PSY 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: American Sign Language, Language Acquisition Device, Vocal Tract

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 102
• Professor: Tom Molcomson

Document Summary

Language largely an arbitrary symbolic system of communication that combines symbols in rule based ways to create meaning. Symbolic way of communicating allowing us individuals to communicate. Purpose - to transmit information to express thoughts, emotions. Hard to learn a language but becomes automatic after a while. We often times forget how complex language is. Four levels: phonemes, sounds that make up a language, morphemes, smallest unit of meaning in a language b, two sections. If you put sounds together, you make a unit (words) c. i. Free- open class or closed class: syntax, grammatical rules that govern words to make proper sentences, words. Morphological markers: things that s , ing , ed (past tense) Sentence structure (rules in english are not universal: shows that the dominant ways we learn language is wrong, eg. Language has content; social environment and nonverbal behaviour; knowledge and reasoning ability of listener.