Unit 8 Thinking and Language

Question 1

cognition

Answer 1

the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.

Question 2

concept

Answer 2

a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.

Question 3

prototype

Answer 3

a mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird,
such as a robin).

chair=shinji chair

Question 4

algorithm

Answer 4

a methodical, logical rule or
procedure that guarantees solving a
particular problem. Contrasts with the
usually speedier—but also more
error-prone—use of heuristics.

Question 5

heuristic

Answer 5

a simple thinking strategy
that often allows us to make judgments
and solve problems efficiently; usually
speedier but also more error-prone than
algorithms.

Question 6

insight

Answer 6

a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it
contrasts with strategy-based solutions.

Question 7

confirmation bias

Answer 7

a tendency to
search for information that supports our
preconceptions and to ignore or distort
contradictory evidence

Question 8

fixation

Answer 8

the inability to see a problem
from a new perspective, by employing a
different mental set.

Question 9

mental set

Answer 9

a tendency to approach a
problem in one particular way, often a
way that has been successful in the past.

Question 10

functional fixedness

Answer 10

the tendency to
think of things only in terms of their
usual functions; an impediment to problem solving.

Question 11

representativeness heuristic

Answer 11

judging
the likelihood of things in terms of how
well they seem to represent, or match,
particular prototypes; may lead us to
ignore other relevant information.

Question 12

availability heuristic

Answer 12

estimating the
likelihood of events based on their
availability in memory; if instances
come readily to mind (perhaps because
of their vividness), we presume such
events are common.

Question 13

overconfidence

Answer 13

the tendency to be
more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and
judgments.

Question 14

belief perseverance

Answer 14

clinging to one’s
initial conceptions after the basis on
which they were formed has been
discredited.

Question 15

intuition

Answer 15

an effortless, immediate,
automatic feeling or thought, as
contrasted with explicit, conscious
reasoning.

Question 16

framing

Answer 16

the way an issue is posed;
how an issue is framed can significantly
affect decisions and judgments.

Question 17

language

Answer 17

our spoken, written, or
signed words and the ways we combine
them to communicate meaning.

Question 18

phoneme

Answer 18

in language, the smallest
distinctive sound unit.

Question 19

morpheme

Answer 19

in a language, the smallest
unit that carries meaning; may be a
word or a part of a word (such as a
prefix).

Question 20

grammar

Answer 20

in a language, a system of
rules that enables us to communicate
with and understand others.

Question 21

semantics

Answer 21

the set of rules by which
we derive meaning from morphemes,
words, and sentences in a given language; also, the study of meaning.

Question 22

syntax

Answer 22

the rules for combining words
into grammatically sensible sentences in
a given language.

Question 23

babbling stage

Answer 23

beginning at about 4
months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously
utters various sounds at first unrelated
to the household language.

Question 24

one-word stage

Answer 24

the stage in speech
development, from about age 1 to 2,
during which a child speaks mostly in
single words.

Question 25

two-word stage

Answer 25

beginning about age
2, the stage in speech development
during which a child speaks mostly twoword statements.

Question 26

telegraphic speech

Answer 26

early speech
stage in which a child speaks like a
telegram—“go car”—using mostly nouns
and verbs

Question 27

aphasia

Answer 27

impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage
either to Broca’s area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke’s area (impairing
understanding).

Question 28

Broca’s area

Answer 28

controls language
expression—an area of the frontal lobe,
usually in the left hemisphere, that
directs the muscle movements involved
in speech.

Question 29

Wernicke’s area

Answer 29

controls language
reception—a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression;
usually in the left temporal lobe.

Question 30

linguistic determinism

Answer 30

Whorf’s
hypothesis that language determines
the way we think.