Psychology 1000 Chapter 9-14: Psychology_textbook summary (ch 9 to 14)

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Laura Fazakas- De Hoog

Document Summary

C hapter 9: thought, language, and intelligence pgs 336-358. Mental representations take a variety of forms, including images, ideas, concepts, and principles. Human cognitive skills have changed through evolution. Language is the offspring of evolution and the need to communicate. Language a system of symbols and rules for combining these symbols in ways that can produce an almost infinite number of possible messages or meanings. Language is symbolic uses sounds, signs, and gestures to refer to objects, events, ideas, and feelings. Language allows the transfer of ones mental representations to another mind. Displacement past, future, and imaginary events and objects that are not physically present can be symbolically represented through language. Language helps us from being restricted to the present. Language has structure rules that govern how symbols can be combined to create meaningful communication units. Language is generative symbols can be combined to generate an almost infinite number of messages that can have novel meaning.