Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Relate, Functional Fixedness, Linguistic Relativity

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Dr.Mike

Document Summary

Chapter 9: language: properties of language, syntax. Deep/surface structure: language learning, structure of thought, heuristic processing. Phonemes: smallest unit of meaning in a language. Morphemes: from phonemes, they are combined to create meaningful pieces of discourse. Stringing together concepts: anything in english can be conveyed in 850 words and most infants already have this vocabulary. Shows us that most of our advanced vocabulary is inherently useless. Set of rules for how symbols can be combined to create meaningful forms of communication: syntax. Grammar for a language and tells us how to put the words together in the proper order: semantics. Meaning of words and sentences: generality. The symbols can be manipulated to generate an infinite number of messages and have a different meaning for each: displacement. Be able to communicate about objects that are not currently present. Processing of individual element and then combines them to form a whole. Small subunits combined to create a larger meaning.