Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Kanzi, Universal Property, Psycholinguistics

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: John Campbell

Document Summary

Bonobo chimps: kanzi was trained informally during everyday interactions after he spontaneously picked up on signs from mother, kanzi generated a corpus of thousands of utterances, many of which demonstrated evidence of syntactic understanding. Properties of language: symbols, structure, meaning, generativity and displacement are universal properties of language. Language is symbolic and structured: symbols used in any given language are arbitrary i. e. spanish, french and german words for dog are perro, chien, and hund. Just as symbols vary across languages, so do grammatical rules. In other words, language frees us from being restricted to focusing on events and objects that are right before us in the present: can discuss the past and the future etc. The structure of language: psycholinguistics describe language as having a surface structure and a deep structure, also examine the hierarchical structure of language. Ambiguous sentences: time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.