language and language use Flashcards
nicaraguan sign language
deaf children created the language to communicate with each other, humans are born to use language
primary use of language
interpersonal
common ground
info shared by people engaged in conversation, set knowledge
adjacency pair
people that are conversing
audience design
Constructing utterances to suit audiences knowledge, taking previous knowledge into account
brief labels=more knowledgeable
descriptive words=less knowledgeable
Four speaker rules/conversational maxims according to Grice (1975)
- trying to be informative (maxim of quantity)
- truthful (maxim of quality)
- relevant (maxim of relation)
- clear and unambiguous (maxim of manner)
amount of ppl in conversation is usually
no more than four (more than 90% of comvos happen w less than 4 ppl)
Pickering and Garrod (2004) different levels of language use used to achieve conversation coordination by alining with others? aka interpersonal alignments
what are the four main components of lang?
- lexicon (words and expressions)
- syntax (grammatical rules for arraging words and expressions together
- speech rate
- accent
situation models
- mental representation of an event, object or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description
- often are shared if people have same common ground
priming (in relation to language)
the activation of certain thoughts or feelings that make them easier to think of and act upon
ex. ‘ring’ makes you think of ‘wedding, marriage, etc’
imitate and infer definitions
imitate: interpersonal ability, executing the same action as another person
infer: cognitive ability, one idea leading to other ideas
both lead to people coordinating common ground, sharing situational models and communicate with each other
what percent of conversations turn out to be gossip (and define it)
60-70%
activities to think and communicate about our social world
define in group and outgroup? what is used to describe their attributes?
ingroup: the group to which a person belongs (enlarged by gossip)
outgroup: group to which a person does not belong ( gossip helps agaisnt it)
argued by Dunbar
Positive things about ingroups=adjectives
Negative things about outgroup=adjectives
What did Dunbar believe about gossip? what were his other findings?
- Social brain hypothesis:
Social effects of gossip have given humans evolutionary advantages and larger brains=help humans think more complex and abstract thoughts and maintain larger ingroups. larger brains=larger groups - estimated an equations that predicts average group size from average neocortex size
- average group size humans can support=150 ppl approx. (size of modern hunter-gatherer community
- human, brain, and language have co evolved, language and human sociality are inseparable
According to Semin and Fiedler, what are the 4 ways someones action can be described? What do the differences indicate?
- action verb that describes a concrete action (ex he swims)
- a state verb that describes the actor’s psychological state (ex. he likes swimming)
- an adjective that describes the actor’s personality (ex. he is athletic)
- a noun that describes the actor’s role (ex. he is an athlete)
Verb=particularity, adjectives=permanency
Define Linguistic intergroup bias
tendency for people to characterize both positive things about their ingroups and negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions (adjectives)
People in ingroups showcasing bad behaviours and people in outgroups showcasing good behaviour is an exception
define social networks
networks of social relationships among individuals through which information travels
through a chain of communication, information spreads fast from first to second to third sources and so on
True or false: when using language to describe an experience, thoughts and feelings are shaped by linguistic representation produced rather than the original experience
True
What happens in the brain when people linguistically label negative images?
The amygdala (responsible for processing negative emotions) is activated more than when they are not labeled
True or false: writing, talking and thinking about negative past life events improve people’s psychological well being.
False, just thinking about it worsens it
Define the Sapir Whorf hypothesis
language that people use determines their thoughts
ex. some languages have words that other languages can only use multiple words together to describe
If psychology is the science of behavior, then the ______of language must be one its most central topics, since it exists for almost all human beings.
use
On Monday morning, Chad asks Jason, “Did you see that amazing game yesterday?” Chad assumes that Jason knows which game he is talking about. This assumption of shared information is called ______in language
common ground
When he is talking to his best friend, Tom says, “Damon and I are going out for dinner.” When he is talking to a stranger, Tom says, “My partner Damon and I are going out to dinner.” Crafting what you say based on the knowledge of the person you are speaking to is called ______.
audience design
The rules for how we arrange words and expressions together to communicate in a meaningful and understandable way are called the ______of language.
syntax
Consider these two sentences: “The boy was sick from eating so much ice cream,” and, “That boy ate so much ice cream, it made him sick.” These sentences have similar ______but different _____.
similar lexicons, different syntax
Evelyn meets Dee from Australia and is very attentive to Dee’s accent. If Evelyn is like most people, what will she start doing?
mimicking the accent without realizing it
______occurs when thinking about one concept causes you to think about other related concepts.
Priming
The basic notion that the language used by a given group of people has a significant impact on how they think is called the ______hypothesis, after its original founder(s).
Sapir-Whorf
aphasia
- problem in frontal lobe of left hemisphere
- brocas area
- temporal lobe - wernickes area (comprehension)
