PSYC 3500 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Noam Chomsky
10 Sep 2019
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Prosodic patterns of language are learned in utero. Words and objects which recur together are also associated. Syllables which recur, and recur together, are chunked together. Grammar definition= conventions for ordering and inflecting words in ways that change the intended meaning of the utterance. Learning grammar is more than learning to produce words in orders you"ve heard, and not produce words in orders you haven"t. Child"s task= learn which types of word orders are grammatical. Need to learn which categories are allowed and which words belong in which categories. Also need to learn internal structure of sentence structure= the dependencies between words and groups of words. To learn the right structure requires knowledge of syntactic categories and their position in the sentence. Exposure to the language tells the infant which possibility is the correct one. A sequence of words (often in real world contexts-- the input to the language acquisition system isn"t just the language)
