Final Exam Vocab

Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Test

neuropsychological battery used to evaluate adults suspected of having aphasia

Cookie Theft picture

word retrieval task that can reveal what kind of aphasia a patient has

Wernicke's Aphasia

notable anomia, poor auditory comprehension; poor repetition, well-articulated speech but includes many filler words (um, stuff), many phonemic and semantic errors

Literal phonological paraphasia

More than half of the spoken words said correctly. Other words mispronounced, syllables out of sequence, etc. (e.g. "I slipped on the lice (ice) and broke my arm;" "ephelant" for "elephant," "bife" for "knife")

semantic paraphasia

a word is produced that deviates in meaning from the intended word (Poeck, 1982). The actually produced word very often has some semantic similarity to the intended word. For instance, an aphasic patient whom I asked to describe a picture of a man reading

neologism

newly-coined word or expression

anosognosia

impairs a person's ability to understand and perceive his or her illness; lack of awareness of their condition

alexia

inability to read

agraphia

inability to write

decoding deficit

problems with coding phoneme to words; problems with specifying the phonological code of words during production

lemma

base form of a word

nodes

representations at different levels

thresholds

level that has to be passed before activation occurs

excitation/inhibition

certain words are activated while others are inhibited to narrow down to the one idea that needs to be conveyed

lexical competition

one word is competing with another due to similar phonological beginnings, causing patients with Wernicke's to look at it longer (activated longer) than in normal people

Spreading activation

semantically similar words activating each other (i.e., the word 'sparky' activating the word 'dog')

Conduction aphasia

inability to repeat words/phrases, respond to sentences/questions in conversations

Arcuate fasciculus

nerves that connect Wernicke's to Broca's area; the brain area that causes conduction aphasia when damaged

anomia

core symptom of aphasia; greater than normal word retrieval problem

pure anomia

Chronic word retrieval problem and for things that normal people would not have trouble retrieving. Damage to white matter - angular gyrus is the main place that leads to anomia. Might not only be restricted to written speech but also when they are readin

semantic anomia

Degraded semantic knowledge. May be unable to even place the object in its correct category (e.g., they are unable to say that a spatula is a "utensil") or describe its function (to flip pancakes or hamburgers). Typically associated with damage to left or

Boston Naming Task

neuropsychological assessment tool to measure confrontational word retrieval in individuals with aphasia or other language disturbance caused by stroke, Alzheimer's disease, or other dementing disorder; contains 60 line drawings graded in difficulty from

network

interconnected system of words

word association task

shows lexical networks in the brain

collocation

word pairs that occur together more often than would be expected by chance (chocolate chip)

coordination

same level of detail (skirt-pants; can include antonyms: dusk-dawn, big-little)

hyponym

dog and cat are hyponyms of each other because they share the same hypernym (animal).

superordinate; hypernym

a word with a broad meaning that more specific words fall under

superordinate-basic-subordinate levels

animal-dog-Golden Retriever

category verification

a chihuahua is an animal" takes longer to identify than "a dog is an animal

property verification

4 legs, fur, etc., longer to identify if at different levels

hierarchical semantic model

nodes are activated in a hierarchical fashion in the memory network. If, for example, activation of plant spreads to flower and then to rose, subjects should take longer to detect the relation between plant and rose than that between either plant and flow

Spreading activation semantic model

Knowledge is represented in terms of nodes and associative pathways between the nodes. Specifically, concepts are represented in memory as nodes, and relations between the concepts as associative pathways between the nodes. When part of the memory network

Prototypicality

Determinant of the associative strength between a category concept and members of the category. Prototypicality (or simply typicality), is a measure of how representative an object is of a category. Higher prototypicality will get verified faster.

Category-specific impairments

Many patients better at naming tasks for non-living than living things

Inflectional morphemes

morphological variant of a word, usually to signal grammatical; only 8 in English (-s,-ed, -ing)

Derivational morphemes

change the meaning or part of speech (-ful, -ness, -ly)

Decompositional view

Words are made up of constituent morphemes; each stem is a separate entry. prefixes & suffixes added on-line as we speak; de-composed as we listen ("morpheme stripping")

Words-as-basic-units view

each word is its own primitive

Cognitive economy

efficiency and flexibility of mental lexicon

Compound words

Some compound words appear to be treated as word1 + word2, because a prime can facilitate RT for word1 only (e.g., 'pea' primes 'bean' + 'pole'), but NOT all words

imageability

the degree in which a word can be seen concretely (e.g., apple) and not abstractly (e.g., justice)

Partial activation

part of a word is activated but still unable to recall a word (first syllable, number of syllables, ending, etc.; 'bathtub effect')

Transmission deficit

lemma and lexeme connection too weak, doesn't pass the threshold to be retrieved

interloper

phonological cues that inhibit TOT retrieval

Blocking hypothesis

given a word that is phonetically or semantically similar, it would block the retrieval of the target word

Root morpheme

the root word that is similar to a part of the target word that helps retrieval

Neighborhood effects

words are easier to retrieve if they are given hints that are around the same phonetically (sitter, bitter, etc., for litter)

Bathtub effect

remembering the sounds of beginning and ending words

perseveration

keep the beginning phoneme of one word and use it for the next word i.e. "blue blonnets

Spoonerisms

a verbal error in which a speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words, often to humorous effect, as in the sentence "you have hissed the mystery lectures" accidentally spoken instead of the intended sentence "you hav

Serial model of speech production

1. Identification of meaning -what do you want to convey
2. Structure
3. Prosody
4. Content words
5. Function words
6. Grammatical morphemes

Intonation contour

The main stress of the sentence takes place at the verb and the minor stress occurs on the last word, the noun.

Interactive model of speech production

interaction between the semantic and phonological systems in word choice and speech errors

Lexical bias effect

errors are usually words because we have a lexical editor that corrects our nonwords

Cross-modal priming technique

given ambiguous context for a word, looks at which meaning is activated (e.g., bug in an ambiguous context, bug/ant and bug/spy both activated)

Vehicle

carries the weight of the word (aka, base): lends characteristics to less familiar objects

Topic

less familiar object in a metaphor

Two-stage processing

when the literal meaning is defective, looks at nonliteral meaning

Structure-mapping

comparison process in which a person aligns objects and maps information from the base to the target

Category view

metaphors are understood by treating the vehicle (Y) of a metaphorical statement as an abstract category
ex.: "Good ideas are diamonds!" ("Diamonds" stand in for abstract category of valuable things)

Career of Metaphor

initially prefer analogy (simile) but as figurative language becomes familiar, prefers metaphors (categorical)

Conventionality

how widely used a metaphor is

Familiarity

how frequent is a particular phrase used

Universalism

thoughts and perceptions are carved the same way across populations

Spatial conception of time

the thought process of time in a spatial manner (seen in Australian Aborigines where they face one way while talking about time) as well as other cultures. Could be vertical or horizontal or both or completely based on NSEW directionality.