Lecture+7(耶鲁大学-心理学导论讲稿).pdf

1 Introduction to Psychology Yale University Lecture 7 Two follow-ups on yesterdays--Im sorry, on Mondays lecture. One is that somebody came up after class and asked when the preference for your own language emerges in development and fortunately, [A graduate teaching assistant] studies pretty much exactly this sort of infant understanding. She knew the answer. Theres been studies looking at newborn babies finding that pretty much the moment they pop out they favor their own language over other language--over other languages. And this suggests that they are listening while in utero, while in the womb, to the rhythms of their language and developing a preference for it. A second issue is, I talked very briefly about a court case in which the person was--said at a moment where someone else was pointing a gun at a police officer, Let him have it! and a police officer was killed. And that person was charged with murder but I admitted I didnt actually know how things turned out and [a graduate teaching assistant] was kind enough to do extensive research. Well, he went to Wikipedia and [laughter] found out the answer. The answer is he was tried and found guilty for murder. He was then subsequently pardoned. In fact, he was pardoned in 1988, which is really nice except he was executed in 1957. But they did it into a movie. So, its a movie. Okay. So, I want to do today, for the first part of the lecture, is continue the language lecture and then move to perception, attention, and memory. And what we had spoken about was--We first talked about universals of language, then moved to some detail about the different aspects of language including phonology, morphology, and syntax. We discussed the ways in which language does the amazing things it does, including the fact that language has used arbitrary science or sounds to convey concepts, and that languages expl