Language

• What is language and what are the subtopics?
• system of communication through which we code our information
• Psychologists focus on language as seen as a cognitive ability of humans... closely linked with thinking.
• We are so linguistic its hard to separate language from thinking.
• Subcategories:
• acquisition
• production (speech)
• and comprehension
• History:
• B.F. skinner and operant conditions... then Chomsky combated the behavioristic view saying that children had novel utterances, so language was not just reinforced learning. It is univeral and has common features, the structures are similar in different languages, and so Chomsky says we are genetically programmed (language is inherent)
• Main topics:
• acquisition
• speech production (both mental and mental)
• comprehension
• young children loose ability for some sound distinctions and gain skills in others.
• Levels in which you can study language:
• phonology(sounds)
• morphology (words)
• syntax (sentence structure)
• semantics (meanings)
• pragmatics (use_
• We focus mostly on syntax, semantics, and pragmatics)
• Physical uses of languages:
• used socially - exchange ideas, knowledge, feelings, etc.
• Is human language a unique a specialized ability or just a general communication ability in other creatures? How unique is it?
• hard to know how specialized other creatures communication is, we have to infer from its effects.
• Major features of human language that may show uniqueness:
• semanticity: symbols have particular meanings, no necessary regular relationship between the symbols and the things they express.. its arbitrary
• creativity: combinational: small sets of basic concepts and combine them in many many (rule-governed) ways.
• ex. 26 letters (sounds) => words, => sentences => paragraphs... many possibilities.
• people can say brand new things, not just parroting things back they've heard before. Its not clear that animals can do this.
• structure dependency: syntax. We don't just string words together, we do it in a particular way - a lot of our knowledge of language is implicit or procedural in how the words go together even if we don't 'know' the rules of grammar, they just are grammatical naturally.
• ex. the dog bites the cat vs. the cat bites the dog.
• Language is not the only way humans communicate:
• facial expressions, gestures, postures, prosody (convey emotion), but these can also become the main form of communication for people who are blind or dear, etc. but those are true languages.
• ex. sign language. 
• These elements are shared with animals, but they seem to lack syntax.
• Could there be inter species communication?
• maybe, but no where near what we have with other people.
• semantics and syntax: you can create sentences that have these errors in them and measure brain responses.
• ex. the pizza was too hot to cry.
• this evokes an N400 - semantical incorrectness response. in the parietal and central regions.
• ex. syntax: early left anterior negativity errors (not really reliable), or p600 (like the cats won't eating).

Comprehension: Wikibook

• parsing: how you break a sentence into parts; distinguishing one word from another.
• syntax first approach: concentrates on the role of syntax when parsing a sentence (ex. lewis carroll poem)