PSY210H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Steven Pinker, Age 13, Function Word
Document Summary
** should correspond to chapter 6, with the end of the lecture deviating from the text. Speech development: early perception, early production. Vocabulary growth: how and when, role of input. Beyond first words: multi-word utterances, grammar, pragmatics. System that relates sounds (or gestures) to meaning: has arbitrary units and is therefore symbolic. Chair only means chair because we have linked it to the object that is a chair: structured and meaningful. Sentence structure, etc: shows displacement- one can communicate about events distant in time and space. Future tense: generative (infinite number of messages can be created) It is possible to create a chain of words that have never been put together before. Some traits overlap between different forms of communication systems (eg. animal communication may have 2 of the 4 traits in human language: eg. Meerkats have different sounds for different meanings: eg. Birds have songs to convey certain information in specific way.
