Thought and Language

Question 1

hierarchical order of language

Answer 1

phoneme, morpheme, word, phrase, sentence

Question 2

phoneme

Answer 2

single unit of sound that changes meaning (eg dog vs log)

not all languages have the same phoenemes

Question 3

morphemes

Answer 3

the smallest language units that carry meaning (words, suffixes, prefixes)

one morphene (dog) two morphenes (dogs)

Question 4

content words

Answer 4

words that have meaning

semantic processing relies on processing content words

• nouns (dog, book, student)
• verbs (walk, swim, sleep, teach)
• adjectives - modifty nouns (warm, beautiful, good, kind)
• adverbs - modify verbs (well, poorly)

Question 5

function words

Answer 5

Conjunctions and most pronouns

syntactic processing relies on processing function words

pronouns(she, he it, we, they)
prepositions (in, of, on, out, at, by)
conjunctives (and, but, or)
words such as that, this, a, the, if, to

Question 6

brocas aphasia

Answer 6

language relevant brain areas: right handed people: left hemisphere, mostly lower edge of frontal lobe and upper edge of temporal lobe

brocas area: located near areas that control speech muscles

Question 7

syntax

Answer 7

• refers to structure of language
• rules for ordering words

syntax is cued by word order
- subject - object - verb: jane the apple ate
- subject - verb - object: jane ate the apple
- verb - subject - object: ate jane the apple

Question 8

wernickes aphasia

Answer 8

aphasia: the inability to produce or understand language

wernickes area: left temporal lobe- next to primary auditory cortex - translates sounds into meaning

Question 9

english syntactic word order

Answer 9

• subject, verb, object

Question 10

infants set of sounds

Answer 10

cooing
- 2 months
- relying on social cues (eye contact) which develops their language

reduplicated babbling
- 6-7 months - some syllable over and over
- babbling where they are starting to form words

varlegated babbling
- 11-12 months syllables with different consonants and vowels
- 10 months children can categorise sounds into meaningful and not
- babys sounds have adpated to language it hears, adults can tell what language baby is learning

Question 11

infants limited set of sounds

Answer 11

• Anatamony of a young baby compared to a adult
• Lips and gums – little room in a babys mouth – produced much more foward
• As the primary use of mouths for babies is sucking
• This is why sounds like mm, pp, dd are produced first because that’s where the tongue and lips are devloping or being used the most
• Vocal cords are much closer in a baby that adult so they use a lot more of those voiced sounds than the unvoiced sounds
  At the age of 3 start to produce those harder sounds

Question 12

vocabulary burst

Answer 12

major increase in productive vocabulary acquistion rate after first 50 words are learned

why?
- symbolic nature of language
- control over articulation
- easier retrieval

Question 13

overextension and underextension of meaning

Answer 13

underextension
- dog only for family dog but not other dogs

overextension
- dog refers to dog and cats
- milk for white blanket, puddle

Question 14

early infant speech perception

Answer 14

• when babies are born they can hear sounds from across a range of languages
• newborns are able to percieve many basic phoneme contrasts (hearing the differences between sounds)

Question 15

1. nativist view of language

Answer 15

• children are biologically predisposed to learn language
• children aquire language rapidly
• children acquire language effortlessly
• children acquire language without being taught

sensitive period:
- ideal time for acquiring certain parts of language - harder afterwards
- sensitive period ends by puberty once lateralisation occurs
- the case of genie

Question 16

pidgins and creoles

Answer 16

pidgin languages:
- invented language drawing on words and grammer from a group of languages

creoles:
- when the pidgin is acquired as a native language
- gramatically more complex

Question 17

2. general learning capacities

Answer 17

• alternative views to nativist accounts
• children have highly developed pattern recognition systems
• allow children to form language categories through picking up on regularities without resorting to innate language categories

statistical learning
- children look longer at novel words, shapes and sounds
- children can internalise patterns within 2 minutes

Question 18

3. social learning

Answer 18

• social responding to infants language attempts
• children’s vocabularies are strongly associated with the amount of language parents use with their children
• response to innate explanations to language learning

Question 19

independent and interdependent cultures

Answer 19

independent cultures
- internal attributes most salient
- self concept seperate from group
- personal goals will take priority over group goals

interdependent cultures
- social role most salient
- self concept is part of the group
- group goals take priority
- relationships crucial

Question 20

child vs situation talk

Answer 20

child centered talk
- adapt talk to childs level

situation centered talk
- child learns to adapt to situation

Question 21

representation

Answer 21

• engaging in thinking
• knowledge of the world which forms the content of our thoughts
• internal monologue we have in our minds to be able to think about the world and form concepts

unit of thought: take the knowledge out there and content in our minds and form representations

two ways in which we represent thought
- propositional thought - internal statements made up of concepts
- we can also think using mental imagery

Question 22

concepts and categories

Answer 22

prepositions are made up of concepts: concepts are mental representations of categories

categorisation is useful: allows us to know what to expect each time you encounter a member of the category

Question 23

propositions

Answer 23

statements that express ideas
- express the relationships between concepts

propositions are made up of a subject, and whats being asserted about that subject (predicate)

Question 24

deductive vs inductive reasoning

Answer 24

deductive reasoning - move from general principles or rules to specific instances
syllogisms (if then problems)

inductive reasoning - start with specifics and infer general principles

Question 25

confirmation bias

Answer 25

the beliefs we hold influence how we process information prefer to seek confirmation than to falsify hypothesis

Question 26

heuristics

Answer 26

making judgements: drawing conclusions from expereince shortcuts that are correct much of the time (fast thinking) helps conserve cognitive resources availability heuristic - probability estimates are influences by how easy it is to retrieve information - used to judge frequency of something happening

Question 27

methods for problem solving

Answer 27

heuristics: shortcut methods to solving problems and making decisions means end analysis and hill climbing means end analysis: work step by step to get closer to your goal as you solve the problem. monitor each step to see how much closer you are to the goal. - participants perform a series of several moves, followed by a long pause, then another series of moves hill climbing: change the present state of the problem so that you are one step closer to solving the problem

Question 28

creativity in problem solving

Answer 28

thinking in a divergent way - process of creating mutiple, unique ideas or solutions to a problem that you are trying to solve framing a problem - option is presented as a loss (negative) or a gain (positive). People are generally biased toward picking an option they view as a gain over one they view as a loss, even if both options lead to the same result.

Question 29

identify barriers to solving problems

Answer 29

mental set and functional fixedness - A mental set is where you persist in approaching a problem in a way that has worked in the past but is clearly not working now. Functional fixedness is a type of mental set where you cannot perceive an object being used for something other than what it was designed for.

Question 30

is there evidence that the language that we speak influences thought?

Answer 30

- not enough evidence to support the strong verison of this that language determines thought - increasing evidence that language can influence many aspects of our thought in subtle ways by making it easier to process certain cognitive operations

Question 31

colour perception

Answer 31

language reinforces categories - there are a group of universal focal colours that are privileged for memory languge boundaries - russia has two names to describe the colour blue but we only have one but the colour boundary is almost indentical Found – Russians were faster to discriminate 2 colors if they fell into two categories of "blue" than if they were in the one category Evidence – could determine boundary for light blue and dark blue and do it faster. English showed no difference as we don’t have separate distinction as we would call all of them blue Russians have categorical advantage

Question 32

time

Answer 32

spatial metaphors reinforce habitual ways of thinking about time Wednesdays lecture has been moved two days foward - we can change this depending on the context we place people in - friday from ego moving perspective, monday from time moving perspective

Question 33

thinking style

Answer 33

the language one speaks can generate a specific style of thinking western style analytic - focus on objects and properties - prefernce for avoiding contradictions, determining which position is correct eastern style holistic - emphasising contexts and relations between elements - preference for dialectical (compromise) approaches and tolerance for contradictions priming a language can activate a general cognitive style of thinking chinese-english bilinguals - chine version scored hgiher on dialectical thinking than english version - language encodes different styles of thinking

Question 34

early ideas of intelligence

Answer 34

social biases intelligence - the ability to acquire knowledge, to think and reason effectively and to deal adaptively with the environment samuel morton 1820s-1850s believed head size was related to intelligence. ranked races off head size. paul broca 1824-1880 - weighed brains and compared groups. he believed the heavier brain you had the more intelligence you had -gender biases francis galton 1822-1911 - intelligence was hereditary - coined the term eugenics (the scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of “racial improvement” and “planned breeding,”) - did not find any relation to social class alfred binet 1857-1911 - pionered intelligence testing - stanford binet iq test - intelligence was a psychological construct that was a general ability

Question 35

implications of social biases on intelligence

Answer 35

social biases on our understanding of the construct of intelligence Alpha test – given to people wanting to go into military to see who was fit for each role Reflected cultural norms of American people so people who didn’t grow up in America or spoke English had a huge disadvantage Used to sort out immigrants because of mental makeup become a burden to the state or produce offspring that will be troubled Anyone who showed signs of mental disease or trouble were not allowed in

Question 36

modern intelligence tests

Answer 36

mental age now replaced with standardised score solution: abandon mental age - calculate iq relative to other adults scores - normal curve (IQ, weight, height, etc) - IQ of 100 is the average of an age group - 2/3 of people in the age group will fall between 85-115 development of sub-scales - verbal comprehension - working memory - perceptual reasoning - processing speed

Question 37

flynn effect

Answer 37

the substantial and consistent rise in average IQ scores observed over the past century in numerous countries, why might our scores on abstract reasoning tasks be increasing? - High component around vocab in these tests, we are getting better with vocab ideas that the world is getting more complex so we have to engage in a higher level or reasoning and problem solving which is having an effect on the results of these scales

Question 38

difference between spearman's g and s

Answer 38

g - (general) intelligence charcterised by a single underlying factor. underlies performance on all intelligence subtests s - (specific) factors specific to type of task. group of skills that correlate better together

Question 39

sternbergs triarchic theory

Answer 39

sternberg: three components of intelligence that are better at predicting success in life - 1. analytic, 2. creative, 3. practical - thinks you need all of these aspects of intelligence to be knowledgeable in the real world - analytic - assess the value of the idea - creative - generate ideas - practical - carry out idea

Question 40

gardeners theory of mutiple intelliegences

Answer 40

- no such thing as a single itelligence - many types of intelligences - modular view of the mind/ some skills before others, can be good at some things but not others linguistic - poetry, writing musical - composition logical-mathematical - logical reasoning and maths spatial - maniuplating images, reading a map bodily-kinesthetic - motor control interpersonal - being happy and getting along with others intrapersonal - being happy within your self

Question 41

fluid vs crystalised intelligence

Answer 41

F - ability to learn percieve relationships, deal with new problems. stops increasing and begins to decline after adolescence C- acquired knowledge from culture continues to increase with age

Question 42

within group and between group differences

Question 43

race, ethnicity and intelligence

Answer 43

- group means have no direct implications for individuals - within group and between group differences might not have similar causes evidence of an enviromental explanation for the relation between iq and ethnicity - gap between african and european based americans is decreasing rapidly - mean iq scores of immigrant groups increase over generations, as enviroment influences development of particular cognitive abilites - african american children adopted into high SES families show higher iq scores than those who remain in lower SES home sterotype threat as a partial explanation for group differences - spencer, steele and quinn 1999 - difference in performance could be eliminated when we lowered sterotype threat by describing the test as not producing gender differences. when described as producing gender differences and stereotype threat was high women preformed worse than men did

Question 44

is intelligence inherited and what is the role of the enviroment?

Answer 44

- need variation in a population to measure adequately - pre and post natal enviroment (nutrition, teratogens, stimulatoin, truama, schooling) has a direct influence on intelligence twin studies are used to estimate heritability - resemblance between iq scores of identical twins in different enviroments - resemlance between iq scores of identical twins vs fraternal twins limitations of heritability studies - challenge the idea that environment's are as similar for MZ twins and DZ twins - heritability estimates vary as a function of SES