Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Language Acquisition Device, Prelingual Deafness, Inferior Frontal Gyrus

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Terry Biggs

Document Summary

Language consists of a system of symbols and rules for combining these symbols in ways that can generate an ininite number of possible messages and meanings. Psycholinguisics: the scieniic study of the psychological aspects of language, such as how people understand, produce, and acquire language. Adapive funcions of language: human thought and behaviour depend on more than the physical structure of the brain, over the course of evoluion, humans adopted a more socially oriented lifestyle that helped them survive and reproduce. Evoluionary theorists believe that the use of language evolved as people gathered to form larger social units. The symbols (sounds, characters, handsigns etc. ) used in any given language are arbitrary: grammar: a set of rules that dictate how symbols can be combined to create meaningful units of communicaion. Syntax: the rules that govern the order of words. Generaivity: the symbols of language can be combined to generate an ininite number of messages that have novel meaning.