Psychology 1000 Lecture 9: Chapter Nine Notes

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Terry Biggs

Document Summary

Pervades every facet of our lives, public and private. Every culture, no matter how isolated or primitive has language. Every person, except under extreme deprivation/accidents, develops skills in use of language. Letters, written and spoken symbols that stand for the referent of the world. Shared by all speakers of a language culture. Grammar: rules that dictate the legal combination of the units of language. Allows for forming and transferring mental representations: structure: rule-governed structures, symbols combined to create meaningful units, generativity: symbols can be combined to generate an in nite number of messages that can have novel meaning. Displacement: past,future, imaginary events, objects can be symbolically represented and communicated. Surface structure: consists of the symbols that are used and their order. Related to the concept of syntax (the rules that govern the order of words). Deep structure: refers to the underlying meaning of the combined symbols. Related to the concept of semantics (the meaning of words and sentences).