PSY 12000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Psy, Extrasensory Perception, Linguistic Relativity

• School: Purdue University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 12000
• Professor: George Hollich

Document Summary

Language helps us find order in the world: basic-order. Linguistic relativity hypothesis: language changes how you think and perceive, benjamin whorf. The challenge: finding clever ways to test infants, who may understand much more than they say, to explain how it is that we can learn a language at all. Language: it"s easy, right: sounds words sentences meaning, to a native speaker, language is reflexive, automatic . Language: it"s hard, right: sounds words sentences meaning, to a non-native speaker, language goes against natural tendencies and is anything but reflexive, automatic. What does it take to learn a language: phonology: sounds of language, segmentation: finding units in fluent speech, semantics: connecting words to meaning, grammar: the rules for combining units and expressing new meanings. Babies know a lot: we now think that babies know phonology, segmentation, semantics and even grammar before age 2.