Language and Thought Flashcards
Components of language:
Phoneme → morpheme → word → phrase → sentence
Using the normal distribution IQ scores, where 100 is the average of an age group, how many of the age group scores will fall between 85 and 115?
Two thirds
Phoneme
Single unit of sound that changes meaning (example: dog vs. log), about 40 in English
Unbound vs. bound morphemes
- Unbound morphemes are words, and they can be either content (example: dog) or function (example: the)
- Bound morphemes are affixes and suffixes, and are always function (example: plural s)
What is the processing system for function morphemes/words?
Syntactic processing
What is the processing system for content words?
Semantic processing
Syntax
Refers to the structure of language → phrases and sentences
Syntax is cued by:
- Word order - who is doing what to whom?
- English word order tends to be: Subject - verb - object
Word class
Whether something is an adjective, noun, or verb
Language-relevant brain areas (right-handed people)
Left hemisphere, mostly lower edge of frontal lobe and upper edge of temporal lobe
Broca’s aphasia
Difficulty in the production of speech
Broca’s aphasia characteristics
- Issues with function words and structure, telegraphic speech
- Uses far more content than function words
- Those affected appear to understand you, but comprehension is often impaired
- Can count automatically, songs are often retained
- Production of speech more impaired than comprehension
Wernicke’s area
Left temporal lobe, next to primary auditory cortex → translates sounds into meaning
Characteristics of Wernicke’s aphasia
- Intonation, production of speech not as forced as for Broca’s aphasia
- Mixed up content words (understanding and production of them impaired)
- Can understand structure of sentence, but sentences do not make sense; ‘jargon aphasia’ - fluent, but nonsensical
Difficulties of people with Wernicke’s aphasia
- Phonological sequence processing (how you put sounds together)
- Semantic ‘word sized’ representation (dog, chase)
- Being able to map between phonology and semantics (dog vs. DOG)
Proposition
Statement that expresses an idea
Semantic roles
What roles individuals or objects, etc. occupy within a sentence
Noam Chomsky
Thought about surface structure (syntax), but also looked at deep structure (semantics); idea that syntax interacts with meaning
Early infant speech perception
- Birth: Preference for human and animal language sounds; able to perceive many basic phoneme contrasts, not restricted to sounds in the language they are growing up in
- 3 months: Discriminate between human and animal sounds
- 9 months: Perception of sound becomes categorical, specific to language they are growing up in, can detect difference between voiced vs. unvoiced sounds
High Amplitude Sucking (HAS) technique
- Attached dummy to a pressure transducer; baby sucks hard on dummy → sound produced (operant conditioning - baby knows that if they give a strong suck, they get a sound)
- Downward trend shows infants habituating to the sound/becoming bored with it
- Different sound introduced → infant sucking rate goes up; babies can detect change in sound
Infant speech sounds
- 0-2 months: Cooing
- 6-7 months: Reduplicated babbling, same syllable over and over
- 10 months: Baby’s sounds have adapted to language it hears, realise that certain sounds are meaningful and others are not
- 11‐12 months: Variegated babbling (syllables with different consonants and vowels; starting to form words)
Reasons for infants’ limited speech sounds
- Shape of the infant mouth and vocal tract
- Development of motor cortex
Protowords to words: Deb Roy
- Protoword: Combination of syllables used as a replacement for lots of words
- Marks the realisation that sounds have meaning/can be representative
Comprehension vs. production
- Word comprehension (receptive vocabulary) precedes productive vocabulary by an average of 4 months
- Initial acquisition rate for comprehension is twice that of production
- Production goes along at a slow rate before taking off at about 18 months
‘Vocabulary burst’
- Major increase in productive vocabulary acquisition rate after first 50 words are learned
- Due to: Symbolic nature of language (object has a corresponding name or term), control over articulation (developing motor abilities), easier retrieval (developing memory system)
Overextension vs. underextension of meaning
- Underextension: ‘Dog’ used only for family dog, but not other dogs
- Overextension: ‘Dog’ refers to dogs and cats
How does overextension change as vocabulary increases?
As you develop more vocabulary, your use of overextension decreases since you can retrieve more words
Holophrase
A single word that stands for an entire statement (example: ‘water’ pointing outside - want to go and jump in the puddles)
Early sentences
- 2 years - children begin to combine words
- Children have specific meaning (semantic) relations they like to convey, often early grammar tends to be quite telegraphic - focus more on semantics than syntax
- Often use pivot grammars (two-word phrases in which one is a function word and another is a content word)
When does a child’s use of syntax begin to resemble adult language?
Age 4
Language bioprogram hypothesis
- Children are innately predisposed to acquire the syntax of language
- Evidence: Creoles and pidgin (taking input from target language and adding it to innate knowledge)
Language Acquisition Device (LAD): Noam Chomsky
Hypothetical tool in the brain that allows human beings to learn a language, children are born with it
Sensitive period for language acquisition
- Ends by puberty once lateralisation occurs (language centres of the brain go into the left hemisphere for right-handers; harder for people to acquire critical components of language, particularly syntax)
- Deaf Signers (Newport, 1990): Syntax errors in sign language greater for those exposed to the language later
General learning capacities theory
- Children have highly developed pattern recognition systems
- Can pick up on abstract patterns in language - statistical learning
Statistical learning for auditory input
- Syllables presented in a synthesised voice, no time in between syllables
- Infants could work out some of the boundaries - worked out that ‘bidaku’ was a set of three syllables that always went together; worked out an artificial grammar even when asleep
Mintz
- Looked at combinations of words that came out of language transcripts - identified common word frames (example: you __ it)
- Children can identify abstract pattern boundaries
Parentese
Simplified speech, exaggerated intonation
Words refer to things
Children learn that gaze and objects are connected
Child- vs. situation-centred talk
Child-centred: Adapt talk to child’s level
Situation-centred: Child learns to adapt to situation
Analogical representations (mental images)
A representation, taking something in the world and re-representing it to yourself (example: can envision sister in Australia)
Mental Rotation Study
Found that the more the stimulus was rotated, the longer it took participants to say whether it was a mirror image or not → hints at the existence of mental images
Symbolic representations
Powerful form of representation since you can combine them together (example: cats eat cat biscuits, as opposed to mental image of a simple cat)
Proposition
- Statement that expresses ideas (express the relationships between concepts)
- Made up of a subject (something/someone that’s doing something), and what’s being asserted about that subject (predicate - linking bit)
Semantic priming studies
Where you look at how concepts are organised through priming (where you present a stimulus, which activates or changes how you might access another stimulus)
Deductive reasoning
- Start with a general belief/principle → what are the implications (looking at specific instances)
- Referred to as syllogisms (if/then problems)
Inductive reasoning
Start with specifics and infer general principles
What influences our ability to reason deductively?
Belief bias: People judge whether the conclusion is plausible on its own, rather than following the logic
Informal reasoning (heuristics)
Making judgements, drawing conclusions from experience; helps conserve cognitive resources
Heuristics to assist inductive reasoning
Probability estimates are influenced by how easy it is to retrieve information (easier to retrieve = perceived as more frequent)
Saliency bias
Highly salient or impactful events more easily retrieved from memory
Steps of problem solving
- Understand the problem
- Generate possible solutions (hypotheses)
- Test solutions
- Evaluate results, and revise if necessary
Trial and error
Often used by children, not so much by adults (example: going to every restaurant in the area in the hopes that one will be an Indian restaurant)
Algorithm
Rule that guarantees a solution, good for well-defined problems
Heuristic: Means-End Analysis
- Where you work step by step to get close to your goal as you solve the problem
- Monitor each step to see how much closer you are to your goal → another flurry of strategizing
Remote Associations Test
- How we look at the more divergent way of thinking
- Gives you three words, have to come up with a fourth word related to the previous three
Duncker’s (1945) radiation problem
- Participants told analogy story → higher proportion found solution (but not too much higher; 10% → 30%)
- When explicit reference was made to the story as a way of solving the radiation problem, solution rate shot up to 92%; also enhanced by participants reading two, rather than one, analogy stories
Mental set
Habits and assumptions you bring to solving a problem, can interfere with effective problem-solving (example: Luchins Water Jar Problem)
Functional fixedness
- Inability to realise that something known to have a particular use may also be used to perform other functions
- Candle Problem (Duncker, 1945) - more likely to solve when ‘thinking outside the box’
Incubation
Taking a break, releases you from a mental set and gives you a new perspective on problem
Language is independent of cognition
Evidence: Babies have concepts before language
(example: babies shown square stimuli, stare more at triangles than squares because they’ve already formed square category and are familiar with squares)
Language influences cognition
Evidence: Children’s conceptual development correlates strongly with language development
Whorfian hypothesis: Benjamin Whorf
- Having a specific language determines (strong version) or influences (weak version) how we think
- Evidence for weak version: Russian Blues experiment
Focal colours
Most representative prototypical colour of a colour; universal and privileged aspect of our cognition
Russian Blues experiment
- Investigated whether lack of a colour name influences perception of colour
- Effect of language was much more pronounced for finer distinctions between colours
Evidence against the Whorfian hypothesis: Eleanor Rosch (a.k.a. Heider)
- Argued that colour cognition was inherently hardwired, rather than language impacting on it
- Results: Perception, memory, and discrimination of focal colours were similar to speakers whose language coded many colour terms
Ego-moving vs. time-moving
- Ego-moving: Future = further in your sense of travel
- Time-moving: Time is coming towards you
Effect of moving through space on how we think about time:
- Spatial primes: First option prompting ego-moving perception, second option prompting time-moving perception
- Found: Whichever spacial prime you were exposed to influenced your response to the question (more noticeable if you imagined, rather than just did physical action)
Influence of language on conception of time: Boroditsky (2001)
- Primed participants before asking questions (either horizontally- or vertically-presented fish)
- English speaker primed vertically - longer to answer; Mandarin speaker primed horizontally → longer to answer
- English speakers were faster with horizontal prime, Mandarin speakers were faster with vertical prime
Western style (analytic)
Focus on objects and properties; preference for avoiding contradictions, determining which position is correct
Eastern style (holistic)
Emphasising contexts and relations between elements; preference for dialectical (compromise) approaches and tolerance for contradictions
Dialectical self-scale study
- Looked at how dialectic (malleable) Chinese-English bilinguals were
- Given a questionnaire in either English or Chinese (priming)
- Found: Chinese version - scored higher on dialectical thinking than English version → language encodes different styles of thinking
Samuel Morton (1820s-1850s)
- Believed head size was related to intelligence (the bigger the better)
- Race science - ranked intelligence of races
Paul Broca (1824‐1880)
- Believed heavier brain = more intelligence
- Corrected for body size
- Found that: Brain was larger in men than women, in white people than not, in ‘eminent’ men than not-eminent men
Correlation between brain size and intelligence
0.33 (higher for females than males, higher for adults than children)
Brains of intelligent people are more efficient
Evidence: Cortex of highly able children starts off thinner at age 7, reaches peak thickness later → extended window of opportunity for developing high-level cognitive circuits
Francis Galton (1822-1911)
- Intelligence as highly hereditary (can breed ‘superior’ people together to get a more intelligent people), coined the term ‘eugenics’
- Made first systematic attempts to measure intelligence
Alfred Binet (1857-1911)
- Pioneer of modern intelligence testing (Stanford Binet IQ test)
- Introduced idea of intelligence as a psychological construct
- Believed that intelligence was a general ability, not just the accumulation of knowledge
Mental vs. real age
- Mental age: Average age at which children achieve a particular score
- Chronological age - real age of the child
Contemporary IQ tests
- Mental age replaced with standardised score (problems with mental age when applied to adults)
- Development of subscales (Verbal IQ and Performance IQ)
The Flynn effect: James Flynn
Found that general IQ was increasing
Spearman’s Two‐Factor Theory
Intelligence consists of:
1. G (general) factor, which underlies performance on all intelligence subtests - if you do well on one sub-test, you’ll also do well on the other
2. S (specific) factors - performance specific to type of task (computation, vocabulary, digit span)
Fluid vs. crystallised intelligence (two forms of g)
- Fluid intelligence: Ability to learn, perceive relationships, deal with new problems; context-free, one solution to the problem (about speed)
- Crystallised intelligence - acquired knowledge from culture; drawing on knowledge from previous experience (about previous knowledge, vocabulary size)
Age related changes in fluid vs. crystallised intelligence
- Fluid intelligence stops increasing and begins to decline after adolescence
- Crystallised intelligence continues to increase with age
IQ scores at 11-years-old correlated with longevity
Issues: IQ test was initially to determine which high-school UK children would go to; IQ test scores associated with quality of school → quality of life
Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
- Analytic intelligence (what is typically measured on IQ tests)
- Creative intelligence - problems in our lives are often ill-defined, have to be creative in our solutions
- Practical intelligence - common-sense solutions to everyday problems
