GLOSSARY

1. Alzheimer’s disease: a progressive degeneration of the brain which results, among

other things, in the general dissolution of memory, cognition, and language.
2. American Sign Language (ASL): a language used by the deaf or hearing impaired in
the United States. It is based on manual and facial movement.
3. Aphasia: the dissolution af language and speech caused by damage of the brain, most
typically, in the central area of the left hemisphere: cf. Broca’s aphasia and Wernick’s
aphasia.
4. Aphasiology: the study of the verbal behavior of the aphasies in an attempt to better
understand the ways in which the brain processes and produces language.
5. Articulation: the third stage of speech production, after the words and phrases have
been conceptualized and formulated. At this stage, thay are translated into the sounds
and syllables of actual speech.
6. Autism: a disease, the causes of which are unknown, that is manifested in infancy and
characterized by extreme asocial behavior and the absence of normal language
acquisition.
7. Autonomic Transition Networks (ATNs): a model of neurolinguistics which claims
that much of langauge is produced by means of chains of associated words.
8. Autonomic: the part of the nervous system that automatically controls the body
functions necessary for life, and thus areas of the brain not directly responsible for
language and speech.
9. Babbling: strings of consonant-vowel syllable clusters produced by infants. Emerging
during the second six months of baby’s life, this stage of language production is the
first indication that an infant is actually learning sounds in its mother tongue.
10. Bathtub effect: the tendency to remember the beginnings and ends of words better
than the middle portions.
11. Broca’s aphasia: also called motor or expressive aphasia, that is the loss of the ability
to produce words or speak fluently because of damage to Broca’s area: cf. Wernick’s
aphasia.
12. Broca’s area: the lower portion of the motor cortex of the brain (just above the left
ear, in front of Wernick’s area) which is responsible for the production of words and
sentences: cf. Wernick’s area.
13. Canalization: the laying down of neural pathways in the young brain in response to
repeated exposure and practice (e.g. the neurological basis for the ability of children
to produce the sounds of their mother tongue accurately).
14. Canonical babbling: the repetition of syllables of infants beginning at about eight
months of age which first shows that they are acquiring distinct features of the mother
tongue, e.g. Chinese babies begin to babble with tones.
15. Categorical perception: listening to a stream of speech and automatically dividing
this continuous flow of sounds into the phonemes of the listener’s native language.
16. Coarticualtion: the assimilation of phonemes into those which immediately precede
or follow them in the stream of speech, thus distorting their normal articulation and
making identification difficult.
17. Competence: implicit knowledge we have about the language(s) we speak, e.g. we
can easily identify an ungrammatical sentence even though we may not be able to
describe what rule(s) it violates: cf. Performance.
18. Conceptualization: the first and most abstract stage of speech production where the
speaker makes the decisions about how to frame an idea into language.
19. Cooing: in contrast to crying, infants at this early stage of oral production express
‘coos’ of contentment which area precursors to babbling.
20. Corpus callosum: a wide sheath of association pathways which serves to transmit
information between the two cerebral hemisphere, making it almost impossible, in the
normal brain, for one hemisphere to store data inaccessible to the other.
21. Creative construction: concerns the tendency of young children acquiring their
mother tongue to come up with overgeneralizations about the language which they
have never been exposed to (e.g. I’m hacking up!)
22. Critical period: hypothetically, approximately the first ten years of life. Some
linguistics believe that certain aspects of language acquisition (e.g. sounding like a
native speaker) can never be fully acquired if they have not been learned during this
time.
23. Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC): a now discredited theory that the
psycholinguistic difficulty of a sentence, as measured by memory load or processing
time, is directly proportional to the number of grammatical rules contained in that
utterance.
24. Developmental psycholinguistics: the examination of how infants and children
acquire the ability to comprehend and speak their mother tongue.
25. Diachronic: studying linguistic change over time in contrast to looking at language as
it is used at a given moment: cf. Synchronic.
26. Down syndrome: an inherited disease which often results in significant loss of
cognitive processing capacity, but which does not inhibit language acquisition to a
corresponding degree.
27. Egocentric speech: a term used by Piaget and others to characterize the way the
language of young children appears to both reflect and shape their early thinking.
28. Equipotential: the neurological notion those, especially in young brains, most areas
of the cerebral cortex are free to be programmed for the processing of a wide range of
cognitive or linguistic functions.
29. Errors: the production of incorrect forms in speech or writing by a non-native
speaker of a second language, the result of incomplete knowledge of the rules of that
target language: cf. Mistakes.
30. Feedback loop: the sensory information the body provides during the production of
speech which allows the speaker to monitor and adjust the articulation of individual
sounds and words.
31. Formulation: the second stage of speech production, after conceptualization, when
the message is framed into words, phrases and clauses by the speaker.
32. Garden-pathing: the phenomenon in the comprehension on sentences that the
sequence of words tends to create in us a certain expectation about their meaning.
This may or may not be confirmed by the remainder of the sentence.
33. Hemispherectomy: the surgical removal of either the left or right hemisphere of the
brain of a child as an extreme measure against a life-threatening illness or
neurological condition.
34. Holophrastic: term used to describe one-word sentence used by small children but
also found in adults speech (e.g. Milk? Here)
35. Iconic: one-to-one relationships between signs and their referents (e.g. lowering the
pitch of your voice on ‘deep’ when you describe someone by saying he ‘speaks in a
deep voice’): cf. Symbolic.
36. Idiomorphs: words small children invent in their initial attempts to acquire a
language (e.g. ‘wa wa’ for ‘cat’)
37. Imagistic thinking: the visual components of the conceptualization of language that
is ultimately manifested in the gestures which accompany speech: cf. Syntactic
thinking.
38. Innateness: the theory that ascribes a major part of language learning to genetically
packaged knowledge which is then triggered, after birth, by exposure to large amounts
of linguistic input: see Language Acquisition Device and Universal Grammar.
39. Johnson Theory: the behaviorally-based explanation for stuttering which claims it is
largely caused by the undue attention paid by parents and/or teachers to a child with
the aim of encouraging correct articulation: cf. Orton/Travis Theory.
40. Language Acquisition Device (LAD): according to Chomsky, the innate mental
mechanism design uniquely for the acquisition of language. See innateness and
Universal Grammar.
41. Logogen: the cumulative information we store about a word we are comprehending,
and which we use to guess its meaning.
42. Long Term Memory (LTM): memory as we normally think of it, whether it is of an
event from childhood or of the name of a person we have just met: cf. Short Term
Memory.
43. Marginal babbling: an infant’s initial attempts to produce syllables, usually
beginning at the age of about six months: canonical babbling.
44. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU): the average number of morphemes an infant
produces in its utterances. Researchers use this as a measure of the complexity of a
child’s early speech production.
45. Mentalistic: relying on logic and intuition rather than directly observable
experimental evidence to support a hypothesis.
46. Mistakes: the production of incorrect forms in speech or writing, the result of factors
such as carelessness or fatigue. All speakers make mistakes, whether they are native
or non-native users of the target language. Cf. Errors.
47. Mnemonists: people with super-normal abilities to remember large amounts of
information (e.g. someone who can recite an entire play or book from memory.)
48. Modular: independent from other forms of cognition – the belief that language
acquisition is greatly facilitated by a special faculty of the human mind uniquely
designed for language and speech.
49. Morphology: the study of the structure of words or the structural patterns of the
words in any particular language.
50. Motor cortex: a small vertical strip of brain roughly ion the mid portion of both
hemispheres which is primarily responsible for initiating complex muscular
movement, as in the articulation of speech sounds: cf. Sensory cortex.
51. Neurolinguistics: the branch of psycholinguistics which investigates the use of
language in experimental or clinical conditions as a window to the way in which the
brain produces and processes linguistic information.
52. Neuroplasticity: the capacity of young child’s brain to allocate different areas of the
cortex for complex human behavior such as language
53. Orton/Travis theory an innatist explanation for stuttering that claim that genetic, not
environmental factor are primarily responsible for this disability.
54. Parallel distributed processing (PDP) a model of cognition that attempts to account
for complex behavior such as the processing and the production of speech by positing
the existence of completely but concurrent and parallel cognitive systems operating at
the same time
55. Performance words actually spoken and written: the explicit physical manifestation
of our intuitive linguistics competence
56. Phoneme monitoring a task used in experiments. Subject are asked to listen to a
sentence and to press a button as soon as they hear a certain sound. Their reaction
time is a direct measure of the complexity of the sentence.
57. Phoneme restoration effect a device employed psycholinguist to investigate
comprehension for example hear “ail” describing how water gathered and believed
they heard the word “ pail”
58. Phrases structure rules the syntactic skeleton of sentence, which specifies all the
major constituents which must be accounted for in that particular utterance. For
example, “the kitchen drank the milk” can be subdivided into a noun phrase the
kitchen and a verb phrase drank the milk.
59. Pivot word used by young children either to begin or end a two words utterance ( hi
mommy, hi kitty, or a milk all gone, mommy all gone.)
60. Position emission tomography (PET) the use of mildly radioactive dye in the blood
to measure the flow of blood in patient’s brain. This can reveal the way neurological
disorders such as tumors can affect the way the brain programs speaking or listening.
61. Pragmatics the study of what people mean when they use language in normal social
interaction.
62. Priming covertly eliciting a certain word in a psycholinguistics experiment
63. Psycholinguistics the study of the normal and abnormal use of language and speech
to gain a better understanding of the human mind functions
64. Psychologically real description of the way in which the structures and categories of
a particular language appears to affect a person ability to process linguistics
information.
65. Psychology of language a synonym for psycholinguistics
66. Rate the amount of time it takes children to learn a specific sound, structure or
specified number of words. Language acquisition rates vary a great deal among very
young children.
67. Resonance the combined harmonics made by the vocal tract in the articulation of any
speech sound.
68. Schematic knowledge specific information which we bring to any new situation
based on our accumulated experience with similar situation
69. Second language acquisition (SLA) the study of how people acquire an additional
language, often by means of any analysis of the errors they make.
70. Segmental phoneme vowels and consonants: sounds which are relatively easy to
divide into individual units of sound
71. Self monitoring the fourth and the final stage of speech production, when we edit our
message and correct any errors.
72. Sensory cortex the narrow strip of brain parallel to the motor cortex which is
primarily responsible for the processing of all sensory information to the brain and
which controls our ability to comprehend speech.
73. Short term memory (SIM) also called working memory. On very limited ability to
remember new information without storing it in to long term memory
74. Slip of the tongue mistake in speech (or in writing) which provided vide
psycholinguistic evidence for the way we formulate the words and phrases
75. Sociolinguistics. In its large sense, the study of language and society, or more
narrowly, how social factors influence linguistics structure in use.
76. Split brain operation. Rarely performed surgery where the corpus callosum is either
partially or entirely severed to spare a patient from the severe epileptic seizures. It can
create unusual neuropsychological constraints
77. Spoonerism slips of the tongue with create new phrases with often unintended or
humorous meaning. (ex; “the breast in the bed” instead of “ the best in the bread”)
78. Spreading activation network the neurolinguistic model which posits that repeated
use of certain words or phrases in the same context will create neuronal network that
facilitate rapid recognition of production of these words.
79. Stage irrespective of their rate of language acquisition, all children appear to progress
through the same stage or sequences of development (ex children “why mommy is
leaving now?; why is mommy leaving now?)
80. Suprasegmental is feature of speech beyond the individual sound such as pitch,
stress, rhythm, and intonation
81. Symbolic are signs which have a random and arbitrary relationship with their
referents (ex: sun is small word but for large object; micro organism is large word but
fro small tiny object)
82. Synchronic is studying language and speech as they are used at a given moment and
not in term of how they have involved over time.
83. Syntactic thinking is thinking in word in linear, sequential manner.
84. Tip of the tongue (TOT) a phenomenon we experience when trying to retrieve word
we know, but are still unable to recall at that moment.
85. Transformational generative (TG) grammar Chomsky’s model of grammar which
posits a set of grammatical rule, or ‘transformation’ which operate in phrases structure
to generate all and only the sentence of a language.
86. Tuning is making minor revision in a hypothesis to accommodate new data ( ex child
who believe that all past tense form end with ‘ed’ creates the word wanted after
hearing went used to indicated past time)
87. Universal grammar (UG) an abstract set of rules and principles that govern the
syntax of all language and which many linguists believe to be innately specified in all
human
88. Voice onset timing (VOT) the brief burst of air which precedes the articulation of all
stop consonants, and which provides phonetic information listener use to distinguish
between sound like /k/ and /g/
89. Wernicke’s aphasia loss of the ability to comprehend speech or written language as a
result of damage to Wernick’s area of the brain.
90. Wernicke’s area. The lower portion of the sensory cortex of the brain (just above the
left ear behind broca’s area) which is responsible for the processing of most speech
and language.