PSYC 354 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Noam Chomsky, Pragmatics, Behaviorism

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 354
• Professor: Jeremy Carpendale

Document Summary

Pragmatics: people use words to mean things in social contexts. Innate view: we are born with specialized learning mechanisms. The arguments that claim that syntax and semantics are innate are logical arguments rather than empirical arguments. Not enough input (positive evidence: there is literally no evidence for this. Not enough explicit corrections (negative evidence: but children are not really receptive to explicit correction, recasting works better (more subtle form of negative evidence, again, he didn"t have enough evidence. No learning mechanisms could account for syntax because we can produce sentences that we have never heard before: statistical learning, there are other examples, but we don"t have to worry about this as much for this course. Constraints: constraints on interpretations (we need to be able to interpret what people mean, how are we constrained when we learn words. Individualistic: constraints approach (different than the broad term for constraints, the ways of limiting our interpretations of words are innate.