PSYC 251 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Cochlear Implant, Lip Reading, Speech-Language Pathology
12 Mar 2014
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Page 298-335, 37 pages page 1 of 11. Elements of language: language is a system that relates sounds or gestures to meaning. It differs from simple communication: it has arbitrary units, and is therefore symbolic. The words only have meaning because meaning has been assigned to those sounds: it is structured and meaningful, it shows displacement. One can communicate about events distant in time and space: it is characterized by generativity. In english, all words are constructed from 45 sound phonemes: morphology: the rules of meaning within a language. The smallest unit of meaning is a morpheme, which are meaningful combinations of phonemes. Free morphemes can stand alone, while bound morphemes cannot, such as -s for plurals or -ing suffix. Morphemes are not syllables: happy is one morpheme, unhappy is two, unhappiness is three: semantics: the study of words and their meaning. Dictionaries: grammar: rules that describe structure of a language.
