PSY374H5 Midterm: Lectures 1-3
Document Summary
What do we see and hear: they"re doing a lot of stuff beyond using language they"re eating dinner, monitoring people walk around the room. A word is inherently an association between (a) a perceptual pattern ( form ) (e. g. , a sound pattern, in the case of spoken language) and (b) a mental concept ( meaning ) The relationship between the pattern and concept is understood to be arbitrary: a word is an association between a perceptual pattern (its form - the noise we associate it with) and a mental concept, ex. The word coronavirus has a specific sound and an associated meaning: the important thing about language and what makes it incredibly useful is the relationship between the pattern and concept is arbitrary, ex. Cup or glass in english we happen to land on those sounds historically to refer to that concept (glass) whereas other languages don"t use that same sound pattern (this is what is meant by arbitrariness)
