Tongue Tied and Twisted: Concepts Every Psycholinguist Should Know
Psycholinguistics Terms
1. Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon (TOT)
That frustrating experience when a word is known but momentarily inaccessible.
Studied for its links to lexical retrieval and memory organization.
2. Garden Path Sentence
A grammatically correct sentence that leads the parser astray, causing misinterpretation.
E.g., “The old man the boats.”
3. Subvocalization
The inner speech mechanism we use while reading silently — critical in models of phonological working memory.
4. Lexical Access
The mental process of retrieving a word’s form, meaning, and syntactic properties from memory during comprehension or production.
5. Incrementality
Refers to how language is processed in real-time, word by word, as it's encountered — rather than waiting for full sentences.
6. Cross-Modal Priming
A technique showing how visual and auditory stimuli activate related linguistic representations — often used to study lexical connections.
7. Saccadic Suppression
During eye movements (saccades) in reading, visual input is momentarily suppressed — impacting word recognition patterns.
8. Phonological Loop
A component of working memory responsible for temporary storage and rehearsal of verbal information.
From Baddeley and Hitch’s model.
9. Parse Failure
When the syntactic structure assigned during comprehension breaks down, requiring reanalysis — especially in ambiguous sentences.
10. Prosodic Bootstrapping
Theory that infants use intonation, rhythm, and pauses to infer grammatical structure before understanding words.
11. Semantic Priming
Processing a word becomes faster when preceded by a semantically related word (e.g., doctor–nurse).
Key in studies of mental lexicon organization.
12. Anomia
A neurolinguistic condition where individuals have difficulty retrieving words — especially nouns — despite knowing their meaning.
13. Dual-Route Model
Describes two mental paths in reading:
- Lexical route (recognizing known words)
- Sublexical route (decoding via grapheme-phoneme conversion).
A copy of motor commands sent to muscles, used by the brain to predict sensory outcomes — including during speech production.
15. Statistical Learning
The brain’s unconscious ability to detect patterns and regularities in linguistic input — crucial for phoneme and word segmentation in infants.
16. Late Closure Principle
A parsing strategy that attaches new words to the most recent phrase — often leading to garden path errors.
17. Shadowing Task
A psycholinguistic experiment where participants repeat speech as quickly as they hear it — used to study perception and processing speed.
18. Mental Lexicon
The internal, structured repository of words, meanings, forms, and grammatical rules in a speaker’s mind.
19. Speech Error Analysis
A method of studying linguistic performance by analyzing slips of the tongue, revealing hidden structures of language production.
20. Auditory Masking
When background noise interferes with spoken word perception, revealing the cognitive load and redundancy in speech comprehension.
