Psychology 1000 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Window Blind, Syntactic Ambiguity, Noam Chomsky

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Atkinson

Document Summary

Language: basic characteristics of language: what are the properties of a language. Generativity: ability to use a finite number of words and rules to produce. Displacement: convey information about other times and places: to communicate about places/times we are not actually at. For example: venetian blind vs blind venetian. an infinite number of sentences. Phonemes: basic units: english 45, hawaiian 13 frequency and word length = -0. 75. (people prefer shorter words) Syntax: how does syntax provide meaning to language? ability to appreciate ambiguous meaning . Phonological ambiguity: the confusion of sounds, lexical ambiguity (confusion or double meaning of words: i work as a baker because i knead the dough), Most anything in english can be said with a vocabulary of 850 words. Telephone conversations: 96% of talk made up of 737 words, correlation word. Sentence phrase word morpheme (stranger: strange-er-s) phoneme (showing you how you pronounce the elements )