PSYC 221 Chapter Notes - Chapter 11: Lexical Decision Task, Speech Segmentation, Frontal Lobe

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 221
• Professor: Richard Smith

Document Summary

System of communication that uses sounds or symbols that enable us to express our feelings, thoughts, idea, and experiences. Human language can be distinguished from animal communication by: creativity, hierarchical structure, governing rules, universality- more than 5,000 languages. Modern psychology language research emerged in1950"s and 1960"s with the advent of the cognitive revolution. Children babble at 7 months, few words at age 1 and multiword by age 2: chomsky"s critique of skinner"s behaviouristic analysis of language. Lexicon: all the words a person knows (50,000) Phoneme- shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changed meaning of word: not the same as a letter, 47 in english. Morpheme- smallest unit that has a meaning or grammatical function o. Can"t identify location of cough and don"t notice missing sound. Meaning and a person"s experience with other aspects of language are important for speech segmentation. Letters are easier to recognize when they are in words.