PSY274H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Glass, Arbitrariness, Boeing 787 Dreamliner
Document Summary
Last time: design features for language: semanticity, arbitrariness, discreteness, duality of patterning, productivity, displacement. Language matters other criteria: rules that constitute a grammar, the ability to refer to abstractions. Specifies some of the kinds of things we can denote with symbols: cognitive processing. Design features provide criteria to evaluate naturally occurring animal communication systems: notes: make sure you understand design features. Are used to evaluate communication systems, not animals. Take home message: there seems to be a big gap between our linguistic abilities and the communicative abilities of other species. Spoken language (topic for today: evolution of spoken language. Paralinguistic: aging and speech communication, relationship to written language (if time) Why is it such a questionable topic when it comes to its scientific. Maybe the ban was justified at the time : bow-wow theory. Human language evolved as a result of us imitating environmental sounds and then somehow evolve into language.
