Lingu

  • Chpqter 9

  • Linguistics - study of language; studies how language affects / influences behavior of people

  • Presents the intersection of linguistics and mental processing

  • The Properties of Language

    • Key properties that distinguish human language from other forms of communication

    • Communicative - language allows us to transfer information from one mind to another

    • Arbitrarily symbolic - there is no

    • Regularly structured -

    • Structured at multiple levels - language can be analyzed in terms of sounds, words, phrases, etc.

    • Generative (productive) - we can create an infinite number of unique sentences and phrases

    • Dynamic -


  • Morphology - morpheme - the smalest unit of meaning

  • Syntax - grammar - the rules governing word order and sentence

  • Semantics - meaning - the study of the meaning of words and sentences

  • Phonology - phonema - the smallest unit of speech sound

  • Pragmatics - cotext - hwo context and social rules contribute to meaning


Language comprehension

  • How we perceive speech - this is harder than it seems because of coarticulation— the fact that we start prnouncing the next phenome before e finish the currnt one

  • The Phonemic Restoraion Effect

  • vategorical of perception


Syntax and semantics

  • sternberg often discusses noam chomsky’s influence on how we understand sentence structure:

    • transformational grammar

    • chomsky proposed that sentences


The nmental lexzicon

  • this is our mental dictionary where we store words and their meanings


Brain and Language

  • Biological basis of language, primarily focusing on the left hemisphere:

    • Broca’s area

    • Wernicke’s area


Chapter 10

  • Language in context

  • Language and thought

    • differences between languages

      • differences in lexicon

      • differenes in syntax

      • princple of linguistic relativity: the sapir-whorf hypothesis

        • the structure of a language influences thought

        • Current view - milder form

        • language facilitates mental representation and manipulation

        • languageaffects how we encode, store and retrieve information in memory

  • linguistic universals


  • bilingualism and dialects