PSY 3136 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Noam Chomsky, Eric Lenneberg, Inflection

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 3136
• Professor: Christopher Fennell

Document Summary

Language: systematic and conventional use of sounds (or signs or written symbols) for the purpose of communication or self- expression. Oed: the system of spoken or written communication used by a particular country, people, community, etc. , typically consisting of words used within a regular grammatical and syntactic structure. Language is: communicative: defining feature of language, arbitrary, structured, multilayered: processing individual sounds, words, grammar and pragmatics all at the same time simultaneously, productive: infinite possibilities of making up sentences etc, evolutionary: language changes. Phonetics and phonology: the constituent sounds of a language /ipa/ Grammar: the structural organization of words and morphemes (inflectional morphology) Extremely complex, so need to explain its fast acquisition. Explain how an immature brain learns 100x better then a developed brain: cognition. How we all learn the same way even though languages are sporadically different. Applied uses: treatment of language disorders. Mythologies/religions of many cultures have language origin stories.