Origins of Language Flashcards
What is language generativity?
the ability to produce sentences we have never said before and understand those never heard before.
Who came up with verbal behaviour and what is it?
Skinner.
Behaviour (vocal or otherwise) that is reinforced and mediated by another person.
Cooperation idea; learned behaviour.
What are the speaker and listener distinctions?
Speaker influences the environment by mediation of the listener.
Listener responds to another’s behaviour due to the convention of language.
What does the convention of language allow?
Cooperation.
What did Universal Grammar identify regarding verbal behaviour?
Skinner’s account couldn’t account for generativity - no direct learning history
What are the methods of science?
Hypothetical deductive methods: top-down; test a hypothesis; often wasteful way of doing science.
Inductive: bottom-up; use patterns in the data to describe/create a theory; often has longer-term benefits.
What is stimulus equivalence and who came up with it?
Murray Sidman
Emergence of equivalent relations between different stimuli - have the same effect on you/you respond similarly to them
What scientific method did Sidman use?
Inductive
What theory did Horne & Low (1996) create?
Naming theory
What is naming theory?
In the same way we can mediate others through speaking, we can influence ourself by hearing our own speaking.
Reflexive process where you produce stimuli that you can respond to to mediate behaviour.
What evidence goes against naming theory?
You don’t have to name things to get stimulus equivalence
Who came up with Relational Frame Theory and what does it explain?
Hayes & Hayes (1989)
Language generativity
How does RFT explain language generativity?
LG = the product of generalised relational responding (responding to relationship between stimuli in a generalised way).
What is relational responding?
Relational responding = response to one stimulus in relation to other available stimuli.
What is generalised relational responding?
Learned process of a particular unit (functional unit of a skill) that you can then generalise/apply more widely.
What is generalised imitation/when has it developed?
GI has developed when the correspondence between the actions of the learner and actions of the model becomes the single stimulus property than controls the child’s response.
Behaviour is now controlled by the correspondence and extends to new topographies of behaviour.
GI = when a novel model evokes an imitative response without prior training.
What are the 3 components of a relational frame?
Mutual entailment (ME)
Combinatorial mutual entailment (CE)
Transformation of stimulus functions (ToSF)
What is mutual entailment?
Deriving a relation between two stimuli.
Refers to the ability to reverse relationships.
What is combinatorial mutual entailment?
Deriving relations between two stimuli given the relation of each of them with a third stimulus.
Refers to combining relationships.
What is transformation of stimulus functions?
Refers to how words get meaning.
Stimuli can have different functions/effects depending on contextual cues.
Functions are transferred between stimuli and you experience the physiological reactions of them.
How does ToSF occur?
Through a generalised operant process.
What can ToSF help to explain?
How pain can be brought to the present moment through words.
How do relational frames develop?
Multiple exemplar exposure.
Throughout infancy children are presented objects with their names, sometimes object first, sometimes name first. Initially, word-object and object-word relations are explicitly trained, but after multiple training trials generalised relational responding emerges.
What are the 9 families of relational frames?
- equivalence/coordination
- distinction
- opposition
- comparison
- spatial
- deictic
- temporal
- hierarchical
- causal
example of equivalence/coordination
a dog is the same as a hound
example of distinction
a white dog is not the same as a brown dog
example of opposition
a black dog vs a white cat
example of comparison
this dog is bigger than that dog
example of spatial
that dog is on the left, the other dog is on the right
example of deictic
I am in front of that dog but behind the other
example of temporal
I fed the dog before I fed the cat
example of hierarchical
a dog is a sort of mammal, which is a type of animal
example of causal
if the dog bites me, I will punish it
What ancient greek root does “deictic” come from and what does the word mean? Examples?
Deîxis - “to show”. Refers to words that do not have formal properties but must be demonstrated as their meaning depends on who is speaking.
E.g., I, you, mine, me, yours, left/right, here/there.
To understand what they are referring to you have to know who is talking and where the person is.
What ancient greek root does “deictic” come from and what does the word mean? Examples?
Deîxis - “to show”. Refers to words that do not have formal properties but must be demonstrated as their meaning depends on who is speaking.
E.g., I, you, mine, me, yours, left/right, here/there.
To understand what they are referring to you have to know who is talking and where the person is.
Responding to deictic stimuli is the basis for human perspective taking and ToM skills; it explains how we discriminate our own spatio/temporal contexts from another person’s – what is this essential for?
self-awareness, prosocial behaviour, prejudice, and empathy.
What do deictic stimuli not have?
Don’t have material dimensions, and they don’t change or degrade.
How does language lead to psychological suffering?
Language allows us to bring threat/aversive stimuli into any moment. How we respond to these events determines suffering. Experiential avoidance leads to suffering.
What is experiential avoidance?
try to alter the form, intensity, or frequency of private events.
Why is experiential avoidance a bad strategy?
We don’t have the same control over our internal events as we do external. Exert effort over something we are unable to do.
What is the rebound effect?
The more we try not to think about something, the more it comes back.
