PSY270H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Parsing, Deep Structure And Surface Structure, Noam Chomsky
Document Summary
Very complex skill that we master effortlessly. We weren"t born to learn to read and write. Flexibility and naming: referents have labels and they can be changed. Duality of patterning: the signal can be broken down into smaller units. Productivity: (generativity): we can create an infinite number of new, meaningful signals. Displacement: can communicate about things that aren"t present. Conceptual: how we understand language in terms of past knowledge and inferences we make. Belief: how we understand in reference to ourselves. * understanding sentences = syntax + semantics + conceptual. Traditionally, linguists have been interested in language competence, psycholinguists are interested in performance. Linguistics has had a strong focus on syntax. Psy270: thinks it is what distinguishes human vs animal lang. Early linguists were strongly influenced by serial, bottom-up views of processing. Phoneme smallest unit of sound that makes a difference to meaning: ex// cat vs bat (c a t b are each phonemes, can either be vowels or consonants.
