PSYC 327 Lecture Notes - Lecture 29: Deaf Culture, Cochlear Implant, Universal Grammar
16 Dec 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
When we speak, brain and voice apparatus conjure up air pressure waves that we send banging against another"s eardrum enabling us to transfer thoughts from our brain into theirs. Language: our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we communicate meaning. Language lets info move from one mind to another. Thanks to lang, we comprehend much that we"ve never seen and distant ancestors never knew. Phonemes: smallest distinctive sound unit in language. Ex: bat has b-a-t, chat has ch-a-t. There are about 869 phonemes in about 500 languages, but no language uses all of them. English has 40, others half half as many to double the maount. Morphemes: smallest units that carry meaning in given languages. Ex: in eng, i and a are morphemes and phonemes, but most morphemes are combination of two or more phonemes. (i. e. bat is one, bated = two) suffix and prefix count as two separate.
