Week 8 (Language & Thought) Flashcards
Language is symbolic
We use spoken sounds and written words to represent
objects, actions, and ideas
Language is semantic
It has meaning
Language is generative
A language’s limited symbols can generate an infinite
variety of messages
Language is structured
Rules govern how words can be arranged into sentences
Phoneme
The smallest speech units in a language that can
be distinguished perceptually
▫ English is composed of ~40
Morphemes:
The smallest units of meaning in a language
▫ Un-wise-ly
Semantics
Area of language
concerned with
understanding
the meaning of
words and word
combinations
▫ Meanings might
be concerned
with denotation
and connotation
Syntax
A system of rules that
specify how words can
be arranged into
sentences
critical periods
Limited time span in an organism’s development
where it is optimal for certain capacities to emerge
because the organism is especially responsive to
certain experiences
Up to 3 months of age
Babies have high phonemic awareness – they can
readily discriminate between phonemes in
language
▫ This high level of awareness disappears at 4-12
months
6+ months
Infants start babbling, producing sounds that
correspond to phonemes and moving towards
consonant vowel combinations
▫ Becomes more complex and eventually resembles
the parents’ language
▫ Lasts until ~18 months
▫ Deaf infants: manual babbling
At ~10-13 months of age
First words
Typically resemble the syllables that they
spontaneously babble
▫ Vocabulary starts to slowly grow
18 months of age
Toddlers can typically say between 3-50 word
Receptive vocabulary is larger than their
productive vocabulary
▫ These words tend to mostly refer to objects,
followed by social actions
18-24 months of age
Vocabulary spurt starts
By grade 1, the average child has a vocabulary of
~10,000 words
▫ By grade 5, this increases to ~40,000
▫ For some two-year olds, this means learning 20 new
words/week
Fast mapping
the process by which children map a
word onto a concept after only one exposure
Overextension
occurs when a child incorrectly uses a
word to describe a larger set of objects or actions than
is meant to
Underextension
a child incorrectly uses a word to
describe a narrower set of objects than is meant to
just under 2 years of age
combining words into
sentences
telegraphic speech
consist mainly of content words, with other less
critical words omitted
3 year of age
children learn to express more
complex ideas like the plural and past tense
Overregularization
occurs when grammatical
rules are incorrectly generalized to irregular cases
metalinguistic awareness
The ability to reflect on the use of language
▫ With this development comes “playing” with
language
Behaviourist theories of langauge
Language is learned in the same way as everything
else: imitation, reinforcement, and other
established principles of conditioning
Nativist theories of langauge
humans have a
native propensity to develop
language
A language acquisition device
– an innate mechanism or
process that facilitates the
learning of a language
Interactionist theories
both biology and
experience make important contributions to
language development
Problems of inducing structure
find relationships between elements
analogies
Problems of arrangement
combinations of things to get to goal
different objects must be arranged in a specific way to satisfy some criteria
Problems of transformation
outside the box thinking
use what’s available to you in your environment
Irrelevant information
People often incorrectly assume that all numerical
information in a problem is necessary to solve it
Functional
fixedness
The tendency to
perceive an item
only in terms of its
most common use
Mental set
Occurs when people
persist in using the same
problem solving strategies
that worked in the past
Unnecessary constraints
Effective problem solving requires
specifying all constraints
governing the problem without
assuming constraints that don’t
exist
heuristics
A guiding principle or “rule of
thumb” used in solving problems or
making decisions
Special process view
insights arise from sudden,
unconscious restructuring of problems
Business-as-usual view
insights arise from
normal, conscious, analytical, step-by-step
thinking
Integrated view
Both the unconscious and
conscious processes outlined above contribute to
insights
Analogies
recognizing similarities between the current
problem and past problems
Representation
Problems might be
represented verbally,
spatially,
mathematically, etc.
* Changing your
representation is often a
good strategy when you
fail to make progress
with your initial
representation
Incubation
occurs when new solutions surface
tor a previously-unsolved problem after a period
of not consciously thinking about the problem
Subjective utility
what an outcome is personally
worth to an individual
Subjective probability
an individual’s personal
estimate of a probability
Availability
basing the
estimated probability of an
event on the ease to which
relevant instances come to
mind
Representativeness
basing
the probability of an event on
how similar it is to the typical
prototype of that event
The conjunction fallacy
Estimating the odds of two
uncertain events happening at
once is greater than the odds of
either event happening alone
The sunk cost fallacy
Individuals continue to a
behaviour because they’ve
already invested time, money
and energy into the action or
decision, not because the
behaviour is rational
The gambler’s fallacy
The belief that the odds of a chance event increase
if the event hasn’t occurred recently
▫ Reflects the pervasiveness of the
representativeness heuristic
incubation effect
surfacing of new solutions for an unsolved problem after not consciously thinking about the problem
theory of bounded rationality
asserts that people use simple strategies in decision making that result in “irrational” decisions
framing
how decision issues are posed or how choices are structured
behavioral economics
field of study that examines the effects of humans’ actual decision-making processes on economic decisions
linguistic relativety
hypothesis that one’s language determines the nature of one’s thought
semantic slanting
used when a person wants to say the same thing but affect their listener in a different way
