Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Deductive Reasoning, Sarcasm, Inductive Reasoning

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Campbell

Document Summary

Most common, universal feature of human society. Believe this is the most common pervasive component of our society. Pervades every facet of our lives, public and private (thinking in your mind) Every culture, not matter how isolated or primitive, has language. Every person, except under extreme deprivation/accidents, develops skills in use of language. A shared symbolic system for communication: letters, written, and spoken symbols that stand for the referent of the word, shared by all speakers of a language culture, system enables communication. Language = word + rules: words of language comprise the mental lexicon, grammar: rules that dictate the legal combination of the units of language. Language is a system of symbols ad rules. Allows for forming and transferring mental representations: structure. Symbols combined to create meaningful units: generativity. Symbols can be combined to generate an infinite number of messages that can have novel meaning. Past, future, imaginary events, objects can be symbolically represented and communicated.