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function word

in a language, a word that has little or no meaning of its own but plays an important grammatical role: Examples include the articles (a, an, the), prepositions (in, of, etc.), and conjunctions (and, but, etc.). Function words are of high frequency, are typically short, and do not generally admit new members (see closed-class words). The distinction between function words and content words is of great interest to the study of language disorders, language acquisition, and psycholinguistic processing. Psycholinguists are especially interested in function words because of their role in facilitating sentence parsing. In combination with nonsense words, they can be used to create sentence frames whose grammaticality can be recognized but whose content is meaningless, such as He zibbed from the fluv by sibbing the flix. Also called empty word; functional moneme; functor; relational word; structure word.

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Psychology term of the day

March 16th 2025

child care worker

child care worker

an individual trained to attend to children on a day-to-day basis in a variety of group settings, including child care centers, schools, businesses, private households, and health care institutions. Child care workers perform such tasks as dressing, feeding, bathing, and overseeing play.