PSYC 2500 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Language Development, Dime (United States Coin), Affix

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2500
• Professor: Chang Xu

Document Summary

System of communication using sounds (or gestures) and symbols that enable us to express our feelings, thoughts ideas, and experiences: primary function: exchange information between individuals, spoken: processed by auditory system, written: processed by visual system. Arbitrary (symbolic: lack of necessary resemblance between form (sounds/words/characters) and what it stands for, words are arbitrary symbols that don"t have meaning alone. Structured and meaningful: without structure no grammar, meaning from words used and their specific order. Displacement: linguistic messages not tied to communication in time/space, past and future, things that are physically distant, things/events that don"t physically exist. Generativity: produce an infinite number of utterances from languages vocab provided you follow the structure, don"t memorize sentences create them as we go along. Phonology: sounds of language and rule system for combing them, phonemes: basic smallest significant unit of sound within a language (english 44, change a word into another by changing 1 sound (time t d dime)