PSYCH 1X03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Speech Segmentation, Phoneme, Kanzi
Document Summary
4:34 pm only human communication is considered language. What makes language special? regular -- governed by rules and grammar arbitrary -- lack of resemblance b/w words and their meaning productive -- there are infinite ways to combine words to form sentences. Whorf-sapir hypothesis: language influences our thoughts and the way we perceive & experience the world (some thoughts take the form of language) Phonemes: the smallest unit of sound in a word different languages contain different libraries of useable phonemes & rules about how they can be combined. Syntax: the rules that govern how sentences are put together (a. k. a. grammar) different languages have different syntactic rules (ex. Semantics: meaning of an individual word a sentence can have perfect syntactical structure but have no semantic meaning (ex. Development and the segmentation problem language production increases systematically throughout infancy & childhood language "explodes" in complexity between 1. 5-6 years of age.
