Language psc 100

Language Is

• Communicative

• a system of communication that allows people to express their ideas, feelings, and thoughts

• Language is a structured system of communication that uses grammar and vocabulary to convey meaning. It can be spoken, signed, or written

• Language is diverse across cultures and time. It has the ability to create an infinite number of sentences and refer to things that aren't present.

Language Is -- and --

• Referential
  

• Communicative

• expressions

• 
  Meaningful

Mental lexicon

• a part of the human language system that stores information about words, including their meanings, pronunciations, and syntactic characteristics

• It's also known as a mental dictionary.

• library” of words we use and their links to real-
  world representations

• Words are mentally represented and organized in an easily accessible way to support efficient processing.

What is lexical decision task.

• a cognitive experiment that measures how quickly and accurately people can identify whether a string of letters is a word or not. It's a common tool in psychology and psycholinguistics research.

• library” of words we use and their links to real-
  world representations

• Language allows us to represent the world (or a possible world) in
  our minds

• You will be faster to say that a letter string is
  a word than to say it is not a word. Why? Because for
  nonwords you must do an exhaustive search.

  
  

The lexicon

• is a big multi-
  dimensional web of information
  about words.

• Is Linguistics

  
  

• The Lexicon helps people to pay closer attention to how they eat, what they buy, and where their responsibility begins for creating a healthier, safer food

• the complete set of meaningful units in a language

Words get meaning

• Many words derive their core meaning from a root word, which is often from an older language like Latin or Greek.

• From language

• From pictures

• from their
  context of use

Notice that the link between what a word means and how it’s said is

• arbitrary
  

• contradictory

• mutually opposed

• inconsistent

Words that occur together tend to have

• Different meaning

• Unrelated meanings

• related meanings

• Same meaning

Zipf’s Law

• Words that are used often tend to be of shorter length

• Words that are used often tend to be of longer length

• Words are used to refer to entities, or they signal relations
  (physical, grammatical); they carry meaning.

• Zipf's law is an empirical law stating that when a list of measured values is sorted in decreasing order, the value of the n th entry is often approximately

Word frequency effect

• people are faster to respond to high-
  frequency words than to low-frequency words

• people are slower to respond to high-
  frequency words than to low-frequency words

• people do not respond to respond to high-
  frequency words than to low-frequency words

• people are faster to respond to low-
  frequency words than to high-frequency words