Week 1 - Carroll

Question 1

What is the Whorf/Whorf-Sapir hypothesis?

Answer 1

The notion that language shapes thought patterns

Question 2

Which 2 concepts are included in the Whorf hypothesis?

Answer 2

linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity

Question 3

define linguistic determinism

Answer 3

the notion that a language determines certain nonlinguistic cognitive processes

Question 4

define linguistic relativity

Answer 4

cognitive processes are different for different languages

Question 5

What is differentation in a language’s lexicon?

Answer 5

A more highly differentiated domain
has more words

Question 6

In which domains can we assess the whorfian hypothesis?

Answer 6

At the grammatical and the lexical levels

Question 7

what does the strong version of the linguistic determinism hypothesis state?

Answer 7

language determines cognition: the presence of linguistic categories creates cognitive categories

Question 8

what does the weak version of the linguistic determinism hypothesis state?

Answer 8

the presence of linguistic categories influences the ease with which various cognitive operations are performed

Question 9

What is codability and how does it relate to Zipf’s law?

Answer 9

the length of a verbal expression - the more frequently a word is used in a language, the shorter the word

Question 10

what are basic colour terms?

Answer 10

terms that consist of only one morpheme, are not contained within another colour, and are not restricted to a small number of objects (e.g., blonde describes hair only)

Question 11

what are focal colours?

Answer 11

the most representative example of various basic colours

Question 12

Research in the colour domain assessed the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Which version of the hypothesis did this research support?

Answer 12

the weak version - there are universal constraints on colour categories, but linguistic differences within those constraints affect colour cognition and perception

Question 13

How does language influence numerical thought?

Answer 13

the way that languages represent
numbers influences mathematical thinking

Question 14

What aspect of a language influences the timing of certain cognitive achievements in children?

Answer 14

the prevalence of nouns and verbs

Question 15

What is the interactionist view in terms of cognition and language?

Answer 15

Children’s early word meanings result from the interaction of existing cognitive development and the semantic categories of the language

Question 16

children have a rich knowledge of space prior to learning specific spatial terms in their native language. How does language then influence how children conceptualise the world?

Answer 16

semantic categories exist prior to language experience and are then enhanced or diminished by language acquisition

Question 17

What are absolute spatial terms?

Answer 17

the location of an object in space irrespective of the location of a person (e.g. north)

Question 18

What do relative spatial terms indicate?

Answer 18

the relationship between a person and an object in space (e.g. to her right)

Question 19

What are intrinsic spatial terms?

Answer 19

they refer to objects in relation to various object coordinates (e.g. behind the house)

Question 20

What is the following sentence an example of?
“If they had started earlier, they wouldn’t be late to the concert”

Answer 20

counterfactual reasoning - the ability to reason about an event that is contrary to fact

Question 21

What was Bloom’s (1984) thesis regarding Chinese and English speakers’ ability to use counterfactual reasoning?

Answer 21

both populations can do it, but English speakers would reason counterfactually more easily

Question 22

Languages with a grammatical gender system have a(n) ____ over other languages in the acquisition of gender identity

Answer 22

advantage

Question 23

Distinction of objects and substances is a ____ ability

Answer 23

prelinguistic/possibly innate