Psychology 2134A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, Empiricism, Tacit Knowledge

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

Document Summary

What makes human language special: unifying human behaviour. What do we know when we know language: mental grammars - certain order and structure in order to be sensible, phonemes, morphemes, etc. How does the mind/brain create language: evolutionary perspectives. How do children learn language: (why do we care anyway?) Sentence comprehension: syntax (amplified meaning of words/sentences) How the brain creates language: patients with brain damage, neuroimaging. Order in which you say words in a sentence really matters. Noam chomsky: what do we know when we know language? . Prescriptive grammar rules: do not end a sentence in a proposition, don"t say ain"t , never split an infinitive. We want to describe what language users know, not what is right . There are lots of principles that all english users abide by. Language is a unified phenomenon across humans: all humans use language. Languages differ in some basic ways: but share many important characteristics.