Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Metacognition, Representativeness Heuristic, Benjamin Lee Whorf

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Derek Quinlan

Document Summary

Human languages across the globe share the same underlying features. Language is symbolic and structured, conveys meaning, is generative, and permits displacement. Language has many adaptive functions, such as facilitating cooperative social systems and allowing people to transmit knowledge to one another. Scientists believe that humans have evolved an innate capacity for acquiring language. The surface structure of a language refers to how symbols are combined; the deep structure refers to the underlying meaning of the symbols. Language elements are hierarchically arranged: from phoneme to morpheme to word phrases, and sentences. Understanding and producing language including pattern recognition of words and the hierarchical structure of language involve bottom-up and top-down processing. In infancy, babies can perceive all the phonemes that exist in all the languages of the world. Between 6-12 months of age, their speech discrimination narrows to include only the sounds specific to their native tongue.