Lexical density is a useful measure of the difference between texts (for example, between a person’s written language and their speech). To calculate this we must distinguish between lexical words and function words. The lexical density of two real world examples is calculated and interpreted. Lexical density is shown to…
Knowledge of the rules that govern how we encode and decode linguistic utterances can be thought of as being organized into three components: the semantic-syntactic knowledge base, the phonological knowledge base, and the phonetic knowledge base.
Linguistic competence is an abstract, internalized ability that allows us to reject certain utterances as ungrammatical and the ability to interpret grammatical utterances that we have never heard before. In contrast, linguistic performance is the behavior of producing actual, authentic utterances.
Processing a spoken utterance You might say that there is nothing that remarkable about processing a spoken utterance in order to understand it. You listen out for the phonemes and, as they come in, you store them in short-term memory until you have enough to…
Children develop expressive language skills in the same sequential order. As they mature, the length of their utterances increases. Consequently we are able to relate the length of an utterance to a child’s age. As the basic element of language is the morpheme, it is appropriate to determine average (mean)…
Morphology studies the internal structure of words and their alteration through the combination of morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest element in a language capable of creating a distinction in meaning. There are bound morphemes (e.g. -s, -ed, -ing) and free morphemes (e.g. go, stop, run).
Pragmatics is the study of the social use of language. It examines how people understand and produce communicative acts in real world situations. Speakers will style shift depending on the context of their talk. The form of utterances can be varied by altering morphology, syntax, vocabulary and phonology. The ability…
Back in 1973, the linguist Roger Brown identified several categories of meaning that all children seem to express. He called these categories semantic categories, which literally means ‘meaning categories’. We will consider four of these: (1) AGENT, (2) OBJECT, (3) ACTION, and (4) LOCATION.
