ENGLISH ANATOMY OF WORDS MIDTERM
STUDY GUIDE 2024
Word – a minimal unit of meaningful speech that can stand alone
● However, words usually occur within larger utterances and the context can change the way the word
is pronounced
● Words also exhibit a dual nature, having both an outward phonological form (the way it sounds
when produced in isolation or within an utterance) and an underlying semantic representation (the
concept associated with that word). At a more abstract level we can think of words as labels for
concepts
● Concept – a mental representation of some sort of statistical regularity in our experience
Words can be grouped in a number of different ways; such as content words and function words.
● Content words are words that convey meaning
○ They are the labels for concepts
○ Also called open-class words because we continue to learn new concepts and the labels for them
○ They come and go in language
○ Form the bulk of a language's vocabulary
○ Convey the bulk of meaning in utterances
○ Include nouns, verbs, and adjectives
● Function
○ Much more limited in number words are words that serve grammatical purposes
○ Known as closed-class words because they remain fairly stable across generations and even centuries
○ Regulate syntax
○ Include prepositions, determiners, and conjunctions
Words, especially those in the open classes of noun, verb, and adjective, change their shape according to the
context in which they are used.
● The process of word form change is called morphology
● English nouns have a different form depending on whether they're singular or plural
● Lemma – the most basic form of a word (ex. run)
● Lexeme – the set of all forms a word can take (ex. runs, ran, running)
Words spoken in isolation consist of phonemes grouped into one or more syllables.
● However, when words are spoken within utterances, the phonemes of neighboring words often regroup to
form new syllables across word boundaries.
Phonemes are the building blocks of phonological word forms, but not all combinations of phonemes are
possible words, rather each language has a set of phonotactic rules.
,● Phonotactic rules – rules for combining phonemes into sequences to form words. Words are sound symbols
that stand for concepts. Many concepts are universal, but languages use different words to represent these
concepts.
● As a general rule, words are arbitrary sound symbols of the concepts they represent. In a sense, the meaning
of a word is the concept it symbolizes. However, concepts are also symbols, since they are mental
representations of classes of objects or events.
● Symbol grounding problem – the question of where a meaning of a symbol comes from
○ e.g., It is the question of how words acquire meaning
○ The traditional cognitive approach proposes that words acquire meaning through their relationships
with other words
■ Chinese Room argument – a demonstration of why meaning cannot arise solely from the
relationshipsamong symbols
○ One way to solve the symbol grounding problem is to have a set of semantic primes – innately
meaningful concepts that are used to define all other concepts
○ Another approach to the symbol grounding problem proposes that a concept is an embodied
representation – a symbol that is understood in terms of the perceptual and motor experiences it
evokes
Arbitrariness of the sign – the observation that the sound of a word gives virtually no information
about its meaning
● This is a universal property of human languages
● However, languages also employ systematic word form patterns to classify words into grammatical
categories. Onomatopoeia – a word that represents a sound (thud, bang), But these vary widely from
language to language
Section 5.2: How Words are Learned
Vocabulary acquisition through the lifespan follows an S-shaped curve.
● With slow learning during the first couple of years, followed by a vocabulary spurt that starts to taper
off by school age.
● However, learning to read additionally boosts vocabulary, and adults continue to learn new words
and new meanings for familiar words throughout their life. When judging if a child has learned a word,
researchers may test a child's:
● Receptive vocabulary – the set of words that a person is able to recognize and understand the
meaning of
● Productive vocabulary – the set of words a person is able to produce in appropriate contexts
○ These are usually measuring of vocabulary size. Word learning is a complex task which involves 3 processes:
1. Constructing a concept
, 2. Learning a phonological word form – this means extracting a sound sequence from the speech stream
and storing it in memory as an abstract phonological form that can be reproduced
3. Creating a link between the word form and the concept. This link needs to go in both directions, from
phonological representation to semantic representation in word recognition and in the other direction
for word production. One of the most notable aspects of word learning in children is how rapid it is.
● Fast mapping – the ability to learn a new word after only one or few exposures
● This ability is typically demonstrated in receptive word learning tasks
● It is thought that fast mapping is facilitated by the hippocampus
● In fast mapping you keep the information in memory for just as long as it's useful
● But the permanent learning of a word requires consolidation in long-term memory
● Complete mastery of a word requires many exposures in various contexts
A challenge for word learning is referential uncertainty – the observation that there is no direct link
between the word and the object or event it refers to
o ● I.e. knowing what aspect of the current situation a novel word refers to
o ● Several cognitive constraints help children overcome referential uncertainty, and these
include:
○ Whole object assumption – the assumption that a new word refers to the entire object and not just a part
of it
○ Taxonomic assumption – the assumption that a newly learned word extends to other similar
referents
○ Mutual exclusivity assumption – the assumption that no two words mean exactly the same thing
Referential ambiguity is only a problem if we assume that words are learned quickly. However,
researchers have found that eighteen-month-old infants have cross-situational word learning – the
ability to learn to associate novel words with novel objects even in the cases of referential ambiguity
by tracking co-occurrence statistics
● The child tracks the co-occurrence of novel words and possible referents and eventually homes in on
the appropriate word-concept mapping
● Furthermore, caregivers often help by naming an object while the child is paying attention to it.
○ Joint attention – a situation in which all participants in an interaction have focused their attention on the
same object or event
Syntactic bootstrapping – use of syntactic information to infer the meaning of verbs
● Young children make use of this
● When it’s employed in conjunction with contextual clues, it provides valuable information about the
meaning of the verb.
● Even in the absence of contextual cues, young children are sensitive to the grammatical
characteristics of verbs.
Various characteristics of a word form can influence how easily it is learned, such as:
, ● Word frequency – a measure how often a word in all its forms occurs in a language
● Neighborhood density – a measure of how many other words differ from a particular word by
substitution of a single phoneme
● Phonotactic probability – the likelihood that a particular sequence of phonemes will occur in a language
Stress patterns can also influence word learning in youngsters
● Trochaic – strong-weak stress pattern
● Iambic – weak-strong stress pattern
Section 5.3: How Words are Stored
Mental lexicon – the storage of information about words in a long-term memory
● This mental lexicon contains information about how words are pronounced, what they mean, and how they
are related to other words.
There are two assumptions of conventional models of lexical processing:
1. Word forms are stored as phonemes, and very common words may be stored as syllables.
2. Only the most basic form of the word (Lemma) is stored, other morphological forms are generated by
rule.
Experimental evidence also suggests that the mental lexicon stores only the base form of the word and
attaches suffixes as needed during word recognition and production
● Inflectional suffix – a suffix that is added to words for the purpose of grammar
● Derivational suffix – a suffix that changes the meaning and grammatical category of a word
More frequent words are recalled more quickly than their less frequent counterparts
● Base frequency effect – the observation that the frequency effect of the base form extends to its inflected
forms
Traditional models of the lexicon assume that only base word forms are stored, with other inflected forms
generated by rule, while connectionist models assume all word forms are stored in the lexicon.
The mental lexicon is envisioned as a network of words; words are connected by both taxonomic (categorical,
such dog-cat) and thematic (associative, such as dog-bone) relations.
One of the most basic tools we have for exploring the organization of the mental lexicon is the word
association task – a procedure in which the participant is asked to produce a word in response to a prompt
Evidence from word association tasks suggests that words in the mental lexicon are semantically associated in
two different ways:
● Thematic relation – a relationship between two words based on frequency of co-occurrence
● Taxonomic relation – a relationship between two words that belong to the same semantic category
STUDY GUIDE 2024
Word – a minimal unit of meaningful speech that can stand alone
● However, words usually occur within larger utterances and the context can change the way the word
is pronounced
● Words also exhibit a dual nature, having both an outward phonological form (the way it sounds
when produced in isolation or within an utterance) and an underlying semantic representation (the
concept associated with that word). At a more abstract level we can think of words as labels for
concepts
● Concept – a mental representation of some sort of statistical regularity in our experience
Words can be grouped in a number of different ways; such as content words and function words.
● Content words are words that convey meaning
○ They are the labels for concepts
○ Also called open-class words because we continue to learn new concepts and the labels for them
○ They come and go in language
○ Form the bulk of a language's vocabulary
○ Convey the bulk of meaning in utterances
○ Include nouns, verbs, and adjectives
● Function
○ Much more limited in number words are words that serve grammatical purposes
○ Known as closed-class words because they remain fairly stable across generations and even centuries
○ Regulate syntax
○ Include prepositions, determiners, and conjunctions
Words, especially those in the open classes of noun, verb, and adjective, change their shape according to the
context in which they are used.
● The process of word form change is called morphology
● English nouns have a different form depending on whether they're singular or plural
● Lemma – the most basic form of a word (ex. run)
● Lexeme – the set of all forms a word can take (ex. runs, ran, running)
Words spoken in isolation consist of phonemes grouped into one or more syllables.
● However, when words are spoken within utterances, the phonemes of neighboring words often regroup to
form new syllables across word boundaries.
Phonemes are the building blocks of phonological word forms, but not all combinations of phonemes are
possible words, rather each language has a set of phonotactic rules.
,● Phonotactic rules – rules for combining phonemes into sequences to form words. Words are sound symbols
that stand for concepts. Many concepts are universal, but languages use different words to represent these
concepts.
● As a general rule, words are arbitrary sound symbols of the concepts they represent. In a sense, the meaning
of a word is the concept it symbolizes. However, concepts are also symbols, since they are mental
representations of classes of objects or events.
● Symbol grounding problem – the question of where a meaning of a symbol comes from
○ e.g., It is the question of how words acquire meaning
○ The traditional cognitive approach proposes that words acquire meaning through their relationships
with other words
■ Chinese Room argument – a demonstration of why meaning cannot arise solely from the
relationshipsamong symbols
○ One way to solve the symbol grounding problem is to have a set of semantic primes – innately
meaningful concepts that are used to define all other concepts
○ Another approach to the symbol grounding problem proposes that a concept is an embodied
representation – a symbol that is understood in terms of the perceptual and motor experiences it
evokes
Arbitrariness of the sign – the observation that the sound of a word gives virtually no information
about its meaning
● This is a universal property of human languages
● However, languages also employ systematic word form patterns to classify words into grammatical
categories. Onomatopoeia – a word that represents a sound (thud, bang), But these vary widely from
language to language
Section 5.2: How Words are Learned
Vocabulary acquisition through the lifespan follows an S-shaped curve.
● With slow learning during the first couple of years, followed by a vocabulary spurt that starts to taper
off by school age.
● However, learning to read additionally boosts vocabulary, and adults continue to learn new words
and new meanings for familiar words throughout their life. When judging if a child has learned a word,
researchers may test a child's:
● Receptive vocabulary – the set of words that a person is able to recognize and understand the
meaning of
● Productive vocabulary – the set of words a person is able to produce in appropriate contexts
○ These are usually measuring of vocabulary size. Word learning is a complex task which involves 3 processes:
1. Constructing a concept
, 2. Learning a phonological word form – this means extracting a sound sequence from the speech stream
and storing it in memory as an abstract phonological form that can be reproduced
3. Creating a link between the word form and the concept. This link needs to go in both directions, from
phonological representation to semantic representation in word recognition and in the other direction
for word production. One of the most notable aspects of word learning in children is how rapid it is.
● Fast mapping – the ability to learn a new word after only one or few exposures
● This ability is typically demonstrated in receptive word learning tasks
● It is thought that fast mapping is facilitated by the hippocampus
● In fast mapping you keep the information in memory for just as long as it's useful
● But the permanent learning of a word requires consolidation in long-term memory
● Complete mastery of a word requires many exposures in various contexts
A challenge for word learning is referential uncertainty – the observation that there is no direct link
between the word and the object or event it refers to
o ● I.e. knowing what aspect of the current situation a novel word refers to
o ● Several cognitive constraints help children overcome referential uncertainty, and these
include:
○ Whole object assumption – the assumption that a new word refers to the entire object and not just a part
of it
○ Taxonomic assumption – the assumption that a newly learned word extends to other similar
referents
○ Mutual exclusivity assumption – the assumption that no two words mean exactly the same thing
Referential ambiguity is only a problem if we assume that words are learned quickly. However,
researchers have found that eighteen-month-old infants have cross-situational word learning – the
ability to learn to associate novel words with novel objects even in the cases of referential ambiguity
by tracking co-occurrence statistics
● The child tracks the co-occurrence of novel words and possible referents and eventually homes in on
the appropriate word-concept mapping
● Furthermore, caregivers often help by naming an object while the child is paying attention to it.
○ Joint attention – a situation in which all participants in an interaction have focused their attention on the
same object or event
Syntactic bootstrapping – use of syntactic information to infer the meaning of verbs
● Young children make use of this
● When it’s employed in conjunction with contextual clues, it provides valuable information about the
meaning of the verb.
● Even in the absence of contextual cues, young children are sensitive to the grammatical
characteristics of verbs.
Various characteristics of a word form can influence how easily it is learned, such as:
, ● Word frequency – a measure how often a word in all its forms occurs in a language
● Neighborhood density – a measure of how many other words differ from a particular word by
substitution of a single phoneme
● Phonotactic probability – the likelihood that a particular sequence of phonemes will occur in a language
Stress patterns can also influence word learning in youngsters
● Trochaic – strong-weak stress pattern
● Iambic – weak-strong stress pattern
Section 5.3: How Words are Stored
Mental lexicon – the storage of information about words in a long-term memory
● This mental lexicon contains information about how words are pronounced, what they mean, and how they
are related to other words.
There are two assumptions of conventional models of lexical processing:
1. Word forms are stored as phonemes, and very common words may be stored as syllables.
2. Only the most basic form of the word (Lemma) is stored, other morphological forms are generated by
rule.
Experimental evidence also suggests that the mental lexicon stores only the base form of the word and
attaches suffixes as needed during word recognition and production
● Inflectional suffix – a suffix that is added to words for the purpose of grammar
● Derivational suffix – a suffix that changes the meaning and grammatical category of a word
More frequent words are recalled more quickly than their less frequent counterparts
● Base frequency effect – the observation that the frequency effect of the base form extends to its inflected
forms
Traditional models of the lexicon assume that only base word forms are stored, with other inflected forms
generated by rule, while connectionist models assume all word forms are stored in the lexicon.
The mental lexicon is envisioned as a network of words; words are connected by both taxonomic (categorical,
such dog-cat) and thematic (associative, such as dog-bone) relations.
One of the most basic tools we have for exploring the organization of the mental lexicon is the word
association task – a procedure in which the participant is asked to produce a word in response to a prompt
Evidence from word association tasks suggests that words in the mental lexicon are semantically associated in
two different ways:
● Thematic relation – a relationship between two words based on frequency of co-occurrence
● Taxonomic relation – a relationship between two words that belong to the same semantic category
