Ling/Psych 371

April 3, 2000

The basic questions of psycholinguistics:

--How do people produce, perceive, acquire, and use language?

--What do people need to know about language in order to use it?

tacit knowledge vs. explicit knowledge

linguistic structure: syntax, morphology, phonology

rationalism vs. empiricism

The issues behind the Skinner/Chomsky debate

behaviorism/nativism

operant conditioning

reinforcement (positive and negative)

association chain theory

phrase structure/constituents

poverty of stimulus

linguistic performance vs. linguistic competence

duality of patterning (explain for spoken and signed languages)

phone

phoneme

morpheme

morphology

constituent

phrase structure

linguistic productivity

arbitrariness and iconicity in languages

transformational rules (e.g., yes/no questions, passive formations, verb particle movement)

surface structure vs. deep structure

Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC)

Grammar and the lexicon in language

Distinctions between language systems and communication systems

The "design features" of language--especially those that are deemed "crucial" to language--productivity, displacement, duality of patterning.

The successful and unsuccessful aspects of primate language experiments