Princeton Review Gre Psychology - Chapter 4 (Language)

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Language

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The meaningful arrangement of sounds.

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Psycholinguistics

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The study of hte psychology of language.

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Phonemes

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Discrete sounds that make up words but carry no meaning, such as ee,p, or sh. Infants first make these sounds when learning language. Phonics is learning to read by sounding out the phonemes. All words in a laguage are created from basic phonological rules of sound combination.

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Morphemes

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Made up of phonemes; the smallest units of meaning in language. Words or parts of words that have meaning are morphemes. The word boy and the suffix -ing are morphemes.

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Morphology or Morphological rules

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Grammar rules; how to group morphemes

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Prosody

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Tone inflections, accents, and other aspects of pronunciation that carry meaning. Prosody is the icing on the cake of grammar and meaning. Infants can more easily differentiate between completely different sounds than between different expressions of the same sound.

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Noam Chomsky

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Undoubtedly the most impotant figure in psycholinguistics.

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Transformational Grammar

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(Noam Chomsky) Differentiates between surface structure and deep structure in language.

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Surface Structure

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In Noam Chomsky's Transformational Grammar, it is the way that words are organized.

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Deep Structure

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In Noam Chomsky's Transformational Grammar, it is the underlying meaning of arrangements of words.

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Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

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Probably Chomsky's most famous contribution to psycholinguistics. After studying children and noticing how they made small errors often based on grammar rules rather than large structural errors, Chomsky proposed that humans have an inborn ability to adopt generative grammar rules of the language that they here. The rules are then used to make millions of novel sentences. One reasons that the LAD is so important and controversial is that it is a nativist or genetic interpretation. According to Chomsky, children need only be exposed to a language in order to easily apply the LAD. The LAD also explains why children who are learning different languages progress similarly.

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Overregularization

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The overapplication of grammar rules. For example, children realize that past tense is indicated by teh sufficx -ed. Then they add this to verbs that don't actually need it.

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Overextension

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Generalizing with names for things. This is often done through chaining characteristics rather than through logic. For example, a three-year-old may call any furry thing a doggie.

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Telegraphic speech

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Refers to speech without the articles or extras, similar to how it would appear in a telegram, such as "Me go."

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Holophrastic speech

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When a young child uses one word (holophrases) to convey a whole sentence. "Me" may mean "give that to me."

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Girls v. Boys and language

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Girls are faster and more accurage with language learning than boys are.

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Bilingual children and language

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Are slower at language learning.

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Language acquisition milestones

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1 year - speaks first words
2 years - >50 spoken words, usually in two-(and then three-) word phrases
3 years - 1,000 word vocabulary, but has many grammatical errors
4 years - grammar problems are random exceptions

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Benjamin Whorf

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From studies of Hopi language, posited that language, or how a culture says things, influences that culture's perspective. This WHORFIAN HYPOTHESIS has been used as an argument for the importance of nonsexist language. It has been found, however, that cultures that don't have words for certain colors can still recognize them, so it is unclear to what extent language really affects our perceptions.

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Roger Brown

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Researched the areas of social, developmental, and linguistic psychology. He found that children's understanding of grammatical rules develops as they make hypotheses about how syntax works and then self-correct with experience.

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Katherine Nelson

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Found that language really begins to develop with the onset of ACTIVE SPEECH rather than during the first year of only listening.

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William Labov

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Studied "Black" English (now known as Ebonics) and found that it had its own complex internal structure. It is not simply incorrect English.

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Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria

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Russia's best-known psychologists, studied the development of word meanings and found them to be complex and altered by interpersonal experience. Also, they asserted that language is a tool involved in (not just a byproduct of) the development of abstract thinking.

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Charles Osgood

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Studied semantics, or word meanings. He created SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL CHARTS, which allowed people to plot the meanings of words on graphs (like near "good" but far from "relaxed"). The results were that people with similar backgrounds and interests plooted words similarly. This indicates that words have similar connotations (implied meaning) for cultures or subcultures.