PSYC 2500 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: American Sign Language, Baby Sign Language, Frontal Lobe

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2500
• Professor: Monique Senechal

Document Summary

Defined broadly, language is a system that relates sounds (or gestures) to meaning. Language differs from simple communication in four main ways: It has arbitrary units and is therefore symbolic. It shows displacement one can communicate about events distant \\in time and space, not just here and now. It is characterized by generativity one can produce an infinite number of utterances from a language"s vocabulary, provided that one follows the structure. Languages are expressed in many forms through speech, writing, and gesture. Spoken languages usually involve five distinct but interrelated elements. Phonology refers to the sounds of a language. About 200 different sounds are used in all known spoken languages; all the different words in english are constructed from only about 45 of them. Morphology refers to rules of meaning within the language. The smallest unit of meaning in a language is called a morpheme. morphemes are meaningful combinations of phonemes.