PSY 244 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Peekaboo, Syntactic Bootstrapping, Phoneme
Document Summary
Symbols- includes language and many kinds of non-linguistic symbols (print, numbers, pictures, models, maps, etc: used to represent our thoughts, feelings, knowledge to other people. By 5 years, most children have mastered the basic structure of their native language, spoken or manually signed: sentences are as grammatically correct as those produced by the average college student. Comprehension- understanding what others say (or sign or write) Production- actually speaking (or signing or writing) Infants" ability to understand precedes their ability to produce, they can understand months or even years before they use them in their own speech. Sounds are combined to form words, words are combined to form sentences, and sentences are combined to form stories, conversations, or other narratives. Generativity- the enormous benefit that emerges from the combinatorial process, by using the finite set of words in our vocabulary, we can generate an infinite number of sentences, expressing an infinite number of ideas.
