Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 grammar,  the system of rules that determine how our thoughts can be expressed.
Grammar deals with three major components of language: phonology, syntax, 
and semantics.  Phonology  is the study of  phonemes,  the smallest basic units of 
speech that affect meaning, and of the way we use those sounds to form words and 
produce meaning. For instance, the a sound in fat and the a sound in fate represent 
two different phonemes in English (Hardison, 2006).
Linguists have identifi ed more than 800 different phonemes among all the 
world’s languages. Although English speakers use just 52 phonemes to produce 
words, other languages use as few as 15 to as many as 141. Differences in phonemes 
are one reason people have diffi culty learning other languages. For example, to a 
Japanese speaker, whose native language does not have an r phoneme, pronouncing 
such English words as roar presents some diffi culty (Gibbs, 2002; Iverson et al., 2003). 
 Syntax  refers to the rules that indicate how words and phrases can be combined 
to form sentences. Every language has intricate rules that guide the order in which 
words may be strung together to communicate meaning. English speakers have no 
diffi culty recognizing that “TV down the turn” is not a meaningful sequence, 
whereas “Turn down the TV” is. To understand the effect of syntax in English, 
consider the changes in meaning caused by the different word orders in the follow-
ing three utterances: “John kidnapped the boy,” “John, the kidnapped boy,” and 
“The boy kidnapped John” (Eberhard, Cutting, & Bock, 2005; Robert, 2006).
language
The communication of 
information through symbols arranged 
according to systematic rules.
grammar
The system of rules that 
determine how our thoughts can be 
expressed.