Chapter 8 Flashcards
What is cognition?
- -the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge
- -involves thinking
What are the properties of language?
- -language is symbolic: people use spoken sounds and written words to represent objects, actions, ideas, events
- -language is semantic: meaningful
- -language is generative: a limited number of symbols can be combined in an infinite variety of ways to generate an endless array of novel messages. Everyday you create and comprehend sentences that you have never spoken or heard before
- -language is structured: rules govern the arrangement of words into phrases and sentences
What are phonemes?
–the smallest speech units in a language that can be distinguished perceptually
What are morphemes?
- -the smallest unit of meaning in a language
- -each morpheme contributes to the meaning of the entire word
- -ex. unfriendly has 3 morphemes; the root friend, the prefix un and the suffix ly
What is semantics?
- -the area of language concerned with understanding the meaning of words and word combinations
- -a words meaning may consist of both it’s denotation, (dictionary definition), and its connotation (emotional overtones and secondary implications)
What is syntax?
–a system of rules that specify how words can be arranged into sentences
What is a critical period?
–refers to a limited time span in the development of an organism when it is optimal for certain capacities to emerge because the organism is especially responsive to certain experiences
How do children develop language?
- -at around 10-13 months of age, children begin to utter sounds that correspond to words (mama, dada, papa) because they resemble syllables that infants most often babble spontaneously
- -toddlers can say between 3 and 50 words by 18 months but their receptive vocabulary is larger than their productive vocabulary
- -children probably acquire nouns before verbs because the meanings of nouns refer to distinct concert objects while the meanings of verbs tend to represent more abstract concepts
- -vocabulary spurt: 18-24 months
What is fast mapping?
- -one factor underlying the rapid growth of vocabulary during the vocal spurt
- -it is the process by which children map a word onto an underlying concept after only one exposure
What is an overextension?
- -occurs when a child incorrectly uses a word to describe a wider set of objects or actions than it is meant to
- -ex. using the word ball for anything that is round
- -appears between ages 1 and 2 1/2 and last for several months
What is an underextension?
- -occurs when a child incorrectly uses a word to describe a narrower set of objects or actions than it is meant to
- -ex. child might use the word doll to refer only to a single, favourite doll
- -overextensions and under extensions show that a child is actively trying to learn the rules of a language
What is telegraphic speech?
- -early sentences at the end of second year of age are characterized as telegraphic speech
- -telegraphic speech consists mainly of content words; articles, prepositions, and other less critical words are omitted
- -ex. “give doll” instead of “please give me the doll”
- -not cross-culturally universal
What is overregularizations?
- -occur when grammatical rules are incorrectly generalized to irregular cases where they do not apply
- -ex “I goed home” or “I hitted the ball”
- -occur in all languages
What is metalinguistic awareness
- -the ability to reflect on the use of language
- -school-age children begin to take interest ambiguities in sentences, and they “play” with language to come up with puns and jokes
According to Ellen Bialystok’s recent research, what are the cognitive benefits to being bilingual?
- -bilingualism is associated with higher levels of controlled processing on tasks that require control of attention
- -both languages remain active even when bilinguals are reading, writing, and hearing one particular language so they have the cognitive control to juggle both languages relatively easily
- -enhanced social skills
- -even “crib bilinguals” who can’t speak show enhanced ability to control and switch attention
- -bilingualism may help attenuate age-related losses in certain aspects of cognition
ex. bilingual patients experienced the onset of dementia four years later, o average, than monolingual patients
What did Allen and Beatrice Gardner do?
- -since chimps do not have the vocal apparatus to acquire human speech, Allen and Beatrice trained a chimp named Washoe to use ASL
- -Washoe learned 160 words and was able to combine these words to convey sentences such as “Washoe sorry”
- -however, according to Herbert Terrace, the chimps’ sentences were products of imitation and operant conditioning rather than generation based on linguistic rules
What did Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues do
- -trained bonobos to communicate by touching geometric symbols that represent words on a computer-monitored keyboard
- -One of the star pupils was a chimp named Kanzi and he acquired hundreds of words and was able to combine them in what seemed follow the rules of language
- -ex. he was able to specify if he wanted to chase of be chased by differentiating between symbol combinations in a way that appeared to involve the use of grammatical rules
- -Kanzi’s trainers began to notice he could understand verbal utterances between them so they evaluated this by asking Kanzi to carry out tasks such as “pour the coke in the lemonade” and “pour the lemonade in the coke” and Kanzi correctly carried our 72% of the 660 requests
Can animals develop language?
- -yes, but in a very basic and primitive way
- -however, a normal human toddler can surpass even the most successfully trained chimps
What does Steven Pinker suggest as to why humans are so well suited for learning language?
- -the universal nature of language suggests that language is an innate human characteristic
- -Consistent with this view, Pinker argues that humans’ special talent for language is a species-specific trait that is the product of natural selection
- -However, David Premack expressed criticism that small differences in language skill would influence reproductive fitness in primitive societies where all they had to do was warn others of predators
- -In an effort to refute this argument, Pinker and Bloom point out that very small adaptive disparities are sufficient to fuel evolutionary change
What does Dunbar argue about human language evolution?
–argues that language developed as a device to build and maintain social coalitions in increasingly larger groups
What is the behaviourist theory of language acquisition?
- -First outlined by Skinner in his book Verbal Behaviour and he claimed that children learn language the same way they learn everything else: through imitation, reinforcement, and conditioning
- -vocalizations are shaped with reinforcers until they are correct
- -ex. as children grow older, parents may insist on closer and closer approximation of the word water before supplying the requested drink
How did Chomsly argue Skinners behaviourist theory of language acquisition and what did he propose instead?
- -Chomsky pointed out that there are infinite number of sentences in a language therefore it’s unreasonable to expect that children learn language by imitation
- -For example, children routinely children misuse the suffix “ed” and say “goed” “eated” and “thinked”. Mistakes such as these are inconsistent with Skinner’s emphasis on imitation because most adult speakers don’t use ungrammatical words like “goed”
- -Children create novel words and sentences
- -According to Chomsky, children learn the rules of language, not specific verbal responses as Skinner proposed
What is the nativist theory of language acquisition?
- -This theory favoured by Chomsky suggests that humans have an inborn or “native” propensity to learn language
- -Nativist theory proposes that humans are equipped with a language acquisition device (LAD): an innate mechanism or process that facilitates the learning of language
What did critics say about the nativist theory?
- -They argue that the LAD concept is terribly vague as there is no explanation as to how it works, what exactly it is, and the neural mechanisms that underly it
- -they also argue that it isn’t fair to compare the rapid progress of toddlers, who are immersed in their native language, against the struggles of older students, who may devote 10-15 hours per week to their foreign language course
- -according to this nativist approach, there’s no behaviourist programming, reinforcement is not part of this process. This is a problem because children require something to imitate.
What is the interactionist theory of language acquisition?
- -these theories assert that both biology and experience make important contributions to the development of language
- -like the nativists, interactionists believe that humans are biologically equipped for language learning and also agree that much of this acquisition involves rules
- -however, like the behaviourists, they believe that social exchanges with parents and others play a critical role in moulding language skills
- -three types of interactionist approaches
1) Cognitive: language development is just an aspect of the natural cognitive development that comes with the child’s growth/maturity
2) Social Communication: language develops because we are social animals and communication is vital to our social world (a functional approach
3) Emergentist: the young brain is still maturing/forming and the connections are still emerging. As the child is exposed to language and has a chance to try language, their brain will solidify (consolidate) connections that support this development
What is linguistic relativity?
- -Bejamin Lee Whorf speculated that different languages lead people to view the world differently
- -linguistic relativity: the hypothesis that one’s language determines the nature of one’s thought
- -current thinking seems to favour the “weaker version” of the hypothesis (language makes certain ways of thinking easier or more difficult) rather than the “stronger” version (a given language makes certain ways of thinking obligatory or impossible)
How did Jim Greeno categorize problems?
1) problems of inducing structure: requires people to discover relationships among numbers, words, symbols, or ideas. Ex: In the Thompson family, there are five brothers and each brother has one sister. If you count Mrs. Thompson, how many females are in the family?
2) problems of arrangement: requires people to arrange parts of a problem in a way that satisfies some criterion. Ex. rearrange the letters in each row to make an English word
3) problems of transformation require people to carry out a sequence of transformations in order to reach a specific goal
ex. suppose you have a 21 cup jar, a 127 cup jar, and a 3 cup jar. Drawing and discarding as much water as you’d like, you need to measure out exactly 100 cups of water. How can this be done?
What are the barriers to effective problem solving?
1) focusing on irrelevant information; effective problem solving requires that you attempt to figure out what information is relevant and what is irrelevant before proceeding
2) functional fixedness: the tendency to perceive an item only in terms of its most common use. People tend to overlook obscure, little-noticed features of problems. To combat this, you have to train yourself to successfully decompose problems into their constituent parts
3) mental set: exists when people persist in using problem-solving strategies that have worked in the past
4) unnecessary constraints: effective problem solving requires specifying all the constraints governing a problem without assuming any constraints that don’t exist. Ex. without lifting your pencil, draw a line through all 9 dots. Many people thinking they can’t draw outside the do boundaries even though that constraint wasn’t specified in the problem.