Language and Thought Flashcards
Define Cognition
How we think (past experiences, beliefs, emotion, creativity, language, problem solving)
A) Define concept
B) 4 Facts
A) Groups/categories of shared features of related objects, events, or stimuli
B) Help organize the world
- Informed by semantic memories
- Agreed upon (laws of a society) or individual
-Concepts can be concrete or complex/abstract
-Concepts can be natural or artificial
What are examples of:
A) Concrete concepts
B) Complex/Abstract concepts
A) fruit, cloud
B) psychology, Pythagorean theorem
What are:
A) Natural concepts
B) Artificial concepts
A) Experienced in the world (snow, fruit, birds). Can construct an understanding of it through direct observation
B) Understood through a set of properties/characteristics, build on one-another (e.g. area of a square, dictionary definitions)
A) Define prototype
B) Three facts about prototypes?
A) The best example of a concept
B) Possesses many if not all of the characteristics of the category
The closer the new fruit is to the prototype, the better example of a fruit it would be considered
People may category and probability judgements based off category prototype
What are schemas?
Represents clusters of related concepts, help further organize information
Define and give example for:
A) Role Schema
B) Event Schema
A) How a person should behave based on their categorization.
EX: professor (brilliant, smart, inquisitive, brave)
B) Cognitive scripts, what do you do in certain events? When we are uncertain about events-schemas we look to others. Some are more powerful than others.
EX: Taking exam, everyone performs in same behaviour
Going to bar, people engage in similar behaviour
Define language
A system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules and that convey meaning.
A) Define phonemes
B) Two facts
A) Smallest unit of language, building blocks of the language
B) English has 26 letters but 44 phonemes (ch/ph,etc.)
EXAMPLE: when: w/e/n
Define phonetic rules
How we can combine phonemes to produce sounds
Define morphemes
Smallest meaningful units of language, some phonemes are also morphemes (e.g. a)
Define morphological rules
How we combine morphemes to remix words
Define:
A) semantics
B) syntax
A) what words mean
B) how words are organized
How do ___ believe we learn language?
A) Behaviourists
B) Nativists
A) Believe we learn language through reinforcement
B) Innate, biological capacity for language
Language development:
A) 0-4 months
B) 4-6 months
C) 6-10 months
D) 10-12 months
A) can tell the difference between all possible sounds
B) babbles consonants
C) understands some words and simple requests. Can no longer reliably distinguish sounds that are not used in their native language.
D) Begin to use single words
Language development:
A) 12-18 months
B) 18-24 months
C) 24-36 months
D) 36-60 months
A) Vocabulary of 30-50 words (simple nouns, adjectives, and action words)
B) Two-word phrases ordered according to syntactic rules. Vocabulary of 50-200 words. Understands rules.
C) Vocabulary of about 1000 words. Production of phrases and incomplete sentences.
D) Vocabulary grows to more than 10 000 words. Production of full sentences. Mastery of grammatical morphemes (such as -ed for past tense) and function words (such as the, and, but). Can form questions and negations
Define Telegraphic speech
At 18 months old: no functional morphemes (Serve grammatical function), only content morphemes
E.g. Throw ball instead of throw the ball
Define fast mapping
At 2 years old: fast learning of words that you only have to hear once and then you understand its meaning
Define overgeneralization
Taking a rule that you’ve learned and applying it broadly (e.g. adding s to make plural doesn’t apply to everything)
A) Who created the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (1956)?
B) What is it?
C) Example and critisicm.
A) Benjamin Whorf
B) Language shapes the nature of thought. A language which does not have a linguistic feature will struggle when dealing with related concepts.
C) If a language has no past tense, a person will struggle thinking of the past.
Most evidence is anecdotal
A) How do words for colour differ between English and Dani?
B) How does it contradict Whorf’s hypothesis?
A) English: 11 words for colour (e.g. red, blue, etc.)
Dani: 2 words for colour (dark and bright)
B) When asked to separate colours, they did not only make two piles (dark and bright), they also separated it into their colours even without words for them
How did Ervin-Tripp show impacts of language and personality?
Asked Japanese-Americans to complete this sentence in either English or Japanese.
“When my wishes conflict with my family, ____”
Japanese: “…it is a time of great unhappiness”
English: “…I do what I want.”
How is time different between english and mandarin?
English: time is linear
Mandarin: time is vertical
Three approaches to problem solving?
1) Trial-And-Error: try different solutions till you land on one that works
E.g. puzzles
2) Algorithm: problem-solving formula with step-by-step instructions
E.g. google search, IKEA instructions
3) Heuristic: rules of thumb/mental shortcut, helps bypass lengthy decision making (used when too much/litte info, too little time, unimportant decision)
E.g. stereotypes
Define:
A) Mental Set
B) Functional Fixedness
A) Approaching a problem in the same way that has worked in the past… but is not working now. Several biases that result in mental sets.
B) seeing the function of an object as unchanging
Define:
A) Anchoring bias
B) Confirmation bias
C) Representative bias
A) Using an initial piece of information (the anchor) to make further judgements relative to that anchor
B) Focusing on information that confirms your existing beliefs
C) Unintentionally stereotype someone/something because they look like a good representation
Define availability heuristic? Example?
Information that is readily available is judged as more likely to have happened (or happen)
Example: people are more likely to believe that they will win the lottery than be murdered in Canada. The chances of winning the lottery is 1 in 14 million, the chances of being murdered is 1 in 6 million.
