PSYCH361 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Vocal Folds, Universal Grammar, Steven Pinker

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH361
• Professor: Jennifer Stolz

Document Summary

Language is to humans what grooming is to other primates, a means of bonding social relationships, which supports the idea that it evolved from basic motor processes (e. g. mating dances, gestures) Language can describe a variety of internal and external processes (e. g. empathy, analogies) allowing humans to develop culture, unlike other species. Chomsky says humans have an innate universal grammar (the range of morphological and syntactic rules that can occur in any language) allowing us to map spoken language known as surface structure to meaning known as deep structure .