PSYCH 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Feral Child, Automaticity, African Grey Parrot
2 Sep 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Language, thinking, and reasoning- dec 2/15 chapter 8. Language- a system of communication that combines symbols or gestural signs, in rule-based ways to create meaning. Knowing a language is a key part to being human. Without language, the transmission of information and the acquisition of knowledge would be enormously impaired. Language is essential for, a huge range of human activities. Sentences- coherent sequences of words that express the intended meaning of a speaker. Before chomsky"s work, the field of language acquisition was dominated by the associationist belief that children learned language via operant and classical conditioning processes. Also, children produce novel sentences they have never heard before, which cannot be explained by simple mimicking: he noticed that there was a deep structure (the underlying meaning) and surface structure (the actual written form of sentence). And children have to learn the rules that allow them to decipher what people actually mean based on the surface structure (ex.
