PSYB57H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Simile, Walter De Gruyter, Davidoff
Document Summary
This chapter focuses on the cognitive aspects of language. Wundt was one of the first important contributors to this area of psychology and used tree diagrams to analyze experiences. Perhaps the most important figure in linguistics, noam chomsky, distinguished language from speech. Speech is only a subset of language and must be constructed according to rules, known as grammar. However, a grammatical utterance need not be meaningful, thus highlighting the distinction between grammar and semantics. Chomsky rejected the idea of finite state grammar, stating that it could not account for the intricacy of natural languages. Instead, he put forward a top- down process that uses phrase structure rules and grammatical transformations. Moreover, chomsky elaborated on the differences between the notions of competence and performance, with the former being largely innate and having a structure that is referred to universal grammar.
