Week 12: Language, Language Use/Development

Question 1

Common Ground

Answer 1

Info shared by people who engage in conversation

Question 2

Audience Design

Answer 2

Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge

Question 3

Lexicon

Answer 3

words and expressions

Question 4

Syntax

Answer 4

grammatical rules for arranging words/expressions together to form sentences

Question 5

Situation Models

Answer 5

a mental representation of an event/object/situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description

Question 6

Priming

Answer 6

activation of certain thoughts/feelings that make them easier to think of/act upon

Question 7

Ingroup

Answer 7

group to which a person belongs

Question 8

Outgroups

Answer 8

group to which a person does not belong

Question 9

Social Brain Hypothesis

Answer 9

hypothesis that human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups

Question 11

Linguistic Intergroup Bias

Answer 11

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 11

Social Networks

Answer 11

networks of social relationships among individual through which info can travel

Question 11

“Theory of Mind”

Answer 11

human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts (ex. agent, intentionality) and processes (ex. goal detection, imitation, empathy, perspective taking)

Question 11

Intentionality

Answer 11

quality of an agent’s performing a behaviour intentionally - w skill/awareness and executing an intention (which is in turn based on a desire/relevant beliefs)

Question 11

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Answer 11

hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts

Question 12

Mimicry

Answer 12

copying others’ behaviour, usually without awareness

Question 13

Synchrony

Answer 13

two people displaying the same behaviours or having the same internal states (typically because of mutual mimicry)

Question 14

Mirror Neurons

Answer 14

neurons identified in monkey brains that fire both when the monkey performs a certain action/when it perceives another agent performing that action

Question 15

Automatic Empathy

Answer 15

social perceiver unwittingly taking on the internal state of another person, usually because of mimicking the person’s expressive behaviour & thereby feeling the expressed emotion

Question 16

Joint Attention

Answer 16

two people attending to the same object & being aware that they both are attending to it

Question 17

Visual Perspective Taking

Answer 17

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

Question 18

Simulation

Answer 18

the process of representing the other person’s mental state

Question 19

Projection

Answer 19

a social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, know, or feels

Question 20

False-belief test

Answer 20

an experimental procedure that assesses whether a perceiver recognizes that another person has a false belief - a belief that contradicts reality

Question 21

People’s explanations of behaviour

Answer 21

people’s natural explanations for why somebody did something, felt something, etc. (differing substantially for unintentional/intentional behaviours)