Chapter 8 - Cognition Flashcards
3 Accounts of Language Acquisition (from class notes)
- 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.
4 Accounts of Language Acquisition (from book)
- “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
Algorithm
Step-by-step learned procedure used to solve a problem.
Aspects of Cognition / Thinking (6)
- Remembering
- Learning
- Perceiving
- Communicating
- Believing
- Deciding
Availability Heuristic
Heuristic that involves estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with which it comes to our minds.
Babbling
Intentional vocalization that lacks specific meaning.
Base Rate
How common a characteristic or behaviour is in the general population.
Bilingual
Proficient and fluent at speaking and comprehending two distinct languages.
Cognitive Bias
Systematic Error in Thinking.
Concept
Our knowledge and ideas about a set of objects, actions, and characteristics that share core properties.
Cryptophasia
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.
Decision Making
The process of selecting among a set of possible alternatives.
Dialect
Language variation used by a group of people who share geographic proximity or ethnic background.
Extralinguistic Information
Elements of communication that aren’t part of the content of language but are critical to interpreting its meaning.
Framing
The way a question is formulated that can influence the decisions people make.
Functional Fixedness
Difficulty conceptualizing that an object typically used for one purpose can be used for another.
Generative
Allowing an infinite number of unique sentences to be created by combining words in novel ways.
Heuristics
Metal Shortcuts. General guesses thatfall under “system 1 thinking”. Intuitive”.Ex: 3 week old milk smells bad so it’s probably bad to drink.
Hindsight Bias
Our tendency to overestimate how well we could have predicted something after it has already occurred.
Homesign
System of signs invented by deaf children of hearing parents who receive no language input.
Language
Largely arbitrary system of communication that combines symbols (such as words or gestural signs) in rule-based ways to create meaning.
Language Acquisition Device
Hypothetical construct in the brain in which nativists believe knowledge of syntax resides.
Levels of Language (4+)
• 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”..
Linguistic Determinism
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.
Linguistic Relativity
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).
Mental Set
Phenomenon of becoming stuck in a specific problem-solving strategy, inhibiting our ability to generate alternatives.
Metalinguistic
Awareness of how language is structured and used.
Morpheme
Smallest meaningful unit of speech.
Morphological Markers
Grammatical elements that modify the meaningof words by adding sounds: “s”, “ing”, and “ed”.
Nativist
Account of language acquisition that suggests children are born with some basic knowledge of how language works.
Obstacles to Problem Solving
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.
One-Word Stage
Early period of language development when children use single-word phrases to convey an entire thought.
Phoneme
Category of sounds our vocal apparatus produces.
Phonetic Decomposition
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.
Problem Solving
Generating a cognitive strategy to accomplish a goal.
Representativeness Heuristic Bias
Heuristic that involves judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype
Semantics
Meaning derived from words and sentences.
Sign Language
Language developed by members of a deaf community that uses visual rather than auditory communication.
Social pragmatics
Account of language acquisition that proposes that children infer what words and sentences mean from context and social interactions.
Stroop Effect
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).
Syntax
Grammatical rules that govern how words are composed into meaningful strings.
Thinking / Cognition
Any mental activity or processing of information, including learning, remembering, perceiving, communicating, believing, and deciding.
Whole word recognition
Reading strategy that involves identifying common words based on their appearance without having to sound them out.
