PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 36: Categorical Perception, Language Acquisition, Phoneme

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jill L Atkinson

Document Summary

After working through this lesson"s material, you should be able to: Language: a method for communicating information, including ideas, thoughts, and emotions. Language is different than communication because while language involves a symbolic rule governed system to convey a message (ie. either verbally or through gesture), communication is the process of establishing shared understanding with others. You do not need shared speech or language to communicate with others. Language can involve communication about objects and events that are not present at that place in time. Ie. the use of past tenses allows us to refer to past events. Language can produce entirely new meanings: words can be strung together to create new sentences, words can be used in novel ways depending on context. Language can be passed down from parents to children. Linguistics: the study of the rules of language. Psycholinguistics: a branch of cognitive psychology devoted to the study of the acquisition, comprehension, and production of language.