PSY 324 - Unit 12

What is a Phoneme?

the smallest unit of sound in language

What is a Morpheme?

the smallest unit of meaning in a word

What is Motor Theory?

the systems we use to produce speech we also use to understand it

What is Auditory Theory?

our auditory system is primarily responsible for our speech perception

What is meant by Chomsky’s Universal Grammar?

humans possess an innate knowledge of language that allows them to learn language efficiently; core argument is the poverty of stimulus argument

What is meant by the Poverty of Stimulus argument?

language is too complex to be able to explain it with the behaviorism approach

What is true about active versus passive sentences?

we prefer active sentences; passive sentences have the subject last (… by the __)