Routledge dictionary of language and linguistics - Developers

Dictionary of language and linguistics 188
oral cavity. Clicks are found in several languages of southern Africa, e.g. in the Khoisan
language Nama as well as in the Bantu languages of Zulu and Xhosan. In African
language studies and in the International Phonetic Alphabet (1989) the following
notations are customary: , I, II, ! (these correspond to the following symbols in the
International Phonetic Alphabet (1979): , , [¿], [C]). The sound that occurs, for
example in a kiss, is a labial click: .
References
phonetics
2 Acoustic signal used in psycholinguistic tests on speech recognition and language
production to determine the psychological reality of grammatical units. In several
investigations subjects were exposed simultaneously to linguistic utterances in one ear
and click signals in the other ear. In these tests, clicks were remembered exactly at
constituent boundaries, while clicks within constituents were displaced in their memories
to constituent boundaries (‘click displacement’). By changing the click position in this
way the hypothesis could be confirmed that constituents play a more decisive role in
speech recognition than other grammatical units (syllables, words) since they
immediately serve the formation of propositions.
References
Bever, T.G. 1970. The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In J.R.Hayes (ed.), Cognition and
the development of language. 279–352.
Kimball, J.P. 1973. Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language. Cognition 2.
15–47.
Levelt, W.J.M. 1974. Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics, vol. 3:
Psycholinguistic applications. The Hague.
[ psycholinguistics]
climax
Mounting by degrees through linked words or phrases with related meaning of increasing
intensity, e.g. Veni, vidi, vici (Caesar).