Chapter 8 - Cognition

Question 1

3 Accounts of Language Acquisition (from class notes)

Answer 1

• LEARNING PERSPECTIVE ACCOUNT: B.F. Skinner. Children learn through reinforcement and imitations. Doesn’t account for overregularization. Parents praise for contect and not grammatical correctness, but language is generative
• Nativist Account: (Noam Chomsky). Children have inborn expectation of a way to communicate to come (housed in the “language organ” (LAD). conflicting: hard to falsify.
• Interactionist Perspective: Acknowledges inborn capacity for learning language and importance of social support/imitation. Children born wtih powerful brain that matures slowly and predisposes the to acquire new understandings they are motivated to share with others. Language looks more a prodcut of genes than experience and the interactionist perspective is the best explanation for acquiring language.

Question 2

4 Accounts of Language Acquisition (from book)

Answer 2

• “Pure” Nature+ Nurture: Parsimony; children learn by immiation. Problem: Parents praise for contect and not grammatical correctness, but language is generative
• Nativist Account: (Noam Chomsky). Children have inborn expectation of a way to communicate to come (housed in the “language organ” (LAD). conflicting: hard to falsify.
• Social Pragmatics Account: aspects of social environment structure lang learning. conflicting: simpler theory works as well.
• General Cognitive Processing Account: Ability to perceive, learn, recognize patterns may be all that’s required to learn langyuage. Problem: children learn language better than adults but adults learn all else better than children

Question 3

Algorithm

Answer 3

Step-by-step learned procedure used to solve a problem.

Question 4

Aspects of Cognition / Thinking (6)

Answer 4

• Remembering
• Learning
• Perceiving
• Communicating
• Believing
• Deciding

Question 5

Availability Heuristic

Answer 5

Heuristic that involves estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with which it comes to our minds.

Question 6

Babbling

Answer 6

Intentional vocalization that lacks specific meaning.

Question 7

Base Rate

Answer 7

How common a characteristic or behaviour is in the general population.

Question 8

Bilingual

Answer 8

Proficient and fluent at speaking and comprehending two distinct languages.

Question 9

Cognitive Bias

Answer 9

Systematic Error in Thinking.

Question 10

Concept

Answer 10

Our knowledge and ideas about a set of objects, actions, and characteristics that share core properties.

Question 11

Cryptophasia

Answer 11

A phenomenon of a language developed by twins (identical or fraternal) that only the two children could understand. The word has its roots from the Greek crypto, meaning secret, and phasia, meaning speech.

Question 12

Decision Making

Answer 12

The process of selecting among a set of possible alternatives.

Question 13

Dialect

Answer 13

Language variation used by a group of people who share geographic proximity or ethnic background.

Question 14

Extralinguistic Information

Answer 14

Elements of communication that aren’t part of the content of language but are critical to interpreting its meaning.

Question 15

Framing

Answer 15

The way a question is formulated that can influence the decisions people make.

Question 16

Functional Fixedness

Answer 16

Difficulty conceptualizing that an object typically used for one purpose can be used for another.

Question 17

Generative

Answer 17

Allowing an infinite number of unique sentences to be created by combining words in novel ways.

Question 18

Heuristics

Answer 18

Metal Shortcuts. General guesses thatfall under “system 1 thinking”. Intuitive”.Ex: 3 week old milk smells bad so it’s probably bad to drink.

Question 19

Hindsight Bias

Answer 19

Our tendency to overestimate how well we could have predicted something after it has already occurred.

Question 20

Homesign

Answer 20

System of signs invented by deaf children of hearing parents who receive no language input.

Question 21

Language

Answer 21

Largely arbitrary system of communication that combines symbols (such as words or gestural signs) in rule-based ways to create meaning.

Question 22

Language Acquisition Device

Answer 22

Hypothetical construct in the brain in which nativists believe knowledge of syntax resides.

Question 23

Levels of Language (4+)

Answer 23

• Phonemes – basic sounds of language;• Morphemes – smallest units of meaning;• Syntax – grammatical rules;• Linguistic Information – non-verbal elements; • Morphological Markers – grammatical elements that modify word meaning by add: “s”, “ing”, and “ed”;- also pragmatics: Ex: “John enjoys charming people”..

Question 24

Linguistic Determinism

Answer 24

View that all thought is represented verbally and that, as a result, our language defines our thinking.conflicting: a) Children oft perform complex tasks before they can discuss;b) Language areas often activate when people think, remember, read, but not necessarily when performing spatial tasks or experiencing visual imagery. Suggests thought can occur without language.

Question 25

Linguistic Relativity

Answer 25

Linguistic RelativityView that characteristics of language shape our thought processes.supporting: Russians remember Russian memories when speaking Russian better vs. American memories better when speaking English.conflicting: English has 11 words for colour basics; Dani New Guinea natives have none, OR some languages combine to cope: “blue like the sky” vs. “Blue like the leaves” (green).

Question 26

Mental Set

Answer 26

Phenomenon of becoming stuck in a specific problem-solving strategy, inhibiting our ability to generate alternatives.

Question 27

Metalinguistic

Answer 27

Awareness of how language is structured and used.

Question 28

Morpheme

Answer 28

Smallest meaningful unit of speech.

Question 29

Morphological Markers

Answer 29

Grammatical elements that modify the meaningof words by adding sounds: “s”, “ing”, and “ed”.

Question 30

Nativist

Answer 30

Account of language acquisition that suggests children are born with some basic knowledge of how language works.

Question 31

Obstacles to Problem Solving

Answer 31

Obstacles to Problem Solving

• Salience of Surface Similarities.
• Mental Sets – fmri – breaking free of a set requires activation of frontal and parietal lobes; helps inhibit previous responses.

Question 32

One-Word Stage

Answer 32

Early period of language development when children use single-word phrases to convey an entire thought.

Question 33

Phoneme

Answer 33

Category of sounds our vocal apparatus produces.

Question 34

Phonetic Decomposition

Answer 34

Reading Strategy that involves sounding out words by drawing correspondences between printed letters and sounds. More complex than merely linking printed letters and sounds since not all such correspondences sound correct.

Question 35

Problem Solving

Answer 35

Generating a cognitive strategy to accomplish a goal.

Question 36

Representativeness Heuristic Bias

Answer 36

Heuristic that involves judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype

Question 37

Semantics

Answer 37

Meaning derived from words and sentences.

Question 38

Sign Language

Answer 38

Language developed by members of a deaf community that uses visual rather than auditory communication.

Question 39

Social pragmatics

Answer 39

Account of language acquisition that proposes that children infer what words and sentences mean from context and social interactions.

Question 40

Stroop Effect

Answer 40

Reading is automatic and hard to inhibit. Relating to the _______ Interference test, which demonstrates that It’s difficult to say the colour of the text while reading a different ‘colour’ in text form (“green” written in red text).

Question 41

Syntax

Answer 41

Grammatical rules that govern how words are composed into meaningful strings.

Question 42

Thinking / Cognition

Answer 42

Any mental activity or processing of information, including learning, remembering, perceiving, communicating, believing, and deciding.

Question 43

Whole word recognition

Answer 43

Reading strategy that involves identifying common words based on their appearance without having to sound them out.