language and thought and unusual language abilities

Question 1

define embodied cognition.

Answer 1

• the experience of living, sensing, and perceiving the word fundamentally informs our conception of it.
• the way we think is shaped by our physically embodied experience.

Question 2

these embodied concepts underlie thought and language through conceptual metaphors, give examples of conceptual metaphors.

Answer 2

an abstract state of being is a container

- i’m in the room

Question 3

give evidence for embodied experience from the ‘up and down’ study.

Answer 3

• list of “sky” words and “ocean” words.
• yes or no - “is it found in the sky/ocean?”.
• presented at top or bottom of the sky.
• P’s respond slower when the type of word (helicopter) doesn’t match the words orientation (ocean condition).

Question 4

give evidence for embodied experience from the ‘an arm and leg’ study.

Answer 4

• TMS applied to motor regions of the brain for the arm or the leg.
• faster lexical decisions for leg-related words with leg stimulation and faster decision for arm-related words with arm region stimulation.

Question 5

give evidence for embodied language and imagery.

Answer 5

“Sarah stopped to pick leaf off a tree” – “did this object appear in the sentence?” – shown picture of green and orange leaf = respond to faster to green.

Question 6

in the ‘bear’ study, why were P’s always quicker to say ‘brown’ over ‘white’ and ‘yellow’ words?

Answer 6

as a brown bear is the most prototypical bear.

Question 7

give an idea of an untranslatable word/phase.

Answer 7

‘the piece of shame’ - some languages don’t have “a word for” this and so untranslatable.

Question 8

what does the Spair-Wolf hypothesis propose?

Answer 8

• if two languages have different features, this means the speakers of those languages might think differently.

Question 9

what is the difference between linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity.

Answer 9

linguistic determinism believes features of language determine/ constrain patterns of thought whereas linguistic relativity looks at the patterns a language does or doesn’t have.

Question 10

what did Whorf claim about Native Americans.

Answer 10

Hopis have “no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time’”
- therefore, hopi had no general notion or intuition or time as smooth following continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate, out of the future, through the present, into a past.

Question 11

define categorical perception and give an example of a categorical perception.

Answer 11

continuous quantities divided categorically e..g colours on a colour spectrum.

Question 12

how many colour terms do Berinmos have compared to English.

Answer 12

five colour terms compared to 11.

Question 13

describe the differences between how often Spanish and English speakers use agentive and non-agentive constructions.

Answer 13

in accidental events English speakers used more agentive descriptions and remembered the correct actor more frequently than Spanish speakers, there was no differences in intentional events.

Question 14

differences in language are influenced by the … or … of an event.

Answer 14

encoding or memory of event.

Question 15

give examples of what is considered an ‘unusual’ language ability.

Answer 15

• multilingualism and multidialectalism
• impaired language production or processing
• enhanced language production or processing.

Question 16

give examples of types of people with language talent.

Answer 16

• interpretators
• intensive language learning
• rhyming on the spot with input.

Question 17

give reasons as to why we study people with unusual language abilities.

Answer 17

• interesting to understand the nature of these abilities and how they influence lives.
• aid or improve lives – awareness of diversity, suggests treatments or aids.
• illuminate process of communication and language generally.

Question 18

true or false: BSL and ASL are dialects like British and American English.

Answer 18

false - they are not dialects.

Question 19

lesions to which brain areas result in similar patterns of impairment in SL.

Answer 19

LH, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area.

Question 20

define phonemes.

Answer 20

minimally distinctive units of language, ASL also have minimal pairs.

Question 21

describe babbling in SL.

Answer 21

babies exposed to sign ‘babble’ with their hands the same way speech-exposed babies do with sounds.

Question 22

children acquire the signs and expressions …

Answer 22

• incrementally (increasingly).

Question 23

do people who use SL gesture or pantomime?

Answer 23

• no, however they contain iconic elements.

Question 24

define synaesthesia.

Answer 24

a neuropsychological condition in which a stimulus presented in one sensory modality automatically and consistently induces a concurrent experience in the same or different modality.

Question 25

define ordinal linguistic personification (OLP).

Answer 25

personalities for e.g. numbers and letters.

Question 26

what is meant by grapheme colour synaesthesia.

Answer 26

seeing words or letters automatically and consistently evokes experiences of colour.

Question 27

colours for letters and words are either idiosyncratically associated or are dimensions of synaesthesic colour systematically mapped onto dimensions of languages/concepts, if they are the second we can use synaethesia to…

Answer 27

• investigate how language is used, interesting for both individual letters (grapheme) and whole words (lexical).

Question 28

give an example of reported trends in letter - colour associations.

Answer 28

• o = white

- A = red

Question 29

describe the apple hypothesis.

Answer 29

• evidence for index word colour (Apple) matching letter colour (red).

Question 30

the A-red cross-linguistic influences which countries ?

Answer 30

England, dutch, spain, Japanese, korean.

Question 31

vowels carry prosody, what is meant by this?

Answer 31

stress, length and intonation of language.

Question 32

compound words are words composed of …

Answer 32

… two constituent words.

Question 33

an example of a compound word is rainbow, if rainbow had one colour it would be stored as a …, if there were two colours for rainbow it would be stored as …

Answer 33

… whole (lexicalised)

… constituents (decomposed)

Question 34

morphology is about how words are structured and processed, this is concerned with how words are stored in the brain, this depends on ….

Answer 34

… frequency.

Question 35

true or false: synaesthesias performed better than non-synaesthesias at guessing the meaning of words they didn’t know.

Answer 35

true!

Question 36

true or false: in tip-of-the-tongue states lexical-gustatory syntesthetes experience the words taste before they can retrieve its form.

Answer 36

true!

Question 37

give evidence that suggests synaesthesia is an “enhanced” language.

Answer 37

• studies show syntesthetes have enhanced creativity and memory abilities.