PSYC 213 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Language Acquisition Device, Phrase Structure Rules, Innateness Hypothesis
Document Summary
Tree diagrams: a description of a process that proceeds from one level at which a number of relationships are simultaneously present to other levels at which these relationships are serially ordered. Chomsky= important figure of the history of linguistics. Language: open-ended verbal communication that consists of all possible sentences. Speech: those sentences that are actually spoken; only a small subset of language. Means that there must be a set or rules. Processes that make a sentence grammatical are different from processes that make a sentence meaningful. Finite state grammars grammar that could generate all the sentences in a language, they only operate at one level. Phrase structure rules: rules describing the way in which symbols can be rewritten as other symbols. Rewriting goes on until it generates actual words. Top-down process. allow a number of different sentences to be derived. Grammatical transformations: rules operating on entire strings of symbols, converting them to new strings.