Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Deductive Reasoning, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Representativeness Heuristic

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Laura Fazakas- De Hoog

Document Summary

Language (cid:120) thinking, reasoning, problem solving involves language (cid:120) Language system of symbols and rules for combining symbols generate infinite number of possible messages and meanings (cid:120) psycholinguistics scientific study of psychological aspects of language how it is understood, produced, and acquired. Properties of language (cid:120) symbols, structure, meaning, generativity, displacement. Language conveys meaning (cid:131) semantics meaning of words. Language is generative and permits displacement (cid:131) generativity: symbols can be combined to make an infinite number of messages. Novel meaning (cid:131) english 26 letter, half a million words, limitless sentences (cid:131) displacement: communicate about things not physically present past and future, and imaginary situations. The structure of language (cid:120) surface structure and deep structure (cid:120) hierarchal structure. Understanding and producing language (cid:120) context plays a key role in understanding. Bottom-up processing: brain must recognize patterns of stimuli, sounds of speech, shapes of letters, etc.