PSYC 1001 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Inuit, Bounded Rationality, Conjunction Fallacy

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1001
• Professor: Elaine Waddington Lamont

Document Summary

Cognition: refers to the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge (complexities of language, inference, problem solving, decision making and reasoning). Language: consists of symbols that convey meaning, plus rules for combinin-g those symbols, that can be used to generate an infinite variety of messages. Everyday you create and comprehend sentences that you have never spoken or heard before: language is structured hierarchical - rules govern the arrangement of words into phrases and sentences; some arrangements are acceptable and some are not. Phonemes: at the base of the language hierarchy. They are the smallest speech units in a language that can be distinguished perceptually. (40 phonemes - 26 letters of the alphabet plus several variations). Morphemes: are the smallest units of meaning in a language. There are approximately 50,000 in the english language including root words/prefixes/suffices. Semantics: the area of language concerned with understanding the meaning of words and word combinations.