Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Psycholinguistics, Mental Image, Psych

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: John Campbell

Document Summary

Language and thinking: mental representations: include images, ideas, concepts, and principles, process of education. 6000 languages spoken around the globe: some authors suggest that language and memory evolved at the same time, language is a powerful learning mechanism. Properties of language: five properties essential to any language, symbolic, structure combined to create meaningful units, meaning, generativity combined to generate an infinite number of messages, displacement symbolically represented and communicated. Language conveys meaning: once people learn those symbols and rules, they are able to form and then transfer mental representations to the mind of another person, semantics: the meaning of words and sentences. The old man the ships: demonstrates there is a risk to interpreting a sentence as it arrives, the info necessary for interpretation can often come at the end. Understanding and producing language: context plays a key role in understanding language.