St. Joseph College of Bulacan
San Jose Patag, Sta. Maria Bulacan
Psychology Department
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
FINAL PERIOD
April 23, 2021
LANGUAGE
Definition
- the use of an organized means of combining words in order to communicate with those around us
- makes it possible to think about things and processes we currently cannot see, hear, feel, touch, or smell
Properties of Language
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Communicative: permits us to communicate with one or more people who share our language
Arbitrarily symbolic: creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and what it represents
Regularly structured: has a structure
Structured at multiple levels: can be analyzed at more than one level
Generative, productive: within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users
Can produce novel utterances
Dynamic: constantly evolve
Principles of Language
Principle of conventionality: meanings of words are determined by conventions
Principle of contrast: different words have different meanings
Regular structure of language: particular patterns of sounds and of letters form meaningful words
Structured at multiple levels: any meaningful utterance can be analyzed at more than one level
Productivity: vast ability to produce language creatively
Naturally leads to the dynamic: evolutionary nature of language
The Basic Components of Words
Phone: smallest unit of speech sound
Phoneme: smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance in a given language from
another
Phonemics: study of the particular phonemes
Phonetics: 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
Root words: portions of words that contain the majority of meaning
Affixes: include prefixes and suffixes
Content morphemes: words that convey the bulk of the meaning of a language
Lexicon: entire set of morphemes in a given language or in a given person’s linguistic repertoire
The Basic Components of Sentences
Syntax: way in which we put words together to form sentences
Parts of a sentence:
Noun phrase: which contains at least one
Verb phrase: contains at least one verb
Reading Dyslexia
Dyslexia: learning disorder that involves difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and
learning how they relate to letters and words
Several different processes may be impaired in dyslexia:
• phonological awareness: awareness of the sound structure of spoken language
• phonological reading: entails reading words in isolation
• phonological coding in working memory: involved in remembering strings of phonemes that are
sometimes confusing
• lexical access: one’s ability to retrieve phonemes from long-term memory
Several Different Kinds f Dyslexia
Developmental Dyslexia: difficulty in reading that starts in childhood and typically continues throughout
adulthood
Acquired Dyslexia: caused by traumatic brain damage