Psychology 3130A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Deep Structure And Surface Structure, Arbitrariness, Mental Model

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 3130A/B
• Professor: Mark Holden

Document Summary

Productive with human language, we can express an infinite number of things and ideas, there is no limit to what we can say, what we can express or, for that matter, what we can think. Arbitrary there does not need to be a correspondence between the sound of a word and the idea that it expresses. There is a small set of exceptions, words that are meant to sound like the idea, but is a very limited subset. For the most part, the sounds that we use to express an idea bear no relationship to the concrete aspects of the idea. They are, in fact, mental symbols that can link together percepts and concepts. Interchangeability a speaker of a language can reproduce any message he or she. Surface structure refers to the words that are used, spoken sound, phrases, word order, written letters, etc.