PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Washoe (Chimpanzee), Phonemic Awareness, Categorical Perception

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Ingrid Johnsrude

Document Summary

Language is a method for communicating information, including ideas, thoughts, and emotions. Language is differentiated from communication because of semanticity, generativity, and displacement. Identify the three key properties of human language. Semanticity: the ability of the system to meaningfully represent ideas, events, and objects symbolically. Generativity: the ability to use a limited number of words and rules to combine words into a virtually unlimited number of sentences. Displacement: the ability to use language to convey messages that are not tied to the immediate context. Describe the components of language: phonemes, morphemes, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Phonemes: the basic distinctive speech sounds in a language that distinguish one word (e. g. , rice) from another (lice). Morphemes: the smallest unit of meaning in language. Free morphemes are meaningful on their own and can stand alone as words. Bound morphemes are meaningful only when combined with other morphemes to form words. e. g. )