PSY 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Eleanor Rosch, Backtracking, Decision-Making
7 Jun 2018
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Language
• Defined as:
o Our spoken, written, or gestured works and the way we combine them to
communicate the meaning
• 2 main functions
o communicate information
o establishes and maintains relationships
▪ emotional content
• Background
o Highest achievement of human thought
▪ Language
o Other animals are capable of language
▪ Rico- border collie who understood over 225 words
▪ Washoe- sign language chimp
▪ Bees- use dance to communicate location of food
o Language is more limited in all other animals
▪ Unable to indicate specific details
• Bees- no indication of time to get food
• Chimps- no grammatical structure
• Properties of Human Language
o Communicative
▪ Anyone who shares language can understand
o Arbitrarily symbolic
▪ Arbitrary relationship between symbol (word) and its referent (location)
o Dynamic
▪ Always changing and evolving
• Parts (Features) of human language
o Phonemes
▪ Lowest structure of language
▪ Single speech sound
▪ Differ by language
• Infants can use phonemes
• Without practice, they lose this ability
• Will never be able to make this sound
▪ American English
• 44 phonemes
• people who know other languages may have different sounds
o Morphemes
▪ Smallest unit of language that is meaningful
▪ include:
• words
• prefixes
• suffixes
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