英语语言学名词解释

Chapter 12 : Language And Brain

1. neurolinguistics: It is the study of relationship between brain and language. It includes research into how the structure of the brain influences language learning, how and in which parts of the brain language is stored, and how damage to the brain affects the ability to use language.

2. psycholinguistics: the study of language processing. It is concerned with the processes of language acqisition, comprehension and production.

3. brain lateralization: The localization of cognitive and perceptive functions in a particular hemisphere of the brain.

4. dichotic listening: A technique in which stimuli either linguistic or non-linguistic are presented through headphones to the left and right ear to determine the lateralization of cognitive function.

5. right ear advantage: The phenomenon that the right ear shows an advantage for the perception of linguistic signals id known as the right ear advantage.

6. split brain studies: The experiments that investigate the effects of surgically severing the corpus callosum on cognition are called as split brain studies.

7. aphasia: It refers to a number of acquired language disorders due to the cerebral lesions caused by a tumor, an accident and so on.

8. non-fluent aphasia: Damage to parts of the brain in front of the central sulcus is called non-fluent aphasia.

9. fluent aphasia: Damage to parts of the left cortex behind the central sulcus results in a type of aphasia called fluent aphasia.

10. Acquired dyslexia: Damage in and around the angular gyrus of the parietal lobe often causes the impairment of reading and writing ability, which is referred to as acquired dyslexia.

11. phonological dyslexia: it is a type of acquired dyslexia in which the patient seems to have lost the ability to use spelling-to-sound rules.

12. surface dyslexia: it is a type of acquired dyslexia in which the patient seems unable to recognize words as whole but must process all words through a set of spelling-to-sound rules.

13. spoonerism: a slip of tongue in which the position of sounds, syllables, or words is reversed, for example, Let’s have chish and fips instend of Let’s have fish and chips.

14. priming: the process that before the participants make a decision whether the string of letters is a word or not, they are presented with an activated word.

15. frequency effect: Subjects take less time to make judgement on frequently used words than to judge less commonly used words . This phenomenon is called frequency effect.

16. lexical decision: an experiment that let participants judge whether a string of letter is a word or not at a certain time.

17. the priming experiment: An experiment that let subjects judge whether a string of letters is a word or not after showed with a stimulus word, called prime.

18. priming effect: Since the mental representation is activated through the prime, when the target is presented, response time is shorter that it otherwise would have been. This is called the priming effect. (06F) 19. bottom-up processing: an approach that makes use principally of information which is already present in the data.

20. top-down processing: an approach that makes use of previous knowledge and experience of the readers in analyzing and processing information which is received.

21. garden path sentences: a sentence in which the comprehender assumes a particular meaning of a word or phrase but discovers later that the assumption was incorrect, forcing the comprehender to backtrack and reinterpret the sentence.

22. slip of the tongue: mistakes in speech which provide psycholinguistic evidence for the way we formulate words and phrases.

Chapter 11 : Second Language Acquisition

1. second language acquisition: It refers to the systematic study of how one person acquires a second language subsequent to his native language.

2. target language: The language to be acquired by the second language learner.

3. second language: A second language is a language which is not a native language in a country but which is widely used as a medium of communication and which is usually used alongside another language or languages.