PSYC 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Language Acquisition Device, Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 102
• Professor: Sherri Atwood

Document Summary

Language: system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules of grammar to to convey meaning. Grammar: set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to produce more meaningful messages. Approximately 4000 human languages (all have basic structure of sounds and rules) Phoneme: smallest unit of sound that is recognizable as speech rather than random noise: phonological rules: set of rules that indicate how phonemes can be combined to produce speech sounds. Morphemes: the smallest meaningful units of language: morphological rules: set of rules that indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words. Syntactical rules: set of rules that indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences. Deep structure vs surface structure: deep structure: meaning of sentence, surface structure: how a sentence is worded. Learning is both social (learn language from routines/contexts, observations, feedback) and cognitive (children have mental structures that predispose them to organize, classify)