Glossary

ABX discrimination task A test in which participants hear two different stimuli followed by a third that is identical to one of the first two. Participants must decide whether the third stimulus is the same as the first or the second.

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.

age-of-acquisition effect The finding that words acquired earlier in life are processed more efficiently and tend to be recognized more quickly than later-acquired words.

agglutinative language A language in which words are formed by joining morphemes together. Syntax is expressed by multiple bound affixes and not by changes in position, form, stress, or tone of the root word. Each affix typically represents a single unit of meaning (such as tense or plural), and affixes do not change form in response to other affixes or different root words.

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.

amusia Loss of the capacity to make sense of music (but not of language).

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 of the stimulus The argument that there is not enough input available to children to 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: ph, th, and kh.

assembled phonology route According to the dual route theory, the means by which graphemes 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.

associationist theories Domain-general theories of learning that emphasize learning that takes place when items become associated in memory through experience.

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.

auditory verbal agnosia “Pure word deafness,” a condition in which people hear speech as meaningless or garbled sound but usually can speak, read, or write without any trouble; their ability to process non-speech sounds, including music, seems to be mostly intact.

autism spectrum disorder (ASD) A neurological condition that impairs the ability to coordinate 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.

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.

binding constraints Structurally based constraints on the possible antecedents of personal pronouns such as she or him and on reflexive pronouns such as himself or themselves.

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.

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 architecture Fundamental characteristics of the mind’s structure that specify how different cognitive components interact with each other.

cognitive control (executive function) The goal-directed cognitive processes responsible for directing 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.

compensation for coarticulation Phenomenon in which the perception of speech automatically adjusts to take into account the tendency for sounds to be pronounced differently in different phonetic environments; thus, the same ambiguous sound may be perceived differently, depending on the adjacent sounds.

complementary distribution Separation of two allophones into completely different, non-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 framework A framework for implementing the process by which items become associated in memory, involving interconnected networks of units.

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.

constructionist account A syntactic framework that rejects the notion of a strict separation between memorized lexical items and combinatorial procedures, and relies instead on structural templates that combine abstract information with detailed information regarding specific words or phrases.

constructions Templates that specify the structure and corresponding meaning of a phrase, and that vary in how narrowly or broadly they apply.

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 the basis of expectations about the speaker’s probable communicative goals and behavior.

conversational repair A speaker’s revision or correction of a segment of speech that was previously uttered or initiated, and is deemed by the speaker to be unsatisfactory.

corpus callosum A bundle of neural fibers that connects and transfers information between the two hemispheres of the brain.

crossmodal priming task An experimental task involving both spoken and written modalities. Participants typically hear prime words (which are often embedded within full sentences) and then must respond to test words displayed orthographically on a computer screen.

cross-sectional studies Studies that test and compare different groups at a single point in time.

cue weighting The process of prioritizing the acoustic cues that signal a sound distinction, such that some cues will have greater weight than others.

cultural transmission view of language change The notion that languages change over time to adapt to the human mind, with all the constraints, limitations, and abilities that human minds bring to the task of learning or using language. This view stands in contrast to the nativist view, which holds that the human mind has changed over time because it has become adapted for the requirements of language.

decay function The rate at which information fades in memory, such that information that has become activated gradually returns to a baseline level of activation.

declarative memory Memory for facts and events (whether real or fictional) that can be spoken of (“declared”).

dendrites Neuronal extensions that receive informational “input” from other neurons.

derivational affixes Affixes that transform a word of one category into a word of a different category or significantly change the meaning of the word; e.g., the affix -er turning the verb own into the noun owner, or the affix pre- changing the meaning of the word view (whether either view or preview is used as a noun or verb).

developmental dyslexia A common learning disability that leads to difficulties in learning to read that are not caused by other known language disorders or learning disabilities.

dichotic listening Experimental task in which subjects listen to spoken words over headphones, with a different word spoken into each ear.

differential case marking A system of case marking in which case markers appear selectively on some but not all noun phrases. For example, object case marking may be limited to appearing with animate nouns.

diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) Neuroimaging technique that tracks how water molecules are diffused in the brain, providing a view of the brain’s “white matter highway.”

direct route According to the dual route theory of reading, the means by which a series of orthographic symbols is directly connected with the meaning of a word, without involving sound-symbol correspondences.

dissimilation processes Speech processes in which putting together sounds that share a feature results in one of them flipping its voicing feature to the opposite value.

distributional evidence The tendency of words or types of words to appear in certain syntactic contexts, allowing extrapolation of these tendencies to newly learned words.

ditransitive verbs Verbs that occur with a direct object and an indirect object (which may be introduced by a preposition).

domain-general learning Learning by mechanisms that aren’t limited to learning language.

domain-general perspective In regard to specific language impairment, the view that the linguistic deficit is only one effect of more general cognitive problems that also affect non-linguistic processes.

domain-specific learning Learning by mechanisms that are strictly devoted to language.

domain-specific perspective In regard to specific language impairment, the view that the linguistic deficit strikes at mechanisms that are particular to language, rather than mechanisms that are shared with other cognitive abilities.

dorsal stream Theoretical “knowledge stream” of dorsal neural connections (i.e., located in the upper portion of the brain) that process knowledge about “how.”

double dissociation Neuropsychological evidence for the independence of two mental processes; it comes from observing cases where the first process is impaired but the second is spared, and conversely, where the second process is impaired but the first is spared.

dual route model A theory of reading proposing that two distinct pathways—the direct route and the assembled phonology route—link written symbols (graphemes) with meaning.

duality of patterning The concept that language works at two general levels, with meaningless units of sound combining into meaningful units (usually words) and these meaningful units combine into a larger pattern of meaningful syntactic units.

elaborative inference Refers to inferences that are not required in order to make a discourse coherent but that enrich the meanings of sentences to include material not explicitly encoded on the linguistic content of the sentence.

electroencephalography (EEG) The use of electrodes placed on the scalp to measure changes in electrical voltage over large numbers of neurons in the brain, thus obtaining information about the timing of responses in the brain.

esoteric languages Languages spoken by linguistic communities that tend to be small and insular; esoteric languages are typically limited to a homogenous group, and have few non-native speakers.

event-related potential (ERP) The change in electrical voltage (the potential) over large numbers of brain neurons, measured with EEG and lined up with the presentation of a relevant stimulus (the event).

evolutionary adaptation A genetically transmitted trait that gives its bearers an advantage—specifically, it helps those with the trait to stay alive long enough to reproduce and/or to have many offspring.

excitatory connections Connections along which activation is passed from one unit to another, so that the more active a unit becomes, the more it increases the activation of a unit it is linked to.

exoteric languages Languages spoken by linguistic communities that tend to be large and diverse; exoteric languages are often used to communicate with people of a variety of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, and typically have a high proportion of non-native speakers.

explanation-based view A theoretical perspective that views discourse processing as a goal-driven process in which an active reader is guided by a search for meaning. This view proposes that discourse can be processed differently depending on the reader’s goals and the degree to which the reader searches for a coherent interpretation of the text and attempts to generate explanations about why certain entities and actions are mentioned in the text.

facilitation Processes that make it easier for word recognition to be completed.

false-belief test A test intended to probe for the ability to recognize that the mental state of another person can be different from one’s own. In the typical false-belief test, the subject learns some new information that has the effect of altering a previous belief. The subject is then asked to report on the belief state of another person who has not been privy to the new information.

familiarization phase A preparation period during which subjects are exposed to stimuli that will serve as the basis for the test phase to follow.

focus constructions Syntactic structures that have the effect of putting special emphasis or focus on certain elements within the sentence.

forced-choice identification task An experimental task in which subjects are required to categorize stimuli as falling into one of two categories, regardless of the degree of uncertainty they may experience about the identity of a particular stimulus.

frequency effect In word recognition, the finding that less frequent words tend to be recognized more slowly than more frequent words.

fricative A sound that is produced when your tongue narrows the airflow in a way that produces a turbulent sound; e.g., “s,” “f,” or “z.”

functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) Neuroimaging technique that uses magnetic fields to measure hemodynamic changes in the brain while the brain is engaged in a task, on the assumption that such changes are a measure of brain activity.

Ganong effect An effect in which listeners perceive the same ambiguous sound differently depending on which word it is embedded within; for example, a sound that is ambiguous between /t/ and /d/ will be perceived as /t/ when it appears in the context of _ask but as /d/ in the context of _ash.

garden path sentences Sentences that are difficult to understand because they contain a temporary ambiguity. The tendency is for hearers or readers to initially interpret the ambiguous structure incorrectly, and then experience confusion when that initial interpretation turns out to be grammatically incompatible with later material in the sentence.

garden path theory A theory of parsing that claims that an initial “first-pass” structure is built during comprehension using a restricted amount of grammatical information and guided by certain parsing principles or tendencies, such as the tendency to build the simplest structure possible. Evaluations of plausible meanings or consideration of the context only come into play at a later stage of parsing.

generative With respect to language, a quality of language that allows us to use whatever we know about language structure to recognize and generate new examples of never-before-encountered sentences.

glide A sound that is produced when you obstruct the airflow only mildly, allowing most of it to pass through the mouth; e.g., “w” or “y.”

graphemes Written symbols, analogous to phonemes in spoken language. Individual graphemes may or may not correspond to individual phonemes (for example, two graphemes are used to represent the sound /k/ in sick).

Greenberg’s linguistic universals A set of observations about common or universal structural patterns across a sample of 30 languages by Joseph Greenberg. Published in 1963, Greenberg’s observations are still used as the basis of a great deal of inquiry in language typology.

habituation Decreased response to a stimulus after repeated presentations of that stimulus.

head-turn preference paradigm An experimental framework in which infants’ speech preference or learning is measured by the length of time they turn their heads in the direction of a sound.

head The central element of a constituent; for example, the head of a prepositional phrase is the preposition.

heavy-NP shift A syntactic structure in which a long noun phrase, usually a direct object, is moved toward the end of the sentence instead of in its normal spot adjacent to the verb.

hemodynamic changes Changes in blood oxygen levels and direction of blood flow.

heuristics Shallow but very fast information-processing shortcuts that often lead to incorrect conclusions based on superficial cues.

hierarchical Top-down (or bottom-up) arrangement of categories. With respect to language, a quality that involves how words group together into constituents, which in turn can group together with other words or constituents to form ever-larger constituents.

Hockett’s design features A set of characteristics proposed by linguist Charles Hockett to be universally shared by all human languages. Some but not all of the features are also found in various animal communication systems.

homesign A personal communication system initiated by a deaf person to communicate through gestures with others who, like the deaf person, do not know sign language.

homographs Words that are spelled exactly the same but have separate, non-overlapping meanings (and may or may not sound the same).

homophones Two or more words that have separate, non-overlapping meanings but sound exactly the same (even though they may be spelled differently).

iambic stress pattern Syllable emphasis pattern in which the first syllable is unstressed, as in reTURN.

iconicity A property of a symbol whereby the symbol’s form bears some resemblance to the meaning it is intended to communicate.

ideophones A class of words, often with special linguistic properties, in which sounds are used to convey information about sensory information related to size, texture, or certain aspects of motion.

idiom A phrase with an idiosyncratic meaning (e.g. “let the cat out of the bag”) that cannot be predicted compositionally on the basis of the combination of its individual words.

implicational universals Crosslinguistic generalizations that are formulated as conditional statements (e.g., “If a language has A, then it has B”).

implicit causality Expectations about the probable cause/effect structure of events denoted by particular verbs.

incrementality The property of synthesizing and building meaning “on the fly” based on partial information as speech unfolds, rather than delaying processing until some amount of linguistic material has accumulated.

incremental language processing The processing of language in such a way that hearers begin to generate hypotheses about the meaning of the incoming speech on the basis of partial acoustic information, refining and revising these hypotheses on the fly rather than waiting until there is enough information in the speech stream for the hearer to be certain about what the speaker meant.

infixes Affixes “shoehorned” into the middle of a word (not found in English).

inflectional affixes Affixes that serve as grammatical reflexes or markers, the presence of which is dictated by the grammatical rules of a language; e.g., in English the affixes -ed and -ing change the tense of a verb. (Note that in English, only suffixes are inflectional affixes.)

inhibition Processes that result in word recognition becoming more difficult.

inhibitory connections Connections that lower the activation of connected units, so that the more active a unit becomes, the more it suppresses the activation of a unit it is linked to.

interactive alignment model A theory of dialogue that minimizes the role of representing a conversational partner’s perspective or mental state. Rather, much of the alignment that emerges between conversational partners is attributed to automatic mechanisms of priming in memory.

interactive mind design A view of the mind’s structure in which higher, more abstract levels of knowledge (usually what we think of as “more intelligent” levels of knowledge) can directly inform lower-level perception.

interstimulus interval (ISI) The amount of time between the offset of the prime and the onset of the target.

intransitive verbs Verbs that take a subject but no object, such as (Joe) sneezes or (Keesha) laughs.

ions Electrically charged particles; the charge can be positive or negative. Ions that are especially important in neural signaling include sodium (Na+), potassium (K+), calcium (Ca2+), and chloride (Cl–).

it-cleft sentence A type of focus construction in which a single clause has been split into two, typically with the form “It is/was X that/who Y.” The element corresponding to X in this frame is focused. For example, in the sentence It was Sam who left Fred, the focus is on Sam.

joint attention The awareness between two or more individuals that they are paying attention to the same thing.

language typologists Researchers who study the ways in which languages vary with the aim of describing and explaining crosslinguistic variation.

lemma An abstract mental representation of a word containing information about its meaning and syntactic category, but not about its sounds.

length effect In word recognition, the finding that longer words tend to be recognized more slowly than shorter words.

lexical bias The statistical tendency for sound-based speech errors to result in actual words rather than non-words.

lexical co-occurrence patterns Information about which words tend to appear adjacent to each other in a given data set.

lexical decision task An experimental task in which participants read strings of letters on a screen that might either be actual words (doctor) or nonsense words (domter). Subjects press one button if they think they’ve seen a real word, and a different button to signal that the letters formed a nonsense word. Response times for real words are taken as a general measure of the ease of recognizing those words under specific experimental conditions.

lexical entrainment The tendency to link a previously used expression with a particular referent.

lexical representation Information that is committed to long-term memory about the sound and meaning properties of words, and certain constraints on their syntactic combination.

linguistic code The system of symbols and combinatory rules that are conventionally agreed upon by a community of language users as conveying specific meanings. Often, the linguistic code is not enough to fully convey the speaker’s intended meaning, so that hearers must augment the linguistic code with inferences based on the context.

linguistic competence Underlying knowledge about linguistic representations and the rules for combining them.

linguistic input The totality of linguistic forms that a child is exposed to in his or her environment.

linguistic intake The totality of linguistic information that is successfully processed and internalized by the child as representations that are the basis for learning.

linguistic performance The execution of linguistic competence in speaking or comprehending.

liquid sound A sound that is produced when you let air escape over both sides of your tongue; e.g., “l” or “r.”

logographic writing system Writing system in which symbols are mapped to units of meaning such as morphemes or words rather than to units of sound.

long-distance dependencies Relationships between constituents widely separated from each other in a sentence.

longitudinal studies Studies in which the same group or multiple groups are studied over time, with comparisons made between different time points.

magnetoencephalography (MEG) A technique related to electroencephalography that detects changes in magnetic fields caused by the brain’s electrical activity.

masked priming A priming task in which the prime word is presented subliminally, that is, too quickly to be consciously recognized.

maxims of cooperative conversation A set of communicative expectations that are shared by speakers and hearers regarding how speakers typically behave in order to be understood by hearers. The four maxims—Quality, Relation, Quantity, and Manner—are attributed to the philosopher H. P. Grice.

McGurk effect An illusion in which the mismatch between auditory information and visual information pertaining to a sound’s articulation results in altered perception of that sound; for example, when people hear an audio recording of a person uttering the syllable ba while viewing a video of the speaker uttering ga, they often perceive the syllable as da.

mediated semantic priming The process by which a prime word (e.g., lion) speeds up responses to a target word (e.g., stripes) not because of a direct connection between lion and stripes, but due to an indirect connection via some other intervening word (e.g., tiger).

memory-driven account In the context of discourse comprehension, a theoretical view in which discourse processing is an automatic process involving linguistic cues that act as signals to activate certain representations in memory. Successful discourse linking depends upon how strong the cue is to retrieve linked information in memory and the extent to which the appropriate old information can be activated.

mental age A person’s overall level of cognitive functioning, related to the chronological age of a person with typical development.

mental models (situation models) Detailed conceptual representations of real-world situations that are evoked by language.

minimal pair A pair of words that have different meanings but all of the same sounds, with the exception of one phoneme (e.g., tan and man).

mixed errors Speech errors that involve similarities of both sound and meaning.

modular mind design View of the mind’s structure in which higher levels of processing never directly influence the lower levels; instead, the higher levels integrate information based on lower-level processes, interpret it, and pass these interpretations on to even higher levels.

mondegreens “Slips of the ear” that result in errors of word segmentation.

morphemes The smallest bundles of sound that can be related to some systematic meaning.

motor theory of speech perception A theory that the perception of speech sounds involves accessing representations of the articulatory gestures that are required to make those speech sounds.

moving window paradigm A version of the self-paced reading task in which dashes initially replace each alphabetic character in a sentence, and participants press a button to successively “uncover” each portion of the sentence. This method of presentation simulates a fairly natural reading rhythm.

mutual exclusivity bias A general bias to line up object categories and linguistic labels in a one-to-one correspondence.

n-back task A test of working memory and cognitive control in which participants view sequences of symbols and have to maintain a certain number of previous letters symbols in memory and respond affirmatively when a symbol is repeated at a specified interval. The test can occur with lures (distractor symbols that repeat at intervals close to the specified one) or without lures. The version with lures increases the demands on cognitive control.

N400 An ERP in which a waveform shows a negative voltage peak about 400 ms.

nasal stop A stop consonant made by lowering the velum in a way that lets the air pass through your nose; e.g., “m,” “n,” and the “ŋ” sound in words like sing or fang.

nativist view The view that not only are humans genetically programmed to have a general capacity for language, particular aspects of language ability are also genetically specified.

natural classes Groups of sounds that share many articulatory features and tend to be targeted together by phonological rules.

neighborhood density effects Experimental results demonstrating that it is more difficult and time-consuming to retrieve a word from memory if the word bears a strong phonological resemblance to many other words in the vocabulary than if resembles only a few other words.

neurolinguists Scientists who study how the physical brain relates to language behavior.

neurotransmitter Molecules produced by a neuron and released across a synapse in response to an action potential. Neurotransmitters bind to receptors on a receiving cell (another neuron or a muscle cell), producing a response in the second cell.

noun phrase (NP) An abstract, higher-order syntactic category that can consist of a single word or of many words, but in which the main syntactic element is a noun, pronoun, or proper name.

object relative clause An embedded clause in which the referent that is shared between the main and embedded clauses is linked to the object position of the embedded clause (e.g., I saw the cat that the dog chased).

onomatopoeia The use of language sounds to imitate non-linguistic sounds, as in the words moo or bang.

onset The material in a syllable that precedes the vowel.

oral stop A stop consonant made by fully blocking air in the mouth and not allowing it to leak out through the nose; e.g., “p,” “t,” and “k.”

over-extension Mapping new words onto categories that are too general—for instance, referring to all animals as doggie.

overspecification The degree to which a language’s morphological system attaches semantic information about an event to a word stem.

P600 An ERP effect in which a waveform shows a positive voltage peak about 600 ms.

paralinguistic use The use or manipulation of sounds for emphasis, clarification of meaning, or emotional color, but not as an element in the composition of words or sentences.

parsing The process of assigning syntactic structure to the incoming words of a sentence during language comprehension. The structure-building mechanisms and procedures collectively are often referred to as “the parser”; the term does not refer to an individual.

particle A syntactic marker, often lacking a specific meaning, that accompanies other syntactic elements.

pedagogical stance A receptive mindset adopted by the learner in response to cues that signal that an interactive partner is intending to convey some new and relevant information.

perceptual invariance The ability to perceive sounds that have highly variable acoustic manifestations as instances of the same sound category.

perceptual narrowing Perceptual changes that result in decreased sensitivity to certain sound distinctions, particularly those not phonemically relevant in the native language.

phonation Production of sound by the vibrating vocal folds.

phoneme An abstract sound category that represents the smallest unit of sound that changes the meaning of a word; often identified by forward slashes; e.g., /t/ is a phoneme in English because replacing it in the word tan (e.g., with the similar sound /d/) makes a different word.

phoneme restoration effect An effect in which a non-speech sound that shares certain acoustic properties with a speech sound is heard as both a non-speech and speech sound, when embedded within a word that leads to a strong expectation for that particular speech sound.

phonemic awareness The conscious recognition of phonemes as distinct units, usually only solidly acquired by individuals who are literate in an alphabetic writing system.

phonemic inventory A list of the different phonemes in a language.

phonetics The study of the physical (i.e., acoustic and articulatory) properties of speech.

phonology The study of the abstract representations and rules that allow the sounds of a language to be mentally organized into patterns.

phonotactic constraints Language-specific constraints that determine how the sounds of a given language may be combined to form words or syllables.

phrase structure rules Rules that provide a set of instructions about how individual words can be clumped into higher-order categories and how these categories are combined to create well-formed sentences.

polysemous words Words that can convey a constellation of related, but different meanings, such as the various related meanings of paper, which can, among other meanings, refer to a specific material or a news outlet.

positron emission tomography (PET) Neuroimaging technique that uses radioactivity to measure hemodynamic changes.

postsynaptic potentials Temporary changes in the electric voltage of neurons that result from the release of a neurotransmitter.

pragmatic meaning The aspect of meaning that that is not available directly from the linguistic code, but that must be inferred on the basis of the contextual information or information about the speaker’s likely intentions.

predictive inference A type of elaborative inference that involves making predictions about the likely outcome of an event described by a sentence.

prefixes Affixes attached at the front end of a word; e.g., un-, pre-.

prepositional phrase (PP) A syntactic constituent, or higher-order category, that in English consists of a preposition (e.g., in, under, before) followed by an NP.

presupposition An implicit assumption that is signaled by specific linguistic expressions and whose existence or truth is taken for granted as background information.

principles and parameters theory A theory claiming that children’s language learning is dramatically constrained with the help of innate syntactic “options” or “parameter switches” that restrict the possible syntactic structures children can infer. Language learning is said to consist largely of checking the input to see which of the constrained set of options apply to the language being learned.

procedural memory Memory for actions and sequences of actions.

productivity The ability to use known symbols or linguistic units in new combinations to communicate ideas.

proposition The core meaning of a sentence as expressed by its linguistic content. This core meaning captures the real-world event or the situation that would have to occur in order for that sentence to be judged to be true.

prosody The rhythm, stress, and intonation of a spoken phrase or sentence.

psycholinguistics The study of the psychological factors involved in the perception, production, and acquisition of language.

reading span test A behavioral test intended to measure an individual’s verbal working memory. The test involves having the individual read a sequence of sentences while holding the last word of each sentence in memory. The number of words successfully remembered corresponds to that individual’s memory span.

recursion Repeated iterations. With respect to language, refers to syntactic embeddings that nest constituents (such as clauses or NPs) within other constituents in a potentially infinite manner.

reduced relative clause A grammatical structure in English involving a relative clause in which certain function words have been omitted (e.g., the reduced relative clause raced past the barn derives from the full relative clause that was raced past the barn). This structure often leads to ambiguity.

referential communication task An experimental task in which speakers refer to a specific target object in the context of a number of other objects. The method may be used to probe the behavior of either speakers or hearers. Speakers are faced with the task of choosing a linguistic expression that successfully distinguishes the target object from the other objects that are present. Hearers are required to successfully identify the target object based on the speakers’ choice of linguistic expression. The task may vary the nature of the objects that are present, the linguistic descriptions of the objects, or various aspects of the interactive context.

referential transparency The degree to which the referent of a word is indicated by clues in the referential context in which the word is used.

relative clause A clause that is embedded within the main clause and shares a referent with the main clause.

repeated-name penalty The finding that under some circumstances, it takes longer to read a sentence in which a highly salient referent is referred to by a full noun phrase (NP) rather than by a pronoun.

repetition suppression A phenomenon in which the repetition of the same stimulus over time leads to a decrease in neural activity in the regions of the brain that process that type of stimulus; a subsequent change in the stimulus leads to an increase in neural activity when the stimulus is perceived as different from the repeated stimulus.

reverse cohesion effect The finding that under some circumstances, readers retain more information from a text in which the coherence relations between sentences are not made explicit and must be inferred by the reader.

rime The material in a syllable that includes the vowel and anything that follows.

rule-based account A syntactic framework that posits a sharp boundary between memorized lexical representations and abstract rules that combine units in a compositional way.

scalar implicature A type of conversational implicature that occurs when a speaker chooses a relatively vague expression rather than a stronger, more specific one. In many contexts, the speaker’s choice of linguistic expression leads the hearer to infer that the speaker has used the weaker, vaguer expression because the stronger one would be inaccurate under the circumstances.

self-paced reading task A behavioral task intended to measure processing difficulty at various points in a sentence. Subjects read through sentences on a computer screen, one word or phrase at a time, pressing a button to advance through the sentence. A program records the amount of time each subject spends reading each segment.

semantic bootstrapping hypothesis The idea that children’s learning of syntactic structure relies on word meanings together with the expectation that certain types of meanings align with certain grammatical categories (e.g. assuming that nouns tend to be used to refer to objects or that the subject of a sentence is typically the agent of the action).

semantic meaning The aspect of meaning that can be derived directly from the linguistic code, based on the conventionally agreed-upon meanings of the linguistic expressions involved.

semantic priming The phenomenon through which hearing or reading a word partially activates other words that are related in meaning to that word, making the related words easier to recognize in subsequent encounters.

semantics The meaning of a sentence; the system of rules for interpreting the meaning of a sentence based on its structure.

sensitive period A window of time during which a specific type of learning (such as learning language) takes place more easily than at any other time.

sentential complement verbs Verbs that introduce a clause rather than a direct object noun phrase (NP).

shadowing task An experimental task in which subjects are asked to repeat the words of a speaker’s sentence almost as quickly as the speaker produces them.

social gating The enhancement of learning through social interaction.

socioeconomic status (SES) An indication of the social and economic status of an individual or group as gleaned from various sources; common measures for assessing a family’s SES include a combination of family income, parental education level, and parental occupation.

sonority hierarchy The ordering of sounds from the most sonorous to the least sonorous.

sonority sequencing principle The crosslinguistic tendency for syllables to be structured in such a way that the sounds with the greatest sonority (i.e., acoustic energy) occur at the center of syllables, with sounds decreasing in sonority toward the edges of the syllable.

specific language impairment (SLI) A disorder in which children fail to develop language normally even though there are no apparent neurological damage or disorders, no general cognitive impairment or delay, no hearing loss, and no abnormal home environment that would explain this failure.

stop consonant A sound produced when airflow is stopped completely somewhere in the vocal tract.

Stroop test Behavioral test in which subjects are required to name the color of the font that a word appears in while ignoring the (possibly conflicting) meaning of the word.

subcategorization information Verb-specific knowledge of the verb’s combinatorial properties.

subcortical Refers to the internal regions of the cerebral hemispheres, those lying beneath the cerebral cortex.

subject relative clause An embedded clause in which the referent that is shared between the main and embedded clauses is linked to the subject position of the embedded clause (e.g., I saw the cat that chased the dog).

subordinate-level categories More specific categories comprising words that encompass a narrow range of referents; e.g., Dalmatian.

suffixes Affixes attached at the end of a word; e.g., -able, -ed, -ing.

superordinate-level categories The more general categories of words that encompass a wide range of referents; e.g., animal.

surprisal A measure that’s inversely related to the statistical predictability of an event such as a particular continuation of a sentence. Processing difficulty is thought to reflect the degree of surprisal at specific points in the sentence, so that less predictable continuations result in greater processing difficulty.

switch task A simple word-mapping test in which infants are exposed to a visual representation of an object paired with an auditory stimulus during a habituation phase. During the subsequent test phase, the infants hear either the same object–word pairing, or they hear a new word paired with the familiar object. A difference in looking times between the novel and familiar pairings is taken as evidence that the child had mapped the original auditory stimulus to the familiar object.

syllabic writing system Writing system in which characters represent different syllables.

synapse Site of connection between the axon terminal of a neuron and the receptors of another neuron or a muscle cell.

syntactic bootstrapping Using the syntactic properties of words to identify and narrow in on those aspects of meaning that words are likely to convey.

syntactic priming A phenomenon in which speakers are more likely to use a particular structure to express an idea if they have recently used the same structure to express a different idea.

syntax The structure of a sentence, specifying how the words are put together. Also refers to a set of rules or constraints for how linguistic elements can be put together.

telegraphic speech Speech that preserves the correct order of words in sentences but drops many of the small function words, such as the, did, or to.

test phase The period in which subjects’ responses to the critical experimental stimuli is tested following a familiarization phase. Often, responses to familiar stimuli are compared with responses to unfamiliar stimuli.

thematic relations Knowledge about verbs that captures information about the events they describe, including how many and what kinds of participants are involved in the events, and the roles the various participants play.

theory of mind (ToM) The ability to grasp the nature of mental states such as beliefs, knowledge, and intentions, and to recognize that different people may have different mental states under different conditions.

tip-of-the-tongue state State of mind experienced by speakers when they have partially retrieved a word (usually its lemma, and perhaps some of its sound structure) but feel that retrieval of its full phonological form is elusive.

transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) A technique that allows researchers to deliver electric current to targeted areas of the brain through the skull and observe the effects of this stimulation on behavioral performance; the connection between behavioral effects and the specific regions targeted provides insight about the role of that brain region in performing the behavioral task.

transitional probability (TP) When applied to syllable sequences, the probability that a particular syllable will occur, given the previous occurrence of another particular syllable.

transitive verbs Verbs that take both a subject and an object, such as (Joe) kicks (the ball) or (Keesha) eats (popcorn).

trigrams Sequences of three words.

trochaic stress pattern Syllable emphasis pattern in which the first syllable is stressed, as in BLACKmail.

unaspirated stop An unvoiced oral stop without aspiration, produced with a relatively short VOT.

under-extension Mapping new words onto categories that are too specific; e.g, referring to a carnation, but not a daisy, as flower.

uniqueness point The point at which there is enough information in the incoming speech stream to allow the hearer to differentiate a single word candidate from its cohort competitors.

universal grammar A hypothetical set of innate learning biases that guide children’s learning processes and constrain the possible structures of human languages.

unvoiced (voiceless) Describes a sound that does not involve simultaneous vibration of the vocal folds; in a voiceless stop followed by a vowel, vibration happens only after a lag (say, more than 20 ms).

velar Describes a sound whose place of articulation is the velum (the soft tissue at the back of the roof of your mouth; see Figure 4.5).

ventral stream Theoretical “knowledge stream” of ventral neural connections (i.e., located in the lower portion of the brain) that process knowledge about “what.”

verb islands Hypothetical syntactic frames that are particular to specific verbs, and that specify (1) whether that verb can combine with nouns to its left or right and/or (2) the roles that the co-occurring nouns can play in an event (e.g., the do-er, the thing that is acted upon, and so on).

vocal folds Also known as “vocal cords,” these are paired “flaps” in the larynx that vibrate as air passes over them. The vibrations are shaped into speech sounds by the other structures (tongue, alveolar ridge, velum, etc.) of the vocal tract.

voiced Describes a sound that involves vibration of the vocal folds; in an oral stop, the vibration happens just about simultaneously with the release of the articulators (say, within about 20 ms) as it does for “b” in the word ban.

voice onset time (VOT) The length of time between the point when a stop consonant is released and the point when voicing begins.

voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) A statistical technique in which individual points in a three-dimensional brain scan image that show evidence of brain damage are correlated with diminished performance on a behavioral test administered to participants undergoing the brain scans.

Wernicke’s aphasia Aphasia associated with fluent speech that is well articulated but often nonsensical, and enormous difficulty in understanding language. Also called sensory aphasia or receptive aphasia.

wh-cleft sentence A type of focus construction in which one clause has been divided into two, with the first clause introduced by a wh- element, as in the sentences What Ravi sold was his old car or Where Joan went was to Finland. In this case, the focused element appears in the second clause (his old car, to Finland).

wh- island constraints Syntactic constraints that prevent wh- words (who, what, where) from being related to certain positions within a sentence.

white matter Bundles of neural tissue (axons) that act as the brain’s information network, allowing products (signaling molecules) from one processing area to be shuttled to another area for further processing.

whole-object bias The (theoretical) assumption by babies that a new word heard in the context of a salient object refers to the whole thing and not to its parts, color, surface, substance, or the action the object is involved in.

Whorf hypothesis The hypothesis that the words and structures of a language can affect how the speakers of that language conceptualize or think about the world.

Williams syndrome (WMS) A genetic syndrome of particular interest to language researchers, in which language function appears to be relatively preserved despite more serious impairments in other areas of cognitive function.