PS101 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Cognitive Style, Problem Solving, 6 Years
Document Summary
January 25, 2010: cognition, language, the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge, the symbols that convey meaning plus rules for combining those symbols, 4 key properties that can be used to generate an infinite variety of messages. Language is symbolic: represents objects, actions, events and ideas, flexible, same word used for different things. Semantic: meaningful, arbitrary, no relationship between the look and sound of the word and the object. Phonemes: the smallest speech unit in language that can be distinguished perceptually, humans can only distinguish about 100 basic sounds, english has 40. Semantics: the smallest unit of meaning in a language. Includes roots, prefix, and suffix: the area of language concerned with understanding the meaning of words and word combinations, denotation: dictionary, connotation: emotions. Syntax: system of rules that specify how words can be arranged into sentences, a sentence must has a subject and a verb, child progress. Learn the rules of syntax very fast.
