Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Baby Talk, Hard Wired, Peekaboo

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Dr.Mike

Document Summary

Spoken language - pushing air through vocal chords. Ability to use finite number of words and rules to produce an infinite number of sentences (you can put things together and generate completely new sentences) Convey information about other times and places (tenses, hypothetical situations) Meaningful units, root word and units that change the part of speech it is. ***breaking down words into morphemes will be on the exam! Good, unabridged dictionary has 250 000 to 300 000. Most anything in english can be said with a vocabulary of 850 words. Telephone conversations: 96% of talk made up of 737 words. Longer the word is, the less likely you are to use it. Ex in english adjectives come before the noun --> helps us understand sentences, it wouldn"t make sense to us if the adjective came after the noun, like in other languages. However syntax isn"t everything, we have to look at the meaning as well.