Psychology 2134A/B Lecture Notes - Australopithecus Afarensis, Hyoid Bone

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2134A/B
• Professor: Marc Joanisse

Document Summary

Unit 2 - language in the biological context. In the previous lecture we began to discuss what we mean by human language. the goal is to situate human language in a biological context by examining it as a universal human ability. This includes introducing the theory that we encode language as a mental grammar , which we encode as tacit (implicit) knowledge. Next we look at theories and facts related to how language might have evolved. This includes studying what we mean by language in a more formal sense, and then looking at theories of evolution, and finally language in non-human species. A key assumption that scientists make is this: every human has language. That is, everywhere that there are human societies, there is language. We make an important distinction here with languages . We know that the world has many languages, like english, mandarin, swahili, farsi and hindi. Those languages are very different from each other.