Psychology 2134A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Noam Chomsky, Linguistic Prescription, Empiricism

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

Document Summary

Mid 20th century behaviourism: skinner: language as operant conditioning (method of learning that employs rewards and punishments for behaviour, language is a response to a stimulus, and its consequences. Cognitivism: chomsky: language is structurally complex, language should be studied as a unique ability, more than just observable stimuli and responses. Idea: mental grammars are made up of rules that we encode implicitly: allows us to produce grammatical utterances, and only grammatical utterances. But even onomatopoeia differs from language to language: each component of the honeybee waggle dance, on the other hand, is an iconic symbol, meaning it"s a symbol that bears a clear resemblance to what it refers to. In fact, most of the linguistic research of the last half of the twentieth century focused on teasing out the structure of sentences, following the lead of noted linguist noam. Chomsky: however, people just don"t go around uttering random sentences.