PSYC 2410 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Inductive Reasoning, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Confirmation Bias

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2410
• Professor: Dan Meegan

Document Summary

Mental representations: cognitive representations of the world, including images, ideas, concepts, and principles, that are foundations of thinking and problem solving. Language has been called the jewel in the crown of cognition and the human essence . Language: a system of symbols and rules for combining them that can produce an almost infinite number of possible messages and meanings. Psycholinguistics: the scientific study of the psychological aspects of language, such as how people understand, produce, and acquire language. Language is a system of symbols and rules for combining these symbols in ways that can generate infinite number of messages and meanings. This definition encompasses four properties that are essential to any language: symbols, structure, meaning and generativity. Language uses sounds written characters, or some other system of symbols to represent objects, events, ideas, feelings, and actions. Grammar: the set of rules that dictate how symbols can be combined to create meaningful units of communication.