Psychology 2040A/B Lecture Notes - Bound And Unbound Morphemes, Baby Talk, Linguistic Universal
Document Summary
Sound system and rules for combining sounds to produce meaningful units of speech. Phonemes: basic units of sound used in spoken language: morphology. Rules for how sounds form words: eg. past tense adds ed , eg. plurals add s , semantics. Free morphemes: can stand alone as words. Bound morphemes: changes meaning when attached to a free morpheme. Eg. the cat chased the dog. vs. The dog was chased by the cat: pragmatics. Knowledge of how language can be used to communicate effectively. Eg. speaking to a young child vs. speaking to teenager. Sociolinguistic knowledge: cultural rules of language use. Caregivers teach language by modeling and reinforcing grammatical speech via: Operant conditioning (skinner): adults reinforce correct sounds imitation (bandura): children imitate adults. Chomsky s language acquisition device (lad): allows children to understand language and to combine words into proper sentences. Activated by verbal input contains universal grammar. Model: linguistic input lad a component of language grammatical competence.