PSY270H1 Lecture Notes - Speech Segmentation, Speech Production, Psycholinguistics
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PSY270H1 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
Language is a system of communication that uses sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, experiences. Human language can be distinguished from animal communication by its: creativity, hierarchical structure (components combined = larger units = words phrases sentences stories, governing rules, & universality. Modern research in the psych of language blossomed in the 1950"s and 1960"s, with the advent of the cognitive revolution. One of the central events here was chomsky"s critique of skinner"s behavioristic analysis of language: skinner = nurture, language learned via reinforcement, chomsky = nature, language is genetic and universal. Children say sentences they have never heard before, as well as ones which have never been reinforced. Process by which we learn language: comprehension, speech production, acquisition, perceiving and understanding words. All the words a person knows are his or her lexicon.
