8. LANGUAGE: NATURE AND ACQUISITION

What is Language?

An organized system for combining words to communicate.

Communicative Function

Language is communicative by nature, allowing interaction between individuals.

Psycholinguistics

The psychology of language in relation to the human mind.

Characteristic: Arbitrarily Symbolic

Language uses symbols that have no inherent connection to their meanings.

Characteristic: Regularly Structured

Language follows specific structures and rules to convey meaning.

Characteristic: Structured at Multiple Levels

Language can be analyzed at different levels such as sounds, words, phrases, and sentences.

Characteristic: Generative

Language can create an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of rules.

Characteristic: Dynamic

Language evolves and changes over time.

Phone

The smallest unit of sound, like a click or vocal sound.

Phoneme

The smallest speech sound that distinguishes meaning, such as 's' vs. 'f'.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of meaning in a language, like 'recharge' which consists of 're' and 'charge'.

Content Morphemes

Morphemes that carry core meaning.

Function Morphemes

Morphemes that add grammatical nuance, such as suffixes or articles.

Syntax

The rules that govern how words are combined into sentences.

Noun Phrase

A phrase that typically includes a noun and modifiers, e.g., 'the student'.

Verb Phrase

A phrase that includes the verb and possibly its objects, e.g., 'answered the question'.

Speech Segmentation

The process of separating a continuous stream of speech into individual words.

Coarticulation

Blending sounds together during speech.

Categorical Perception

The ability to group similar sounds despite differences.

Motor Theory of Speech Perception

Interpreting a speaker’s mouth movements to understand speech.

Denotation

The dictionary or literal meaning of a word.

Connotation

The emotional or implied meaning of a word.

Prescriptive Grammar

Rules that dictate how language should be used.

Descriptive Grammar

The way language is actually used by speakers.

Phrase-Structure Grammar

A method that breaks sentences into their functional components.

Parsing

Assigning syntactic roles to words in a sentence.