Glossary – Psychology of Language
Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
A
Accommodation The process of updating a mental model to include information that is
presupposed by a speaker, as evident by his use of specific
presupposition-triggering expressions.
Action potential An electrical pulse that travels down the axon of a neuron to a
synapse, resulting in the release of neurotransmitters.
Affective pathway Sound production (vocalizations) arising from states of arousal,
emotion, and motivation. Affective sound production is innate,
doesn’t require learning, and is generally inflexible.
Affixes Linguistic units that can’t stand on their own but have predictable
meanings when attached to a stem morpheme such as own, pink, or
cat.
Affricate A sound that is produced when you combine an oral stop and a
fricative together, like the first and last consonants in church or
judge.
Allophones Two or more similar sounds that are variants of the same phoneme;
often identified by brackets (e.g., [t] and [th] represent the two
allophones of /t/ in the words Stan and tan).
Alphabetic inventory A collection of orthographic symbols that map onto individual
sounds or phonemes.
Alveolar Describes a sound whose place of articulation is the alveolar ridge,
just behind the teeth.
Analogical reasoning A type of comparative reasoning in which the similarities between
conceptual structures are aligned and highlighted, while other
irrelevant properties or relations are disregarded.
Analogy In regard to forming complex words, a process of comparison in
which similarities between the members of pairs or sets of word
forms are taken as a basis for the creation of another word form.
Antecedent A pronoun’s referent or referential match; that is, the expression
(usually a proper name or a descriptive noun or noun phrase) that
refers to the same person or entity as the pronoun.
Anti-nativist view The view that the ability of humans to learn language is not the result
of a genetically programmed “language template” but is an aspect (or
by-product) of our extensive cognitive abilities, including general
abilities of learning and memory.
Aphasia Any language disruption caused by brain damage.
Argument from the poverty The argument that there is not enough input available to children to
of the stimulus allow them to learn certain structures without the help of innate
expectations that guide their language development.
Argument structures Syntactic frames that provide information about how many objects or
participants are involved in each event, and what kind of objects or
participants are involved.
Artificial language A “language” that is constructed to have certain specific properties
for the purpose of testing an experimental hypothesis: strings of
sounds correspond to “words,” which may or may not
have meaning, and whose combination may or may not be
constrained by syntactic rules.
Aspirated stop An unvoiced oral stop with a long voice onset time and a
, characteristic puff of air (aspiration) upon its release; an aspirated
stop “pops” when you get too close to a microphone without a pop
filter. Aspirated stop sounds are indicated with a superscript: p h, th,
and kh.
Assembled phonology According to the dual route theory, the means by which graphemes
route are “sounded out” against their corresponding sounds, beginning at
the left edge of the word.
Assimilation The process by which one sound becomes more similar to a nearby
sound.
Associative learning Learning process by which associations between two stimuli are
made as a result of experiences in which the two are paired.
Audience design The practice of adjusting aspects of one’s language with the goal of
communicating effectively with a particular audience or hearer. This
adjustment may be conscious or unconscious, and may relate to
various aspects of language production, including lexical choice,
pronunciation, and choice of syntactic structure.
Autism spectrum disorder A neurological condition that impairs the ability to coordinate
(ASD) attention with another person or to make inferences about someone
else’s state of mind.
Auxiliary verbs A category of words (often informally known as “helping verbs”)
that accompany the main verb. Includes was, is, can, should, does,
and did.
Axon Extension of a nerve cell (neuron) along which informational
“output” travels to another neuron.
B
Back-channel responses Behavioral cues (e.g., nods, murmurs of agreement) produced by a
hearer that provide the speaker with information about the hearer’s
degree of comprehension.
Basic-level categories The favored mid-level category of words that strike a balance
between similarity among members of the category and
distinctiveness from members of other categories; e.g., of the words
dog, Dalmatian, and animal, dog would fall into the basic-
level category.
Bigrams Sequences of two words (i.e., word pairs).
Bilabial Describes a sound that is produced by obstructing airflow at the lips.
Brain lateralization The specialization of the brain’s right and left cerebral hemispheres
for different functions.
Bridging inference An inference that connects some of the content in a sentence with
previous material in the text, or with information encoded in the
mental model.
Broca’s aphasia Aphasia characterized by halting speech and tremendous difficulty in
choosing words but fairly good speech comprehension. Also called
motor aphasia or expressive aphasia.
Brodmann areas Areas of the human cerebral cortex that are distinct from each other
anatomically and in cellular composition, as determined by
Korbinian Brodmann.
C
Case markers Morphemes that occur within a noun phrase to signal its grammatical
function (e.g., subject, direct object, indirect object). Case markers
, may occur on nouns, articles, adjectives, or on any or all of these.
Case Grammatical markers that signal the grammatical role (subject,
direct object, indirect object, etc.) of a noun within a given sentence.
Categorical perception A pattern of perception where continuous changes in a stimulus are
perceived not as gradual, but as having a sharp break between
discrete categories. Here, small differences between sounds that fall
within a single phoneme category are not perceived as readily as
small differences between sounds that belong to different phoneme
categories.
Cerebral cortex The outer covering of the brain’s cerebral hemispheres.
Coarticulation Variation in the pronunciation of a phoneme that is caused by the
articulatory properties of neighboring sounds.
Code-switching The practice of intentionally mixing two or more languages in a
single utterance or stretch of speech by fluent bilinguals.
Cognates Words that originate from the same source and are similar in both
form and meaning, such as English father and German vater.
Cognitive control The goal-directed cognitive processes responsible for directing
(executive function) attention and supervising behavioral responses to stimuli.
Cognitive pathway Controlled, highly malleable sound production that requires extensive
auditory learning and practice. Includes human language sounds and
some birdsong.
Cohort competitors Words with overlapping onsets (e.g., candle, candy, candid,
etc.).
Cohort model A model of word recognition in which multiple cohort competitors
become active immediately after the beginning of word is detected
and are gradually winnowed down to a single candidate as additional
acoustic information is taken in.
Complementary Separation of two allophones into completely different, non-
distribution overlapping linguistic environments.
Compositionality The concept that there are fixed rules for combining units of language
in terms of their form that result in fixed meaning relationships
between the words that are joined together.
Compounding Gluing together two independent words into one unit so that the new
unit acts as a single word.
Conceptual pact A tacit “agreement” that evolves over the course of a communicative
exchange in which conversational partners settle on a particular
linguistic expression to refer to a particular referent.
Connectionist model Here this refers to a computational model of the past tense. Based on
previously learned associations between verb stems and past-tense
forms, the model predicts the probable shape of past-tense forms for
new verb stems.
Constituent A syntactic category consisting of a word or (more often) a group of
words (e.g., noun phrase, prepositional phrase) that clump together
and function as a single unit within a sentence.
Constraint-based approach The main competitor to the garden path theory, this approach claims
that multiple interpretations of an ambiguous structure are
simultaneously evaluated against a broad range of information
sources (or constraints) that can affect the parser’s early decisions.
Contingency In reference to language input, the extent to which a caregiver’s
response is connected in timing and meaning to the child’s words or
communicative actions.
Conversational implicature An aspect of the speaker’s intended meaning that cannot be derived
directly from the linguistic code but must be inferred by the hearer on
Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
A
Accommodation The process of updating a mental model to include information that is
presupposed by a speaker, as evident by his use of specific
presupposition-triggering expressions.
Action potential An electrical pulse that travels down the axon of a neuron to a
synapse, resulting in the release of neurotransmitters.
Affective pathway Sound production (vocalizations) arising from states of arousal,
emotion, and motivation. Affective sound production is innate,
doesn’t require learning, and is generally inflexible.
Affixes Linguistic units that can’t stand on their own but have predictable
meanings when attached to a stem morpheme such as own, pink, or
cat.
Affricate A sound that is produced when you combine an oral stop and a
fricative together, like the first and last consonants in church or
judge.
Allophones Two or more similar sounds that are variants of the same phoneme;
often identified by brackets (e.g., [t] and [th] represent the two
allophones of /t/ in the words Stan and tan).
Alphabetic inventory A collection of orthographic symbols that map onto individual
sounds or phonemes.
Alveolar Describes a sound whose place of articulation is the alveolar ridge,
just behind the teeth.
Analogical reasoning A type of comparative reasoning in which the similarities between
conceptual structures are aligned and highlighted, while other
irrelevant properties or relations are disregarded.
Analogy In regard to forming complex words, a process of comparison in
which similarities between the members of pairs or sets of word
forms are taken as a basis for the creation of another word form.
Antecedent A pronoun’s referent or referential match; that is, the expression
(usually a proper name or a descriptive noun or noun phrase) that
refers to the same person or entity as the pronoun.
Anti-nativist view The view that the ability of humans to learn language is not the result
of a genetically programmed “language template” but is an aspect (or
by-product) of our extensive cognitive abilities, including general
abilities of learning and memory.
Aphasia Any language disruption caused by brain damage.
Argument from the poverty The argument that there is not enough input available to children to
of the stimulus allow them to learn certain structures without the help of innate
expectations that guide their language development.
Argument structures Syntactic frames that provide information about how many objects or
participants are involved in each event, and what kind of objects or
participants are involved.
Artificial language A “language” that is constructed to have certain specific properties
for the purpose of testing an experimental hypothesis: strings of
sounds correspond to “words,” which may or may not
have meaning, and whose combination may or may not be
constrained by syntactic rules.
Aspirated stop An unvoiced oral stop with a long voice onset time and a
, characteristic puff of air (aspiration) upon its release; an aspirated
stop “pops” when you get too close to a microphone without a pop
filter. Aspirated stop sounds are indicated with a superscript: p h, th,
and kh.
Assembled phonology According to the dual route theory, the means by which graphemes
route are “sounded out” against their corresponding sounds, beginning at
the left edge of the word.
Assimilation The process by which one sound becomes more similar to a nearby
sound.
Associative learning Learning process by which associations between two stimuli are
made as a result of experiences in which the two are paired.
Audience design The practice of adjusting aspects of one’s language with the goal of
communicating effectively with a particular audience or hearer. This
adjustment may be conscious or unconscious, and may relate to
various aspects of language production, including lexical choice,
pronunciation, and choice of syntactic structure.
Autism spectrum disorder A neurological condition that impairs the ability to coordinate
(ASD) attention with another person or to make inferences about someone
else’s state of mind.
Auxiliary verbs A category of words (often informally known as “helping verbs”)
that accompany the main verb. Includes was, is, can, should, does,
and did.
Axon Extension of a nerve cell (neuron) along which informational
“output” travels to another neuron.
B
Back-channel responses Behavioral cues (e.g., nods, murmurs of agreement) produced by a
hearer that provide the speaker with information about the hearer’s
degree of comprehension.
Basic-level categories The favored mid-level category of words that strike a balance
between similarity among members of the category and
distinctiveness from members of other categories; e.g., of the words
dog, Dalmatian, and animal, dog would fall into the basic-
level category.
Bigrams Sequences of two words (i.e., word pairs).
Bilabial Describes a sound that is produced by obstructing airflow at the lips.
Brain lateralization The specialization of the brain’s right and left cerebral hemispheres
for different functions.
Bridging inference An inference that connects some of the content in a sentence with
previous material in the text, or with information encoded in the
mental model.
Broca’s aphasia Aphasia characterized by halting speech and tremendous difficulty in
choosing words but fairly good speech comprehension. Also called
motor aphasia or expressive aphasia.
Brodmann areas Areas of the human cerebral cortex that are distinct from each other
anatomically and in cellular composition, as determined by
Korbinian Brodmann.
C
Case markers Morphemes that occur within a noun phrase to signal its grammatical
function (e.g., subject, direct object, indirect object). Case markers
, may occur on nouns, articles, adjectives, or on any or all of these.
Case Grammatical markers that signal the grammatical role (subject,
direct object, indirect object, etc.) of a noun within a given sentence.
Categorical perception A pattern of perception where continuous changes in a stimulus are
perceived not as gradual, but as having a sharp break between
discrete categories. Here, small differences between sounds that fall
within a single phoneme category are not perceived as readily as
small differences between sounds that belong to different phoneme
categories.
Cerebral cortex The outer covering of the brain’s cerebral hemispheres.
Coarticulation Variation in the pronunciation of a phoneme that is caused by the
articulatory properties of neighboring sounds.
Code-switching The practice of intentionally mixing two or more languages in a
single utterance or stretch of speech by fluent bilinguals.
Cognates Words that originate from the same source and are similar in both
form and meaning, such as English father and German vater.
Cognitive control The goal-directed cognitive processes responsible for directing
(executive function) attention and supervising behavioral responses to stimuli.
Cognitive pathway Controlled, highly malleable sound production that requires extensive
auditory learning and practice. Includes human language sounds and
some birdsong.
Cohort competitors Words with overlapping onsets (e.g., candle, candy, candid,
etc.).
Cohort model A model of word recognition in which multiple cohort competitors
become active immediately after the beginning of word is detected
and are gradually winnowed down to a single candidate as additional
acoustic information is taken in.
Complementary Separation of two allophones into completely different, non-
distribution overlapping linguistic environments.
Compositionality The concept that there are fixed rules for combining units of language
in terms of their form that result in fixed meaning relationships
between the words that are joined together.
Compounding Gluing together two independent words into one unit so that the new
unit acts as a single word.
Conceptual pact A tacit “agreement” that evolves over the course of a communicative
exchange in which conversational partners settle on a particular
linguistic expression to refer to a particular referent.
Connectionist model Here this refers to a computational model of the past tense. Based on
previously learned associations between verb stems and past-tense
forms, the model predicts the probable shape of past-tense forms for
new verb stems.
Constituent A syntactic category consisting of a word or (more often) a group of
words (e.g., noun phrase, prepositional phrase) that clump together
and function as a single unit within a sentence.
Constraint-based approach The main competitor to the garden path theory, this approach claims
that multiple interpretations of an ambiguous structure are
simultaneously evaluated against a broad range of information
sources (or constraints) that can affect the parser’s early decisions.
Contingency In reference to language input, the extent to which a caregiver’s
response is connected in timing and meaning to the child’s words or
communicative actions.
Conversational implicature An aspect of the speaker’s intended meaning that cannot be derived
directly from the linguistic code but must be inferred by the hearer on
