week 12 - language, language use, and development

Question 1

audience design

Answer 1

Audience design - Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge.

Question 2

common ground

Answer 2

Common ground - Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation.

Question 3

ingroup

Answer 3

Ingroup - Group to which a person belongs.

Question 4

lexicon

Answer 4

Lexicon - Words and expressions.

Question 5

linguistic in-group bias

Answer 5

Linguistic intergroup bias - A tendency for people to characterize positive things about their ingroup using more abstract expressions, but negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions.

Question 6

outgroup

Answer 6

Outgroup - Group to which a person does not belong.

Question 7

priming

Answer 7

Priming - A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus.

Question 8

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Answer 8

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.

Question 9

situation model

Answer 9

Situation model - A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description.

Question 10

social brain hypothesis

Answer 10

Social brain hypothesis - The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.

Question 11

social networks

Answer 11

Social networks - Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel.

Question 12

syntax

Answer 12

Syntax - Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences.

Question 13

automatic empathy

Answer 13

Automatic empathy - A social perceiver unwittingly takes on the internal state of another person, usually because of mimicking the person’s expressive behavior and thereby feeling the expressed emotion.

Question 14

false belief test

Answer 14

False-belief test - An experimental procedure that assesses whether a perceiver recognizes that another person has a false belief—a belief that contradicts reality.

Question 15

folk explanations of behaviour

Answer 15

Folk explanations of behavior - People’s natural explanations for why somebody did something, felt something, etc. (differing substantially for unintentional and intentional behaviors).

Question 16

intention

Answer 16

Intention - An agent’s mental state of committing to perform an action that the agent believes will bring about a desired outcome.

Question 17

intentionality

Answer 17

Intentionality - The quality of an agent’s performing a behavior intentionally—that is, with skill and awareness and executing an intention (which is in turn based on a desire and relevant beliefs).

Question 18

joint attention

Answer 18

Joint attention - Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they both are attending to it.

Question 19

mimicry

Answer 19

Mimicry - Copying others’ behavior, usually without awareness.

Question 20

mirror neurons

Answer 20

Mirror neurons - Neurons identified in monkey brains that fire both when the monkey performs a certain action and when it perceives another agent performing that action.

Question 21

projection

Answer 21

Projection - A social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, knows, or feels.

Question 22

simulation

Answer 22

Simulation - The process of representing the other person’s mental state.

Question 23

synchrony

Answer 23

Synchrony - Two people displaying the same behaviors or having the same internal states (typically because of mutual mimicry).

Question 24

theory of mind

Answer 24

Theory of mind - The human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts (e.g., agent, intentionality) and processes (e.g., goal detection, imitation, empathy, perspective taking).\

Question 25

visual perspective taking

Answer 25

Visual perspective taking - Can refer to visual perspective taking (perceiving something from another person’s spatial vantage point) or more generally to effortful mental state inference (trying to infer the other person’s thoughts, desires, emotions).