Psychology 2134A/B Lecture : Overview of Human Language

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2134A/B
• Professor: Marc Joanisse

Document Summary

The real content of this course begins in this section, in which we will start to think about what language is, and why we would want to study it anyway. However, they don"t all speak the same language. (in fact sign languages aren"t even spoken, but as we will see in this course, they are still human languages!) In this class you"ll learn that languages differ in some basic ways. When we look beyond the surface differences across languages we see that there are lots of deep similarities across them. There is no such thing as a "primitive" language. All languages are structurally complex, and are able to transmit an infinite set of thoughts and ideas. There is no "correct" or "best" form of a language: languages can have many dialects, identified with different social or economic strata. However these are just as grammatical and complex as any other form of the language.