Performance (linguistics)

Also called linguistic performance, it is a term, together with competence, introduced by Noam Chomsky into generative and transformational grammar, and which forms the basis of psycholinguistics. It refers to specific utterances made by the native speaker of a language, including false starts, hesitations and speech errors.  Broadly, speaking, competence and performance is a distinction …

Perceptual memory

A class of long-term memory for visual (e.g., faces, appearance of things), auditory (e.g., tunes, voices) and other perceptual information (e.g., odor, taste).  It is sometimes included in the category of semantic memory.  See Episodic event and semantic memory, Memory, Recognition memory,  Short-term-memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM)

Perception

Generally speaking, the active process of recognizing and identifying something.  As such, it is distinguished from sensation, the sensitivity of neural receptors to internal and external stimuli.  Putting the two terms together, perception is then a process of converting ‘meaningless’ sensations into ‘meaningful’ percepts.  This interpretation represents the concept of indirect perception that can be …

Perceptual development

Developmentof perceptual modalities, either individually or in some combination(i.e., cross-modal matching or intermodal perception), from before birth toweeks, months and sometimes years postnatally.  Most research concerned withperceptual development has focused on the visual system during the period ofinfancy, particularly the first six months after birth, as visual functionsundergo rapid and relatively clear-cut changes during this …

Perception-action coupling

Circular causality between perception and movement in order to achieve a particular action relative to a particular task. This type of causality is exemplified by James J. Gibson (1979) in his book The ecological approach to visual perception as follows:  “We perceive in order to act and we act in order to perceive.”, a standpoint captured …

Peptides

Acompound composed of two or more amino acids in which a carboxyl group of oneis linked to amino acid monomers  f another group in a short chain. While theyhave been referred to as ‘small proteins’, peptides differ in terms ofstructure consisting of 50 or more amino acids.  Moreover, proteins consist of one or morepolypeptides.  Naturally-occurring milkpeptides are …

Peers

Children of approximately the same age such as classmates.  More generally, it refers to people with the same abilities, legal status and qualifications in a group.  See Co-rumination, Friendship, Peer group, Social network, Sociometry