Psychology 2134A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Symbol Grounding Problem, Phonological Word, Phonotactics

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2134A/B
• Professor: Sarah Smits- Bandstra

Document Summary

Word a minimal unit of meaningful speech that can stand alone. However words usually occur within larger utterances and the context can change the way the word is pronounced. Words also exhibit a dual nature, having both an outward phonological form (the way it sounds when produced in isolation or within an utterance) and an underlying semantic representation (the concept associated with that word). At a more abstract level we can think of words as labels for concepts. Concept a mental representation of some sort of statistical regularity in our experience. Words can be grouped in a number of different ways; such as content words and function words. Content words are words that convey meaning. Also called open-class words because we continue to learn new concepts and the labels for them. Form the bulk of a language"s vocabulary. Convey the bulk of meaning in utterances. Function words are words that serve grammatical purposes.