PSYC10003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 31: Noam Chomsky, Spoken Language, Cognitive Science
8. Language
Language Origins
• Consideration of the origin of language was deemed futile by the Societe de Linguistique de Paris in
1866
• All discussion on this topic was banned
• Spoken language leaves no trace
o Theories on the origin of language highly speculative
• No gaps etee spoke ords like rods o a page
• Boundaries between areas actually occur within a word
• Spoken languages are estimated to have originated in our evolutionary history 30,000-100,000 years
ago
• ≈ 4000 ad 6000 laguages o earth
• written language is a recent human invention (meme)
o originated in Middle Eastern Cultures about 5000 years ago
• Wherever human societies exist, there is language
• Only 1/3 of humans are literate
o Reading is a cognitive skill dependent upon formal instruction
• Literacy influences the way we think about spoken language
Noam Chomsky
• American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist and social activist
• Professor of linguistics at MIT
• Challenged behaviourist approach
• Contributed to cognitive revolution in psychology
• Claim human capacity for language is innate
Language
• When you know a language, you have the capacity to produce sounds that correspond to certain
meanings, and the ability to understand and interpret the sounds produced by others
• Language consists of a set of arbitrary symbols (words) combined by syntactic rules to enable
relationships between concepts to be expressed and thoughts to be conveyed among people
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Document Summary
Language origins: consideration of the origin of language was deemed futile by the societe de linguistique de paris in. Noam chomsky: american linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist and social activist, professor of linguistics at mit, challenged behaviourist approach, contributed to cognitive revolution in psychology, claim human capacity for language is innate. Phonology: phonology: the sound structure of a language, knowing a language means knowing the sounds that are in a language and which are not. Categorical perception of phonemes: phonemes represent abstract perceptual categories for a range of sounds on a continuum, eg. I(cid:374) japa(cid:374)ese, (cid:858)r(cid:859) a(cid:374)d (cid:858)l(cid:859) u(cid:374)its are (cid:272)ategori(cid:272)al pho(cid:374)e(cid:373)i(cid:272) (cid:272)ategories: cannot differentiate, as not useful for their language. Morphology: morpheme: is the smallest unit of sound that denotes meaning in a language. Semantics: semantics: knowing a language means knowing how to relate sounds to meanings, relationships between words and the things they represent is arbitrary, eg.
