Find over 25,000 psychological definitions


branching

n.

1. a form of programmed instruction that provides additional steps, or branches, to be followed if the standard teaching material has not been adequately mastered to a given level of proficiency. Correct and incorrect answers lead to branches of new material so that students complete different sequences depending on how well they perform. Also called branching program.

2. in linguistics, a method of analyzing the formal structure of a sentence by representing it diagrammatically as a treelike structure with an organized hierarchy of branches and subbranches. In phrase-structure grammar, a tree diagram of this kind (also known as a phrase marker) is often used to illustrate the set of phrase-structure rules that generates a particular grammatical sentence: The diagram so produced will also be a constituent analysis of the sentence in question. Theories of branching have been used in predicting psycholinguistic phenomena and in creating linguistic typologies.

Browse dictionary by letter

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Psychology term of the day

March 11th 2025

delirium

delirium

n. a disturbed mental state in which attention cannot be sustained, the environment is misperceived, and the stream of thought is disordered. The individual may experience changes in cognition (which can include disorientation, memory impairment, or disturbance in language), perceptual disturbances, hallucinations, illusions, and misinterpretation of sounds or sights. The episode develops quickly and can fluctuate over a short period. Delirium may be caused by a variety of conditions, such as infections, cerebral tumors, substance intoxication and withdrawal, head trauma, and seizures.