOSSARY
an infant is actually learning sounds in its mother tongue. See
also canonical and marginal babbling. [10] bathtub effect The tendency to remember the beginnings and
ends of words better than the middle portions. [57] Broca's aphasia Also called motor or expressive aphasia, this is
the loss of the ability to produce words or speak fluently as a
result of damage to Broca's area: cf. Wernicke's aphasia. [74] Broca's area The lower portion of the motor cortex of the brain
(just above the left ear, in front of Wernicke's area) which is
responsible for the production of words and sentences: cf.
Wernicke's area. [731
canalization The laying down of neural pathways in the young brain in response to repeated exposure and practice (e.g. the neurological basis for the ability of children to produce the sounds of their mother tongue accurately). [76]
canonical babbling The repetition of syllables by infants beginning at about eight months of age which first shows that they are acquiring distinct features of the mother tongue, e.g. Chinese babies begin to babble with tones: cf. marginal babbling. [10]
categorical perception Listening to a stream of speech and automatically dividing this continuous flow of sound into the phonemes of the listener's native language. [54]
coarticulation The assimilation of phonemes into those which immediately precede or follow them in the stream of speech, thus distorting their normal articulation and making identification difficult. [44]
competence Implicit knowledge we have about the language(s) we speak, e.g. we can easily identify an ungrammaticai sentence even though we may not be able to describe what rule(s) it violates: cf. performance. [47]
conceptualization The first and most abstract stage of speech production where the speaker makes the decisions about how to frame an idea into language. [27]
cooing In contrast to crying, infants at this early stage of oral production express 'coos' of contentment which are precursors to babbling. [10]
corpus callosum A wide sheath of association pathways which
lid GLOSSARY
I
serves to transmit information between the two cerebral hemispheres, making it almost impossible, in the normal brain, for one hemisphere to store data inaccessible to the other. [71]
creative construction Concerns the tendency of young children acquiring their mother tongue to come up with overgeneraliza-tions about the language which they have never been exposed to (e.g. Tm hicking up!'). [20]
critical period Hypothetically, approximately the first ten years of life. Some linguists believe that certain aspects of language acquisition (e.g. sounding like a native speaker} can never be fully acquired if they have not been learned during this time. [22]
Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC) A now discredited theory that the psycholinguistic difficulty of a sentence, as measured by memory load or processing time, is directly proportional to the number of grammatical rules contained in that utterance. [60]
developmental psycholinguistics The examination of how
infants and children acquire the ability to comprehend and
speak their mother tongue. [7] diachronic Studying linguistic change over time in contrast to
looking at language as it is used at a given moment: cf.
synchronic. [5]
Down's syndrome An inherited disease which often results in significant loss of cognitive processing capacity, but which does not inhibit language acquisition to a corresponding degree. [84]
egocentric speech A term used by Piaget and others to characterize the way the language of young children appears both to reflect and shape their early thinking. [12]
equipotential The neurological notion that, especially in young brains, most areas of the cerebral cortex are free to be programmed for the processing of a wide range of cognitive or linguistic functions. [73]
errors The production of incorrect forms in speech or writing by a non-native speaker of a second language, the result of incomplete knowledge of the rules of that target language: cf. mistakes. [46]
feedback loop The sensory information the body provides during the production of speech which allows the speaker to monitor and adjust the articulation of individual sounds and words. [47]
formulation The second stage of speech production, after conceptualization, when the message is framed into words, phrases, and clauses by the speaker. £27]
garden-pathing The phenomenon in the comprehension of sentences that the sequence of words tends to create in us a certain expectation about their meaning. This may or may not be confirmed by the remainder of the sentence. [65]
hemispherectomy The surgical removal of either the left or right hemisphere of the brain of a child as an extreme measure against a life-threatening illness or neurological condition. [76]
holophrastic Term used to describe one-word sentences used by small children but also found in adult speech (e.g. 'Milk?' 'Here!'). [13]
iconic One-to-one relationships between signs and their referents (e.g. lowering the pitch of your voice on 'deep' when you describe someone by saying he 'speaks in a deep voice'): cf. symbolic. [9]
idiomorphs Words small children invent in their initial attempts to acquire a language (e.g. 'wa wa' for 'cat'). [11]
imagistic thinking The visual component of the conceptualization of language that is ultimately manifested in the gestures which accompany speech: cf. syntactic thinking. [27]
innateness The theory that ascribes a major part of language learning to genetically packaged knowledge which is then triggered, after birth, by exposure to large amounts of linguistic input: See Language Acquisition Device and Universal Grammar. [17]
Johnson theory The behaviorally-based explanation for stuttering which claims it is largely caused by the undue attention paid by parents and/or teachers to a child with the aim of encouraging correct articulation: cf. Orton/Travis theory. [81]
Language Acquisition Device (LAD) According to Chomsky, the innate mental mechanism designed uniquely for the acquisition of language. See innateness and Universal Grammar. [18]
logogen The cumulative information we store about a word we are comprehending, and which we use to guess its meaning. [56]
Long Term Memory (LTM) Memory as we normally think of it, whether it is of an event from childhood or of the name of a person we have just met: cf. Short Term Memory (STM). [85]
marginal babbling An infant's initial attempts to produce syllables, usually beginning at the age of about six months: cf. canonical babbling. [10]
Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) The average number of morphemes an infant produces in its utterances. Researchers use this as a measure of the complexity of a child's early speech production. [24]
mentalistic Relying on logic and intuition rather than directly observable experimental evidence to support a hypothesis. [32]
mistakes The production of incorrect forms in speech or writing, the result of factors such as carelessness or fatigue. All speakers make mistakes, whether they are native or non-native users of the target language: cf. errors. [46]
mnemonists People with super-normal abilities to remember large amounts of information (e.g. someone who can recite an entire play or book from memory). [66]
modular Independent from other forms of cognition—the belief that language acquisition is greatly facilitated by a special faculty of the human mind uniquely designed for language and speech. [54]
morphology The study of the structure of words or the structural patterns of the words in any particular language. [36]
motor cortex A small vertical strip of brain roughly in the mid portion of both hemispheres which is primarily responsible for initiating complex muscular movement, as in the articulation of speech sounds: cf. sensory cortex. [72]
neurolinguistics The branch of psycholinguistics which investigates the the use of language in experimental or clinical con-
ditions as a window to die way in which the brain produces and processes linguistic information. [71] neuroplasticity The capacity of a young child's brain to allocate different areas of the cortex for complex human behaviors such as language. [76]
OrtorVTravis theoryAn innatist explanation for stuttering that claims that genetic, not environmental, factors are primarily responsible for this disability: cf. Johnson theory. [81]
Parallel Distributed Processings (PDP) A model of cognition that attempts to account for complex behaviors such as the processing and production of speech by positing the existence of completely separate but concurrent and parallel cognitive systems operating at the same time. [55]
performance Words actually spoken and written: the explicit, physical manifestation of our intuitive linguistic competence: cf. competence. [47]
phoneme monitoring A task used in experiments. Subjects are asked to listen to a sentence and to press a button as soon as they hear a certain sound (e.g. /p/). Their reaction time is a direct measure of the complexity of the sentence. [63]
phoneme restoration effect A device employed by psycholinguists to investigate comprehension; e.g. subjects hear 'ail' in a paragraph describing how water is gathered and believe they heard the word 'pail1. [51]
phrase structure rules The syntactic skeleton of a sentence which specifies all the major constituents which must be accounted for in that particular utterance, e.g. 'The kitten drank the milk1 can be subdivided into a noun phrase ('the kitten') and a verb phrase ('drank the milk'). [16,59]
pivot Word used by young children either to begin or end a two-word utterance (e.g. 'Hi Mommy', 'Hi Kitty', or 'Milk aligone', 'Mommy aligone'). [15]
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) The use of a mildly radioactive dye in the blood to measure the flow of blood in a patient's brain. This can reveal the way neurological disorders such as tumors can affect the way the brain programs speaking or listening. [45]
pragmatics The study of what people mean when they use language in normal social interaction. [38]
priming Covertly eliciting a certain word in a psycholinguistic experiment (e.g. in a listening task, 'right' might be primed in a text about street directions; 'write' might be primed in a text which describes the importance of literacy). [31]
psycholinguistics The study of the normal and abnormal use of language and speech to gain a better understanding of how the human mind functions: cf. psychology of language. [4]
psychologically real Description of the way in which the structures and categories of a particular language appears to affect a person's ability to process linguistic information. [34]
psychology of language A synonym for psycholinguistics. [4]
rate The amount of time it takes children to learn a specific sound, structure, or specified number of words. Language acquisition rates vary a great deal among very young children. See stage. [22]
resonance The combined harmonics made by the vocal tract in the articulation of any speech sound. [43]
schematic knowledge Specific information which we bring to
any new situation based on our accumulated experience with
similar situations. [58] Second Language Acquisition (SLA) The study of how people
acquire an additional language, often by means of an analysis
of the errors they make. [46] segmental phonemes Vowels and consonants: sounds which are
relatively easy to divide into individual units of sound: cf.
suprasegmental. [10] self-monitoring The fourth and final stage of speech production,
after conceptualization, formulation, and articulation, when
we edit our message and correct any errors. [27] sensory cortex The narrow strip of brain parallel to the motor
cortex which is primarily responsible for the processing of all
sensory information to the brain and which controls our ability
to comprehend speech: cf. motor cortex. [72]
GLOSSARY
riQ
Short Term Memory (STM) Also called working memory. Our very limited ability to remember new information without storing it in Long Term Memory: cf. Long Term Memory (LTM). [86]
slips of the tongue Mistakes in speech (or in writing) which provide psycbolinguistic evidence for the way we formulate words and phrases: cf. Spoonerisms. [30]
sociolinguistics In its larger sense, the study of language and society, or, more narrowly, how social factors influence linguistic structure and use. [38]
split-brain operation Rarely performed surgery where the corpus callosum is either partially or entirely severed to spare a patient from severe epileptic seizures. It can create unusual neuropsychological constraints. [77]
Spoonerisms Slips of the tongue which create new phrases with often unintended or humorous meanings (e.g. 'the breast in bed' instead of 'the best in bread'): cf. slips of the tongue. [32]
spreading activation networks The neurolinguistic model which posits that repeated use of certain words or phrases in the same context will create neuronal networks that facilitate rapid recognition or production of these words. [58]
stage Irrespective of their rate of language acquisition, all children appear to progress through the same stages or sequences of development (e.g. English-speaking children say 'Why Mommy is leaving now?' before they produce the correct 'Why is Mommy leaving now?'). See rate. [15]
suprasegmental Features of speech beyond the individual sound such as pitch, stress, rhythm, and intonation: cf. segmental phonemes. [11]
symbolic Signs which have a random and arbitary relationship
with their referents (e.g. 'sun" is a small word but a large object;
'micro-organism' is a large word but a tiny object): cf. iconic. [9] synchronic Studying language and speech as they are used at a
given moment and not in terms of how they have evolved over
time: cf. diachronic. [6] syntactic thinking Thinking in words in a linear, sequential
manner: cf. imagistic thinking. [27]
Tip-Of-the-Tongue (TOT) A phenomenon we experience when trying to retrieve a word we know we know, but are still unable to recall at that moment. [56]
Transformational-Generative (TG) grammar Chomsky's model of grammar which posits a set of grammatical rules, or 'transformations', which operate on phrase structures to generate all and only the sentences of a language. [14, 59]
tuning Making minor revisions in a hypothesis to accommodate new data (e.g. a child who believes that all past-tense forms end with -ed creates the word 'wented' after hearing 'went' used to indicate past time). [19]
Universal Grammar (UG) An abstract set of rules and principles which govern the syntax of all languages and which many linguists believe to be innately specified in all humans. See innateness and Language Acquisition Device. [18]
Voice Onset Timing (VOT) The brief burst of air which precedes the articulation of all stop consonants, and which provides phonetic information listeners use to distinguish between sounds like l\d and/g/. [52]
Wernicke's aphasia Loss of the ability to comprehend speech or written language as a result of damage to Wernicke's area of the brain: cf. Broca's aphasia. [74]
Wernicke's area The lower portion of the sensory cortex of the brain (just above the left ear, behind Broca's area) which is responsible for the processing of most speech and language: cf. Broca's area. [73]
I^O GLOSSARY