Summary PSY1005S Exam Notes: Language & Thought

LANGUAGE AND
THOUGHT
NOTES

,Language
Definition
 Language is a system for communicating with others
o Using signals that convey meaning
o And combining with the rules of grammar
 Allows individuals to
o Exchange information about the world
o Coordinate group action
o Form strong social bonds


Human Language
 Complex structure
 Use language to
o Name
o Categorize
o Describe things
 Can even use words to refer to intangible things
o Democracy
 Influences how knowledge is organized in our brains
 Human language is a relatively recent evolutionary phenomenon
o Emerged as a spoken system no more than 1 to 3 million years ago
o Emerged as a written system as little as 6,000 years ago
 Approximately 4,000 human languages
o Linguists have grouped into about 50 language families


Adaptive Functions
 Evolved as people gathered to form larger social units
 Made it easier for humans to adapt to environmental demand
 Allows us to share
 Thoughts
 Feelings
 Needs
 Ideas
 Powerful learning mechanism
 Passing on of knowledge & wisdom

,Properties / Qualities of language
 Consists of symbols
o Symbols convey meaning
o Rules for combining those symbols
o Can be used to generate an infinite variety of messages and
meanings
 List of properties
o Symbolic
 Arbitrary
o Semantic
 Meaning
o Structured / rule-governed
o Generative
o Permits displacement


Grammar
 All languages have grammar
 Set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to
produce meaningful messages
o Rules of morphology
o Rules of syntax

,Hierarchical structure of language

Sounds
Phonetics/phonemes
 Smallest speech units
 100 possible
o English = 44
 Only roughly correspond with written alphabet
 Important source of variety amongst world’s languages
 Some phonemes absent from some languages
 Example
o ‘psycho’ = 6 letters but 4 sounds
Phonological Rules
 Every language has phonological rules that
o Indicate how phonemes can be combined to produce speech
sounds
o Specify whether speech sounds form words of that language
 Infants are born with the ability to distinguish among phonemes
o Learning rules for combining them occurs automatically
 As long as infants hear language spoken around them

Words
Morphemes
 Consist of multiple phonemes
 Smallest unit of meaning
 50 000 in English
o Root words
o Prefixes
o Suffixes
 Examples
o ‘ism’
o ‘ant’
Morphological rules
 Indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words
 Examples
o Noun + atic = Adjective
 Systematic
o Un + Adjective = Adjective
 Unhappy
o Adjective + al = Adjective
 Egotistical, Fantastical
o Noun + al = Adjective
 Autumnal, National
o Adjective + ly = Adverb
 Happily, Hopefully

,Sentences
Syntax
 A system of rules for arranging words into phrases and sentences
o Different rules for different languages
 Venetian blind vs. Blind Venetian
 Example of syntax rules

Semantics
 Meaning of words and word combinations
 Relationship between language & what it represents



Structure of Language
Surface vs. deep structure
 Surface structure
o ambiguous
o “Please make me a jam sandwich”
 Deep structure
o real meaning
o I would like a jam sandwich made from bread and jam
 Different surface structures with same deep structure
 Same surface structure with different deep structure
o The police must stop drinking after midnight
o Flying planes can be dangerous
 Need to transform deep structure into a surface structure that others can
understand

, Language Processing
Bottom-Up Processing
 Individual elements of a stimulus are analysed
o Then combined to form a unified perception
 More like the structuralist approach
o Piece together data until a bigger picture is found

Applied to language
 Decode the different parts of language
o Sounds and letters of a language into words
o Clauses into sentences
o Sentences into…
 Then interpret mthe meaning
o Using our knowledge of grammatical, syntactic and lexical rules
 Analyse to isolate phonemes, word boundaries
o And relate these things to the mental lexicon.
o Can happen only piece by piece
 No forward projection, no prediction.

Top-Down Processing
 Sensory information is interpreted in light of existing knowledge
o Concepts
o Ideas
o Expectations
 Knowledge or expectations are used to guide processing
o Mental set
 Example
o Pragmatics

Applied to language
 We predict, anticipate, and infer meaning using
o prior knowledge
o previousexperience
o Background knowledge
 Begin interpretation of a sentence spontaneously and automatically based
on what information is available to us
o Do not have to wait until we have analyzed all the phonemes in a
sentence in order to understand it