Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Deep Structure And Surface Structure, Speech Segmentation, Phoneme

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Laura Fazakas- De Hoog

Document Summary

Humans can create mental representations of the world and can manipulate them in forms of language, thinking, reasoning, and problem solving. Mental representations include images, ideas, concepts, and principles. Language consists of a system of symbols and rules for combining these symbols in ways that can generate an infinite number of possible messages and meanings. Psycholinguistics is the scientific study of the psychological aspect of language. Language has evolved immensely over the past 50,000 years. It may have evolved as people gathered to form larger social units. Every human culture no matter how isolated or remote, has developed one or more languages. The human brain seems to have an inborn capacity to acquire any of the languages spoken across the globe. Four properties are essential to any language: symbols, structure, meaning, and generativity. Language uses sounds, written characters, or some other system of symbols to represent objects, events, ideas, feelings, and actions.