Language and Thinking

Question 1

Mental Representations

Answer 1

• psychological structures that stand for real world objects
• symbolic: arbitrary representations; no relationship between representation and what it represents
• analogical: representations are not arbitrary; existing relationship between representation and what it represents

Question 2

Language

Answer 2

• consists of symbols that represent, transmit, and store some meaning
• phoneme: smallest unit of sound in a language
• morpheme: smallest unit of meaning in a language
• grammar: rules for combining sounds and words to make meaningful speech (syntax involves rules of word order while semantics involves rules of word meaning)

Question 3

Language Development

Answer 3

• critical period: if children are not expose to language before age 7, they lose the ability to master any language
• learning a second language is much easier before puberty

Question 4

Statistical Learning

Answer 4

• ability for humans and other animals to extract statistical regularities from the world around them to learn about their environment
• transitional probability: probability of a particular syllable given a prior one

Question 5

Language in the Brain

Answer 5

• Broca’s Area: area in frontal lobe responsible for language production (syntax)
• Broca’s Aphasia: unable to speak fluently but understand fine (syntax issue)
• Wernicke’s Area: area in temporal lobe responsible for language reception (semantics)
• Wernicke’s Aphasia: unable to understand or produce meaningful language (semantics issue)

Question 6

Representations

Answer 6

• cognitive economy: represent an entire class of individuals under a common representation to save resources
• inferencing: group individuals into classes to infer properties of the individual based on group properties

Question 7

Definitional Theory of Conceptual Structure

Answer 7

• represent concepts with a definition that determines how individuals should be grouped
• problematic because we cannot rank members and definitions don’t always work

Question 8

Prototype Theory of Conceptual Structure

Answer 8

• represent concepts with a typical example (prototype)
• features are shared by most members of the group
• typicality effects: some members better represent the group than others (rated higher, learned faster, and recognized faster)

Question 9

Knowledge Processing

Answer 9

• automatic: quick and consistent without awareness or effort
• controlled: slow and flexible with awareness or effort
• processes can become automatic with practice overtime

Question 10

Stroop Effect

Answer 10

• when naming words (automatic process) contradicts recognizing colors (less automatic)

Question 11

Heuristics

Answer 11

• availability heuristic: estimates of frequency are usually based on what most easily comes to mind
• representativeness heuristic: estimates of likelihood based on how likely we think something will happen at first glance