PSYCH 111 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Statistical Hypothesis Testing, Confirmation Bias, Inductive Reasoning

• School: U of M
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH 111
• Professor: Elizabeth Buvinger

Document Summary

Language - system of symbols/sounds/meanings/rules that allow for communication among humans. Linguistic relativity - benjamin whorf, one"s language determines the nature of one"s thought. Phonemes - smallest units of distinguished sounds, change in sound can alter meaning. Morphemes - smallest units of meanings in a language (ex. Semantics - the meaning of words and word combinations. Syntax - system of rules that specify how words can be arranged into sentences. Deep structure - notion of nouns, verbs, commands. Language is based on modeling, imitation, exposure, and reinforcement. Flaws: children acquire language with ease; adult speech is often sloppy, children acquire basic rules/structures anyways; children"s speech is not a mechanical playback of adult speech. Gleason study - language rules are generative; made up words to test language rules. Over-regularizations - grammatical rules incorrectly generalized to exceptions (ex. Humans possess an inborn language mechanism that facilitates the learning of language.