PSY342H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Function Word, Long-Term Memory, Phoneme
Document Summary
The understanding of language is relatively automatic. As we hear or read a sentence, we focus on its meaning and comprehend it by using the information stored in our long term memory. Psycholinguistics refers to the study of comprehension, production and acquisition of language. A sentence is composed of many different pieces and these different pieces are referred to as different levels of language representation. Grammar refers to the rules of usage but in linguistics grammar refers to the sum of knowledge that someone has about the structure of his/her language. Most of the grammatical knowledge is unconscious but it underlies our ability to speak or comprehend a language. Various levels of language representation explain how we understand sentences. These levels include: discourse level refers to a coherent group of written or spoken sentences. This level mentally represents the meaning of an sentence that goes beyond the meaning of individual words.
