Psycholinguistics Glossary
25 essential terms — because precise language is the foundation of clear thinking in Psycholinguistics.
Showing 25 of 25 terms
A language disorder resulting from brain damage that impairs the ability to produce or comprehend speech.
The ability to use two languages proficiently, involving simultaneous activation and competition between both linguistic systems.
A nonfluent aphasia caused by damage to Broca's area, characterized by effortful speech, impaired grammar, but relatively preserved comprehension.
A model of spoken word recognition in which the initial sounds of a word activate a set of lexical candidates that are narrowed down as more input is received.
An approach to modeling cognition using artificial neural networks of simple processing units that learn through adjusting connection weights.
A biologically constrained time window during which language acquisition occurs most naturally and efficiently.
A specific learning disability characterized by difficulty with accurate or fluent word recognition and poor spelling, often linked to deficits in phonological processing.
A research method that records eye movements to study real-time cognitive processing during reading or visual scene inspection.
The comprehension difficulty that arises when a reader or listener must revise an initial incorrect syntactic analysis of a sentence.
An abstract lexical entry that specifies the meaning and syntactic properties of a word but not its phonological form, a key component in speech production models.
The process of retrieving a word's information from the mental lexicon during language comprehension or production.
The weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, proposing that language influences but does not determine thought and perception.
The cognitive system that stores all of a person's knowledge about words, including their sounds, meanings, and grammatical properties.
The branch of linguistics concerned with the structure and formation of words from meaningful units called morphemes.
The study of the neural mechanisms in the brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language.
The cognitive process of assigning grammatical structure to a sequence of words during real-time sentence comprehension.
The smallest unit of sound in a language that can distinguish meaning between words.
A component of Baddeley's working memory model responsible for temporarily storing and rehearsing verbal and acoustic information.
The study of how context and speaker intentions contribute to meaning beyond the literal semantic content of utterances.
A phenomenon where exposure to one stimulus influences the processing of a subsequent stimulus, used extensively to study lexical and semantic organization.
The branch of linguistics concerned with the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences.
A developmental disorder in which children have significant difficulties with language acquisition despite normal nonverbal intelligence and hearing.
The set of rules governing how words are combined into phrases and sentences in a language.
Chomsky's theory that all human languages share an innate set of structural principles encoded in the human genome.
A fluent aphasia caused by damage to Wernicke's area, characterized by fluent but meaningless speech and severely impaired language comprehension.