PSY 302 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Nicaraguan Sign Language, Noam Chomsky, Universal Grammar

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 302
• Professor: Margaret Moulson

Document Summary

Symbols: systems for representing our thoughts, feelings and knowledge. Comprehension: understanding what others say (sign or write) Generativity: idea that through use of finite set of words and morphemes we can put together an infinite number of sentences to express infinite ideas. Language: species-specific behaviour: humans can acquire a communicative system with the complexity, structure, and generativity of language, phonological development. Learning rules for combining sounds/words: pragmatic development. Learning how language is used: language is associated with the left hemisphere. Newborns show greater activity when exposed to normal speech. Speech is localized ere because of acoustic properties: critical period for language: time during which language develops quickly then slows down and becomes more difficult. The more exposure, the better they will learn language. Children must be exposed to other people using signed or spoken language: feral children. Word segmentation: process of discovering where words begin and end. Infants listened longer to words that they heard before.