PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Phonemic Awareness, Categorical Perception, Nonverbal Communication

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jordan Poppenk

Document Summary

Language is a method for communicating information (ideas, thoughts, emotions: socially shared code that uses a conventional system of arbitrary symbols to represent ideas about the world that are meaningful to those who know the same code. Information can only be communicated if both sender and receiver understand what is going on: music, sending flowers, body language. Identify the three key properties of human language. Semanticity: extent to which a language can use symbols to transmit meaningful messages. Generativity: ability to combine words/symbols of a language using rules of composition and syntax to communicate a variety of ideas using relatively small vocabulary. Displacement: ability to convey a message that is not tied to current time/place. Describe the components of language: phonemes, morphemes, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Phonology: the rules that govern the patterns of sounds that are used/combined in a language. Phonemes: the most basic units of speech sound, combined to form morphemes.