Psychology 1000 Lecture 2: Cha. 9

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Derek Quinlan

Document Summary

Language & thinking: humans create mental representations, mental representations: images, ideas, concepts, and principles. Language: = system of symbols and rules for combining these symbols in ways that can generate an infinite number of possible messages and meanings, psycholinguistics: psychological aspects of language, such as how people understand, produce, and acquire language. Properties of language: striking part about languages in characteristics they share, not how they differ, four properties essential to any language: (1) symbols (2) structure (3) meaning (4) generativity. Structure of language: psycholinguists describe language as having a face structure and a deep structure. Surface structure & deep structure: surface: consists of symbols that are used and their order, deep: underlying meaning of the combined symbols, sentences can have different surface structures but same deep structure: (1) same ate the cake. In everyday life, when you hear speech, you are moving from surface deep.