PSYC 1010 Chapter Notes -Language Acquisition Device, Metalinguistic Awareness, Phonemic Awareness

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1010
• Professor: all

Document Summary

The language and thought (chapter 8) cognition: mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge. Cognitive psychologists investigate language, inference, problem solving, decision making and reasoning. Language: consist of symbols that conveys meaning, plus rules for combining those symbols that can be used to generate an infinite variety of messages. Symbolic: people use spoken and written language to represent objects, actions, events and ideas. Semantic (or meaningful): symbols used in a language are arbitrary in that no built-in relationship exists between the look or sound of words and objects they stand for. Generative: limited number of symbols can be combined in an infinite variety of ways to generate an endless array of novel messages. Structured: theses sentences must be constructed in a limited number of ways. Phonemes: smallest speech unit in a language that can be distinguished perceptually. English composed of about 40 phonemes corresponding with 26 alphabets. 50000 morphemes in english many words are combinations of morphemes + prefixes (friend-ly, un-friend)