PSYCH 240 Lecture 14: Psych 240 Lecture 14 Notes - Language
Document Summary
Arbitrarily symbolic: no connection between symbol and concept: lexicon: words and their meanings, principle of conventionality: meanings of words are determined by conventions (nothing about the word tree indicates an actual tree ) Generative property of language: using rules of language we can create an unlimited number of new utterances: limited number of words: unlimited combinations, syntactic rules create sequences and give those sequences meanings. Mapping from letters to phonemes is not one to one: sh is one phoneme but two letters, in cake c and k are two different letters, but same phoneme. Speech perception: recover phonemes from acoustic signal. Like object recognition in a visual task. Segment and categorize patterns of sound into a limited set of phonemes: sound waves, frequency. Tuesday, march 15, 2016: how often sound wave repeats itself, number of cycles per second, high frequency = high pitch, low frequency = low pitch. Amplitude: how much energy sound has.
