Psychology 2134A/B Lecture Notes - Noam Chomsky, Pragmatics, Empiricism

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2134A/B
• Professor: Marc Joanisse

Document Summary

Compositional semantics: bigger meaning arising out of discrete syntactic structure; entire sentence. Highly productive nature of our grammar (infinite combinations) means that the theory that babies memorize things is not likely. Example from slides: the grammar here is a set of rules about what shapes should/can look like. Not told what this rule is, just shown the shapes. Mirrors the way children use evidence in the environment to form grammatical rules. Positive evidence: evidence about what"s correct (heard from peers). Makes it difficult to figure out the grammar. Poverty of the stimulus: (chomsky, a nativist) stimulus that the child gets are impoverished- it doesn"t contain enough information allowing the child to discover the grammar, a very complex grammar. Only getting a subset of all possible grammatical utterances, and sometimes getting ungrammatical sentences. (possibilities are infinite). So, you must come into the world with some preexisting knowledge about what grammar should look like.