PSYCH 1X03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Speech Segmentation, Phoneme, Universal Grammar
13 May 2016
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Document Summary
Communicate to send and receive information to another individual or group. (info from one group to another). Most psychologists consider only human communication to be language, this excludes animal communication. Criteria for true language: language is regular, this means that is governed by rules and grammar, natural language is arbitrary (based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system. ) Arbitrary: lack of resemblance between words and their meaning. What specific sound is assigned to represent a concept is compltetely arbitrary or unrelated: language is productive. Although thought and language are not one and the same, some thoughts do take the form of language. Whorf sapir hypothesis: some language may influence how we perceive and experience the world. Support for the whorf sapir hypothesis: a tribe of hunter-gatherers in brazil called piraha. Their tribe contains only three counting words and they connect/correspond to many others.
