The phonemes that particular letters or combinations of letters typically represent. Most languages need to be adjusted every 50 years or so to maintain the stability of grapheme-phoneme correspondences. English has not been reformed or adjusted for 900 years, which accounts for the large number of inconsistencies and irregularities found in its orthography. See Decoding …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Granule cells
Small multipolar interneurons situated in the molecular layer of the cerebellum that give rise to parallel fibers, and the most numerous cell type in the brain. They are the only cell to receive inputs from outside the cerebellar cortex, the other being the Purkinje cells. In the cerebellum, there are some 100 billion such cells, …
Grammaticization (or grammaticalization)
A central phenomenon of language change in which a contentful word such as a noun or a verb develops over time. It does so through a process of becoming more fixed in position, phonologically reduced, and semantically bleached into a grammatical element like an inflection, preposition or conjunction. See Copula, Closed-class words, Co-occurrence learning, Language …
Granular layer
The deeper two layers of the cerebellar cortex, it contains the dark nuclei of the small densely packed neurons referred to as granule cells in addition to some Golgi type II cells in the cerebellar cortex. A notable feature of this layer is the presence of small spaces or islands termed cerebellar glomeruli where dendrites …
Grammatical marking
A sub-class of morphological markings that reflect grammatical relationships such as the use of the possessive /s/ on a noun to mark its status as a possessor of the following noun. See Morphological marking, Morphology (linguistics), Syntax
Grammatical metaphor
A literacy device that re-orders ideas and experiences by using a variety of grammatical resources, producing compressed and incongruent versions. Its effect is often to move the initial idea away from the way in which it would be represented in speech toward a version that hides human agency. Moreover, it presents information in a way …
Graded signal
This theory proposes that an infant’s cry conveys the degree of the infant’s distress or state of arousal, but not its specific cause. It contrasts with the idea of ‘cry types‘, where the audible, acoustic features of a cry are assumed to vary so as to signal its particular cause (e.g., ‘hunger’ versus ‘anger’ versus …
Goodness-of-fit (statistics)
The quantification of the relationship between a set of hypothetical models and a known collection of empirical observations. Several popular indices are designed to provide an overall assessment of ‘misfit’ (e.g., the likelihood ratio) as they are related to the numbers of parameters in the model (e.g., the degrees-of-freedom and the chi-square test). See Likelihood …
Gossip
When two or more persons talk about a third person who usually is not present at the time of the conversation. Gossip can be comprised of either positive or negative content. It is usually evaluative in nature. See Tattling
Goodness-of-fit (psychology)
A concept put forward by the man and wife team, Alexander Thomas (1914-2000) and Stella Chess (1914-2007), in 1977 to depict how well children’s characteristics meet the expectations and demands of the environment. See Temperament