PS366 Lecture Notes - Frontal Lobe, Language Acquisition, Positron Emission Tomography
Document Summary
Definitions: linguistics: the study of language, the rules that describe it and our knowledge about rules of language, psycholinguistics: study of psychological psychological processes involved in language, how people understand and produce language. Sentence rather than word is primary unit of language: cognitive view of speech production. Speech production as the transformation of a complete thought process into sequentially organized speech segments. Relationship between memory and language: merigner and mayer. John watson skinner: no role for consciousness, introspection, mind, objective and observable behaviour, laws relating to stimulus conditions, associative chain theory. A sentence is a chain of associations between words. Lang acquisition and use explained by reinforcement and conditioning. People produce and understand infinite sentences that we have not heard before cannot be reduced to stimulus-response: poverty of stimulus argument. Info from lang given to children cannot account for complexity of language. Intuitive knowledge of grammar: words with few associations can still be syntactically acceptable.