PSYC 105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Verbal Behavior, Nicaraguan Sign Language, Noam Chomsky
Document Summary
Language: what is it, system of communication. Sound and symbols: express feelings and thoughts, every human society has language, written language, came way after, not instinctive/ not natural. Lose phonemes not heard during the first year of life: we don"t just link phonemes, coarticulation: adjacent phonemes contain information about each other, phonemic restoration. If a phoneme is replaced (cough) you still here the phoneme: can"t just leave it out, change in perception, morpheme, contain meaning, ex: dog - animal: expletive infixation, we know naturally where to put an explicit word in the middle of a long word, comes before the stressed syllable - but we were never taught this word. Syntax: rules for combining words, are these rules natural or learned, order of words in a sentence is very important, semantics = whether a sentence makes sense. Independent of syntax: meaning, can use synaptic priming to make people use either active or passive sentences, this works across language, garden-path sentences.
