PSYCH 1X03 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Onomatopoeia, Phoneme, Reinforcement
6 Nov 2016
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Document Summary
A single word or turn of a phrase can profoundly alter the meaning, impact, or legality of a sentence. According to operational definitions of language accepted by most psychologists, no other species of animal except humans use language. Language is a uniquely human form of communication that involves arbitrary associations, is productive, and is rule-governed. Arbitrary associations allow various languages to use different sounds to label the same item. Sometimes words are associated with their meanings onomatopoeia. Language is designed to use a small number of components to produce and understand a wide range of symbols. Language has a limited set of rules that can be used to combine a limited set of symbols in infinite ways. Oral language is made up of phonemes the smallest sound units of language: english uses about 40 phonemes. From the 40 phonemes and limited rules about how they are combined comes a vocabulary of over 500 000 words.
