PSYC 3350 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Japanese Language, Critical Period, Proxemics

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3350
• Professor: Francois Lalonde

Document Summary

Culture shapes many of the norms that govern our behaviour: ex. personal space: venezuelans prefer closer conversational distances, and japanese prefer wider conversational distances, compared with americans. Two possibilities for cultural differences: inherited genetic tendencies, early experiences with their environments. Our nature is that of a cultural being. Our universal biological foundation is shaped by our experiences, such that we are able to thrive in an extremely broad array of cultural environments. A sensitive period is a period of time in an organism"s development that allows for the relatively easy acquisition of a set of skills. No other species is dependent on their language skills or has a complex language system as humans. Evidences for a sensitive period of language acquisition: people"s abilities to discriminate among different sounds. Humans are capable of producing, recognizing, and using appr. 150 phonemes; however no language uses more than 70 of them.