 What is language?  How does language work?  Does language affect thought?

 A system of communication that is:  Hierarchical  Rule-Governed  Generative

 We are biologically prepared to learn language  Rapid acquisition without formal training  Similarity across languages  Common development sequence  Babbling (4 mo.)  One word utterances (12 mo.)  Two word utterances (24 mo.)

 Phonology  Semantics  Syntax  Pragmatics

 Phoneme – shortest segment of speech that affects word meaning  Phonemes are categories of sounds  The speech signal is continuous and must be segmented

 Morpheme - smallest unit that carries meaning  words/root words  prefixes  suffixes

 Context affects meaning  Both meanings of an ambiguous word are initially available; context disambiguates  While the exterminators were searching the house they found several bugs in one room.  While the CIA agents were searching the house, they found several bugs in one room.

 Rules for combining words and morphemes  Meaning depends on syntax  His face was flushed, but his broad shoulders saved him.

 How is speech planned?  Speech errors can indicate what type of planning was used  Spoonerisms

 “You have tasted the whole worm.”  “Our queer old dean.”

 “a catful of houses”  “gownless evening straps”

 “the brain supply to the blood”  “you’ve eat me seen that”

 Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1975)  Conversational maxims  Quantity  Quality  Manner  Relation

 Linguistic Determinism  If language limits thinking, then color categorization and memory should be limited by the color words in one’s language

English: purple / blue / green / yellow / orange / red Dani (New Guinea): mili (dark) / mola (bright)

 Speakers of different languages tend to select the same focal colors, even if they don’t have a word for that color category  Individuals show better color discrimination between colors that have different words in their language