PSY100Y5 Chapter 8: textbook summary chapter 8

• School: UTM
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY100Y5
• Professor: Dax Urbszat

Document Summary

Cognition refers to the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge. A language consists of symbols that convey meaning, plus rules for combing those symbols, that can be used to generate an infinite variety of messages. People use spoken sounds and written words to represent objects, actions, events, and ideas. The symbols used in a language are arbitrary in that no built-in relationship exists between the look or sound of words and the objects they stand for. A limited number of symbols can be combined in an infinite variety of ways to generate to endless array of novel messages. Although people can generate an infinite variety of sentences, these sentences must be structured in a limited number of ways. Phonemes are the smallest speech units in language that can be distinguished perceptually. A letter in the alphabet can represent more than one phoneme if it has more than one pronunciation. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in language.