lesson 10

• PSYCH 104 LESSON 10 LANGUAGE
• Language


  The use of an organized means of combining words in order to communicate with those around us. It also makes it possible to think about things and processes we currently cannot see, hear, feel, touch, or smell.
• Language can be written, spoken, or signed (e.g., via American Sign Language [ASL])
• Not all communication is through language. Communication encompasses other aspects-nonverbal communication, such as gestures or facial expressions, can be used to embellish or to indicate. Glances may serve many purposes.
• Psycholinguistics


  The psychology of our language as it interacts with the human mind. It considers both production and comprehension of language.
• 4 areas of psycholinguistics


  • linguistics, the study of language structure and change
  • neurolinguistics, the study of the relationships among the brain, cognition, and language
  • sociolinguistics, the study of the relationship between social behavior and language
  • computational linguistics and psycholinguistics, the study of language via computational methods
• There are almost 7,000 languages spoken in the world today. New Guinea is the country with the most languages in the world—it has more than 850 indigenous languages, which means that on average, each language has just about 7,000 speakers. Surprisingly, there are still languages today that have not even been "discovered" and named by scientists.
• Properties of language


  • Communicative: Language permits us to communicate with one or more people who share our language.
  • Arbitrarily symbolic: Language creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and what it represents: an idea, a thing, a process, a relationship, or a description.
  • Regularly structured: Language has a structure; only particularly patterned arrangements of symbols have meaning, and different arrangements yield different meanings.
  • Structured at multiple levels: The structure of language can be analyzed at more than one level (e.g., in sounds, meaning units, words, and phrases).
  • Generative, productive: Within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances. The possibilities for creating new utterances are virtually limitless.
  • Dynamic: Languages constantly evolve.
• Phoneme

  The smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance in a given language from another.
• Phonemics

  The study of the particular phonemes of a language.
• Phonetics


  The study of how to produce or combine speech sounds or to represent them with written symbols.
• Morpheme


  The smallest unit of meaning within a particular language.
• Types of morphemes


  • Content morphemes — the words that convey the bulk of the meaning of a language.
  • Function morphemes - add detail and nuance to the meaning of the content morphemes or help the content morphemes fit the grammatical context.
• The lexicon is the entire set of morphemes in a given language or in a given person's linguistic repertoire. The average adult speaker of English has a lexicon of about 80,000 morphemes.
• Syntax


  The way in which we put words together to form sentences. It plays a major role in our understanding of language.
• Semantics


  The study of meaning in a language.
• Grammar

  The study of language in terms of noticing regular patterns. These patterns relate to the functions and relationships of words in a sentence. They extend as broadly to the level of discourse and narrowly to the pronunciation and meaning of individual words.
• Dyslexia


  A learning disorder that involves difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words (decoding).
• Dyslexia falls under the umbrella of "specific learning disorder" which has three main subtypes: Reading (dyslexia), Writing (dysgraphia), and Math (dyscalculia).
• How dyslexia affects language understanding

  It interferes with how your brain uses spoken language to "decode" writing. Your brain has trouble processing what you read, especially breaking words into sounds or relating letters to sounds when reading. This slowdown in processing can affect everything that follows, including slowed reading, difficulties with writing and spelling, problems with how you store words and their meanings in your memory, and trouble forming sentences to communicate more complex ideas.
• Causes and symptoms of dyslexia

  • Genetics - Dyslexia is highly genetic and runs in families.
  • Differences in brain development and function - People with dyslexia are neurodivergent, meaning their brain formed or works differently than expected.
  • Disruptions in brain development and function - Infections, toxic exposures and other events can disrupt fetal development and increase the odds of later development of dyslexia.
• Discourse involves units of language larger than individual sentences—in conversations, lectures, stories, essays, and even textbooks. From our knowledge of discourse structure, we can derive meanings of sentence elements that are not apparent by looking at isolated sentences.
• The following series of sentences is taken from a short story by O. Henry (William Sydney Porter, 1899-1953) titled "The Ransom of Red Chief". The sequence of sentences is incorrect. Without knowing anything else about the story, the correct sequence of sentences needs to be figured out.