Cognition and Language Bilingualism

Question 1

what are concepts?

Answer 1

fundamental building blocks of thought

Question 2

how are concepts useful?

Answer 2

enables us to generalise from past experiences to new observations
allows us to predict new outcomes

Question 3

Probabilistic view of concepts

Answer 3

concepts represented by prototypes with characteristic features

Question 4

Does language = thought?

Answer 4

prelingual babies show evidence of conceptual categories
pathology: speech and language impairment don’t necessarily destroy thought and reason
Language and thought are closely linked but not the same thing

Question 5

Language and thought: arbitrariness

Answer 5

connection between signifier and signified is fundamentally arbitrary

Question 6

How are words built and stored?

Answer 6

“Dog” is a simplex word( free morpheme) complex words - Free morpheme( can stand independently) + Bound morpheme( cant stand on its own) e.g. Dog + S = Dogs

Question 7

The Wug Test

Answer 7

Children learn language by imitating/ memorising what adults say
Words like “wug” are not real
children cannot learn to say it because an adult never said it
Wug test showed that children do in fact apply implicit morphological rules to novel words

Question 8

Storage vs Computation

Answer 8

Full listing
words must be looked up in the lexicon as wholes
Maximises computational efficiency
Minimies storage efficiency

Full parsing
Words much be decomposed into elements
Maximises storage efficiency
Minimises computational efficiency

Question 9

Lexicalisation

Answer 9

Stored on its own as a word

Question 10

Dual route models

Answer 10

Both direct lookup and computation “race”

Question 11

Parsimony and Efficiency

Answer 11

Parsimony:
Avoid needlessly multiplying entities
Too much efficiency - ambiguity

Question 12

Linguistic economy

Answer 12

Each language strikes a different balance

languages rely on contextual, cultural, social knowledge

Question 13

Cognates and interlingual homographs

Answer 13

Bilinguals were faster at lexical decision for cognates

slower for interlingual homographs

Question 14

Crossmodal

Answer 14

ASL/English bilinguals asked to judge whether two written english words were semantically related
Judgements were:
Faster when the words were related and the signs were similar
Slower when the words were unrelated and the signs were similar

Question 15

joint activation

Answer 15

Both languages are active even when only one is being used

Bidirectional influence of between languages

Question 16

Code switching

Answer 16

Joint activation means both languages are always active

Code switching - switching between languages, espcially mid conversation or mid-sentence

Question 17

Bilingual advantages

Answer 17

EF/Inhibition
Bilingual children are better at
- finding embedded figures
Identifying correct grammar in odd sentences
Bilingual adults are better at
Stroop task
Simon task

Theory of mind
Bilingual children must realise that different people speak different languages
better at theory of mind
Bilingual children better on perspective-taking and false-belief tasks

Better memory, better performance on some cognitive tasks

Question 18

Disadvantages of billingualism

Answer 18

know fewer words in each language
lower receptive vocabulary
slower at lexical retrieval (picture naming)
produce fewer words