Psychology 2135A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Noam Chomsky, Language Acquisition Device, Universal Grammar

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2135A/B
• Professor: Sandra Hessels

Document Summary

Psycholinguistics: the study of how people communicate using language. Language universal - symbolism: symbols refer to objects, events, ideas, feelings, referential- symbol refers to something, arbitrary connection between symbol and referent- exception onomonipia, can talk about the abstract and the future. Language universal - structure: rules govern how the symbols are combined to produce meaningful communication, rules for letters, words, and sentences implicit knowledge. Language universal - generativity: able to create an in nite number of novel utterances, able to understand an in nite number of novel utterances, can combine symbols to produce an in nite number of utterances. Can distinguish sounds from a very young age. Written letters are not a good match for sounds. Languages differ in the particular phonemes they use. The phonemes you hear in your language predict what you are able to hear. Example: r and l difference cannot be detected by japanese. The later you learn a language the harder it is to learn.