Language Processing & the Brain

All 12 Terms & Definitions

Categorical perception

Phonemes are perceived as discrete categories despite continuous acoustic variation — voice-onset time (VOT) is heard as either /b/ or /p/, never intermediate.

Cohort model

At each phoneme, all matching word-candidates are activated simultaneously; they are progressively eliminated until the uniqueness point — where one word remains.

Semantic priming

Prior exposure to a semantically related word (e.g., "doctor") speeds recognition of a target word (e.g., "nurse") — evidence for associative organisation of semantic memory.

Garden-path effect

Incremental syntactic parsing commits to the simplest reading; sentences that require reanalysis (e.g., "The horse raced past the barn fell") cause processing difficulty.

Phonological loop

A component of Baddeley's (1986) working memory model that temporarily stores phonological information — critical for sentence comprehension and new word learning.

Grice's cooperative principle

Speakers follow maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner; violations generate conversational implicatures — what is communicated beyond what is literally said.

Broca's area

Left inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44/45) — damage causes non-fluent speech with relatively preserved comprehension (Broca's aphasia); also involved in syntax, phonological WM, and hierarchical structure.

Wernicke's area

Left posterior superior temporal gyrus — damage causes fluent but meaningless speech (jargon, paraphasias) with severely impaired comprehension (Wernicke's aphasia).

Arcuate fasciculus

White-matter tract connecting Wernicke's and Broca's areas; damage causes conduction aphasia — fluent speech, intact comprehension, severely impaired repetition.

Dual-stream model

Hickok & Poeppel (2007): ventral stream (temporal lobe) maps sound onto meaning ("what"); dorsal stream (parietal-frontal) maps sound onto motor articulation ("how").

Conduction aphasia

Disconnection syndrome from arcuate fasciculus damage: fluent spontaneous speech, good comprehension, but severely impaired repetition.

Language lateralisation

Language is predominantly left-hemisphere dominant in ~95% of right-handers; right hemisphere contributes prosody, discourse coherence, and pragmatic inference.