Chapter 9: Langauge and Thought

Question 1

What are the three major components of language?

Answer 1

• Language production
• Speech
• Language comprehension

Question 2

What are the four major language terms?

Answer 2

• Phonology
• Semantics
• Grammar
• Pragmatics

Question 3

What is phonology? What are phonemes?

Answer 3

• The structure of sounds that can be used to produce words in a language
• Phonemes - basic building blocks of speech sounds (humans have about 100, and different languages use different phonemes)

Question 4

What are semantics?

Answer 4

• The study of how meaning in language is constructed of individual words and sentences
  *Morpheme - the smallest unit of a language that conveys meaning (ex. pigs has two morphemes)
  *Lexical meaning - dictionary meaning of a word

Question 5

What’s syntax?

Answer 5

• The rules for combining different types of words in sentences.

Question 6

What is pragmatics?

Answer 6

• The practical aspects of language usage, including speech pace, gesturing, and body language

Question 7

What’s the main sequence of language learning?

Answer 7

• Prevocal learning: 2-4 months
• Babbling: around 6 months
• First words: around 1 year
  *their comprehension of words spoken is often a lot higher than those they can produce
• Telegraphic speech - by 2 years of age, simple sentences omitting all but essential words
• Pragmatics - by 3 years of age, there’s a basic understanding of practical information regarding language
• Grammar - by 4 years of age, basic rules of grammar are understood without formal education

Question 8

Whats’ the difference between a naming explosion and fast mapping?

Answer 8

• Naming explosion - at about 18 months, this increases to 10 or more new words a week
• Fast mapping - the process of linking a word with its referent after hearing the ord once or twice

Question 9

Whats the theory of the learning perspective?

Answer 9

• According to Skinner, language is entirely learned, not born with it.

Question 10

What’s the theory of the nativist perspective?

Answer 10

• According to Chomsky, children are genetically programmed at birth to learn language. There are many problems with this theory/perspective

Question 11

Whats the interactionist perspective theory?

Answer 11

• There are biological/cognitive contributions, as well as environmental contributions that help children learn languages
• Conversation plays a major role in this theory

Question 12

What’s the difference between critical and sensitive periods in language development?

Answer 12

• Critical period - stage when an individual is particularly open to specific learning, in this case, language learning
• Sensitive period - stage in development when an individual can best acquire specific skills

Question 13

What are some environmental impacts on language development?

Answer 13

• Child-directed speech - simple, high-pitched, slow-paced, emotion-charged speech used by adults when speaking to babies, helps keep babies interested
• Overregularization - the process by which elementary school children apply learned grammatical rules to improperly “correct” an irregular verb

Question 14

What are the major language centres in the brain?

Answer 14

• Broca’s area - critical for speech production, associated with grammar comprehension
• Agrammatism - inability to speak with proper grammar, located in frontal lobe
• Wernicke’s area - critical for language comprehension, located in temporal lobe

Question 15

What are the two types of aphasia?

Answer 15

• Broca’s aphasia - unable to produce coherent speech
• Wernicke’s aphasia - unable to comprehend speech

Question 16

What’s controlled processing?

Answer 16

• Effortful, and relies on a limited-capacity system

Question 17

What’s cognitive control?

Answer 17

• Ability to guide thinking and actions despite distraction
• Ability to guide attention
• Ability to pursue complex behaviour

Question 18

What’s dysexecutive syndrome?

Answer 18

• Impairments in the ability to control and direct mental activities (think of the Phineas Gage case where there was damage to the frontal lobes)

Question 19

What are the three main steps to problem solving?

Answer 19

1) Define the problem
2) Find a strategy for solving the problem
3) Evaluation: Did you find a good solution

Question 20

What are the three main strategies for problem-solving?

Answer 20

• Algorithm - step-by-step procedure for solving problems that guarantees a solution
• Heuristic - short cut to solving problems but does not guarantee a correct solution
• Insight - sudden realization of answer

Question 21

What does heuristics also involve?

Answer 21

• Working backwards through a problem, forming subgoals.
• Can also involve applying a solution used for past problems to a current problem that shares many similar features

Question 22

What are three mental stumbling blocks to soling problems?

Answer 22

• Mental set - the tendency to use problem-solving strategies that have worked in the past
• Functional fixedness - a tendency to think of objects only in terms of their usual functions, a limitation that disrupts problem-solving
• Confirmation bias - we often search for information that confirms our expectations

Question 23

What’s Belief Perseverance?

Answer 23

• The tendency to cling to beliefs even after they have been discredited (ex. Obama wasn’t born in America)

Question 24

What’s the difference between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning?

Answer 24

• Deductive - working from the general to the particular (ex. birds can fly. An ostrich is a bird, therefore an ostrich can fly)
• Inductive - working from a particular case to a generalization (ex. all crows are black. A crow is a bird, therefore all birds must be black)

Question 25

What’s the difference between representative heuristic and availability heuristic?

Answer 25

• Representative - guessing the probability of something based on how much a new object seems to resemble our existing stereotype of that object (ex. he’s tall, so he must be a basketball player)
• Availability - guessing the probability of something based on how quickly and easily information bearing on it comes to mind, based on more recent experience. (ex. smoking doesn’t harm unborn babies because my cousin smoked and her baby was fine)

Question 26

What is metacognition?

Answer 26

• Metacognition - thinking about one’s own thoughts
• Reviewing memories
• Considering past learning to understand events in the present