Psychology 1000 Midterm: Chapter 9 Language and Thinking

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Dr.Mike

Document Summary

Humans have a remarkable ability to create mental representations of the world and to manipulate them in the forms of language, mental representations - images, ideas, concepts, and principles. Language - system of symbols and rules to generate infinite possible meanings. Psycholinguistics - study of psychological aspects of language. Adaptive functions of language - for humans to adopt a more socially oriented lifestyle that helped them survive and reproduce, evolved as people gathered to form larger social units. Grammar - the set of rules that dictate how symbols can be combined to create meaningful units of communication. Syntax - the rules that govern the order of words. Generativity - finite symbols can be combined to an infinite number of messages. Displacement - llows us to communicate things that aren"t physically present (imaginary, past, future) Surface structure - symbols and the their order. Sentences can have different surface structures but the same deep structure.