chapter 9 thinking and language recall

Question 1

cognition

Answer 1

the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.

Question 2

concept

Answer 2

a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or peoples.

Question 3

prototype

Answer 3

mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin).

Question 4

algorithm

Answer 4

a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier-but also more error-prone – use of heuristics.

Question 5

heuristic

Answer 5

a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgements and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms.

Question 6

insight

Answer 6

a sudden realization of a problem’s solution; contrast with strategy-based solutions.

Question 7

confirmation bias

Answer 7

a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.

Question 8

intuition

Answer 8

an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning.

Question 9

availability heuristic

Answer 9

estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), presume such events are common.

Question 10

overconfidence

Answer 10

the tendency to be more confident that correct-to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgements.

Question 11

belief perseverance

Answer 11

clinging to ones initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited.

Question 12

framing

Answer 12

the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgements.

Question 13

language

Answer 13

our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.

Question 14

phoneme

Answer 14

in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit.

Question 15

morpheme

Answer 15

in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of word (such as a prefix).

Question 16

grammar

Answer 16

in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. In a given language, semantics is the set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds, and syntax is the set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences.

Question 17

babbling stage

Answer 17

beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language.

Question 18

One-word stage

Answer 18

the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.

Question 19

Two-word stage

Answer 19

beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements.

Question 20

telegraphic speech

Answer 20

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram-”go car”-using mostly nouns and verbs.

Question 21

aphasia

Answer 21

impairment of language, usually caused of left-hemisphere damage either to Broca’s area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke’s area (impairing understanding).

Question 22

linguistic determinism

Answer 22

Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think.