GEOLOGY 002 Lecture Notes - Lecture 28: Speech Perception, Linguistic Relativity, Oddball Paradigm
Document Summary
Keywords: comprehension, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, reading, lexical access, discourse processing, whorf, linguistic relativity, bilingualism. Language has two necessary characteristics: it is regular, governed by a system of rules (grammar), and is productive, meaning that there are infinite combinations. Other characteristics are arbitrariness, that is the lack of resemblance between a word and its meaning, and discreteness, that is the subdivision in its parts. Languages can be strikingly different, but they all have some commonalities. Communicative: language permits us to communicate with one or more people who share our language. Arbitrarily symbolic: language creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and what it represents (e. g. an idea, a thing, a process etc. ) Regularly structured: language has a structure, only particularly patterned arrangements of symbols have meaning and different arrangements yield different meanings. Structured at multiple levels: the structure of language can be analyzed at more than one level (e. g. sounds, meaning units, words and phrases)
