PSY 2105 Chapter Notes - Chapter 11: Language Acquisition Device, Language Development, Syntactic Bootstrapping

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 2105
• Professor: Gustavo Gottret

Document Summary

Language is a complicated system of rules that allows us to communicate verbally. Language unlikely to be only genetic process b/c: productivity of language involves an infinite set of messages that are unlikely to be passed along via genetic code, adopted children don"t speak language of their biological parents. Productivity: property of language that permits humans to produce and comprehend an infinite number of statements. Acquisition of language was a function of learning. Child is reinforced for imitation of adult speech, punished for poor language effort. Emphasized interaction of inborn processes and biological mechanisms w environmental influences. Children not reinforced for speech accuracy (cid:2) (cid:2) (cid:2) (cid:2) (cid:2) (cid:2) (cid:2) Children learn to speak well even when exposed to poor models of speech. The rules of grammar are too complex for simple learning processes. Biological basis for language acquisition because young children acquire language early and rapidly. Surface structure the way that words are combined (varies w culture: 2.