PSYCH 3330 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Ray Jackendoff, Temporal Lobe, Metatheory
2 Apr 2017
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Language pervades every facet of our lives, from our most public behavior to our most private thoughts. Every culture, no matter how primitive or isolated, has language; every person, unless deprived by nature or accident, develops skill in the use of language. Linguistics is the discipline that takes language as its topic. Linguistics, however, focused on language itself as a formal, almost disembodied system. In such an approach, the use of language by humans was seen as less interesting, tangential, or even irrelevant. Thus a branch of cognitive psychology evolved, called psychlinguistics, the study of language as it is learned and used by people. One critical idea is that meaning and understanding is attributed to the words and their pronunciation, rather than being part of those words. Language is based on arbitrary connections between linguistic elements, such as sounds, and the meanings denoted by them. It is true that the development of writing depends critically on a spoken language.
