Psychology 2134A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: American Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, Noam Chomsky

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2134A/B
• Professor: Terry Biggs

Document Summary

Speakers use a finite set of rules to pronounce and understand an infinite set of possible sentences. Syntax: how the words are combined into sentences. Semantics: the relation of sounds and meanings. Linguistic competence, knowledge, is different from linguistic performance, behavior. Universal grammar: forms the basis of specific grammars of all possible human languages and constitutes the innate component of the human language faculty that makes normal language development possible. Descriptive grammar: represents unconscious linguistic knowledge/ capacity of its speakers. Model of mental grammar, every speaker of the language knows. It does not teach rules of language, it describes the rules that are already known. Prescriptive grammar: grammar that attempts to legislate what your grammar should be. Reference grammar: written to help people find out grammatical facts of a language. Teaching grammar: written to help people learn a foreign language of their own language.