Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Deep Structure And Surface Structure, Phoneme, Surface Roughness

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: John Campbell

Document Summary

Mental representations: take a variety of forms, including images, ideas, concepts, and principles. Although the structure of the brain has not changed much in the last 50 000 years, human cognitive skills have made large leaps. Language may be the most important cognitive skill. Language consists of a system of symbols and rules for combining these symbols in ways tat can produce an almost infinite number of possible messages or meanings. Symbolic: it uses sounds, written signs, or gestures. Structured: it has rules that govern how symbols can be combined to create meaningful communication units. Generative: symbols can be combined to generate an almost infinite number of messages that can have novel meaning. Displacement is a linguistic feature that refers to the fact that past, future, and imaginary events and objects that are not physically present can be symbolically represented and communicated through the medium of language.