PSYC 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Language Acquisition Device, American Sign Language, Phonemic Awareness

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1010
• Professor: Doug Mc Cann

Document Summary

The structure of language: words + words phrases+ phases sentences, the 3 structure of language, 1) phonemes: the smallest speech units in a language that can be distinguished perceptually. Humans are capable of only recognizing only 100 sounds. The english language is composed of 40 phonemes, corresponding through 26 letters of the alphabet. Letter in alphabet= represent more than one phoneme: ex: letter a = pronounced differently, in the words father, had, call, take correspond to a different phoneme. Some phonemes are presented by combinations of letters, such as ch" and th": 2) morphemes and semantics. Morphemes: are the smallest units of meaning in a language (most are prefixes and suffixes) single morpheme = words such as fire, guard, friend combinations of morpheme= words such as unfriendly 3 morphemes (root=friend, prefix=un, suffix=ly) Rule: how words arranged into sentences, that must contain both a.