Psychology 2015A/B Study Guide - Final Guide: Operational Transformation, Transformational Grammar, Active And Passive Transformation

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2015A/B
• Professor: Patrick Brown

Document Summary

Wundtt was the first to do important research in the psychology of language. He looked at experiences and the relationship with words used to describe the experience. He used tree diagrams to show items that were on the same plane as occurring simultaneously and the branched items are items that occur sequentially. Chomsky is one of the most important figures in the history of linguistics. Chomsky said the the number of possible sentences in a language is infinite. Language is open ended and consists of all possible sentences, but speech consists of only those sentences that are actually spoken. This is because there is a set of rules, called grammar, that everyone uses to generate sentences. Chomsky argued that the process that makes a sentence grammatical is different than what makes it meaningful. Chomsky argued that finite grammar is too simple to underlie the complexity of natural language.