PSYB57H3 Chapter 12: Chapter 12
Document Summary
The nature of language: the understanding of language is relatively automatic. As we hear or read a sentence, we focus on its meaning and comprehend it by using the information stored in our long term memory: psycholinguistics refers to the study of comprehension, production and acquisition of language. Most of the grammatical knowledge is unconscious but it underlies our ability to speak or comprehend a language: various levels of language representation explain how we understand sentences. These levels include: discourse level refers to a coherent group of written or spoken sentences. this level mentally represents the meaning of an sentence that goes beyond the meaning of individual words. In this representation, the two most important parts are the subject and the object. the relationship between the words is explained in terms of a propositional representation which relates the action, the one doing the action and the thing that is acted on.
