PSYB57H3 Chapter 9: PSYB57H3 (COGNITION - 6TH EDITION BY SCOTT SINNETT) CHAPTER 9 - LANGUAGE
Document Summary
There are currently more than 7,000 languages in the world. More than 200 languages have died since 1950; another 3000 are about to become extinct. The most important characteristic that human languages share is their capacity for recursion. Recursion: the capacity of any one component (e. g. phrase or sentence) to contain any number of similar components. In theory, it"s possible to construct a sentence that has an infinite number of other sentences embedded in it. Psycholinguistics: branch of cognitive psychology that studies the acquisition, production, comprehension, and representation (in the mind) of language. Language is hierarchical in nature ! a series of components can be combined to form larger components and so on, as long as each combination follows certain rules. All languages share some components, example a phoneme: the smallest unit in language. Phonemes are combined with other phonemes to form morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language.
