Psychology Exam 3 Study Guide * Hierarchy of Language: * Phonemes: the smallest units of sound that are recognizable as speech rather than as random noise * Example: the “te” sound of T * Phonological Rules: indicate how phonemes can be combined to produce speech sounds * Example: the ‘”ts” sound is found in German, but not in English * Phonemes are combined to make morphemes: the smallest meaningful units of language * Example: “tele” as in television * Morphological Rules: indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words * Example: tele + phone = telephone * Content Morphemes: refer to things and events * Example: “cat” “dog” “take” * Function Morphemes: serve grammatical functions, such as tying sentences together or indicating time * Example: “and” “but” “when” * Function morphemes are what make human language grammatically complex enough to express abstract ideas * Syntactical Rules: indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences. * Example: In English, every sentence must contain at least one noun and one verb * Deep Structure vs. Surface Structure: * Deep Structure: meaning of a sentence * Surface Structure: how a sentence is worded * Example: “the dog chased the cat” and “the cat was chased by the dog” have the same deep structure, but different surface structures * To create a sentence: start with deep structure (meaning of the sentence) and create a surface structure (the particular words) to convey that meaning * When comprehending a sentence: opposite; process surface structure in order to extract the deep structure * After deep structure is extracted, surface structure is usually forgotten * Distinguishing Speech Sounds During