Language & Decision-Making Outline-3.docx

**\-- Outlines are for personal use only. Please do not distribute. \--** **[Decision Making]** **Decision making:** Involves evaluating alternatives and making choices among them **Decision Making biases** **1. Availability** **bias**: items that are more readily available in memory are judge...

**\-- Outlines are for personal use only. Please do not distribute. \--** **[Decision Making]** **Decision making:** Involves evaluating alternatives and making choices among them **Decision Making biases** **1. Availability** **bias**: items that are more readily available in memory are judged as having occurred more frequently 2\. **Framing effects:** changing how an issue is presented can change people's decisions - **Loss aversion:** people tend to want to avoid losses more than they want to achieve gains - **Sunk cost fallacy** **3. Anchoring**: the bias to be affected by an initial anchor, even if the anchor is arbitrary, and to insufficiently adjust our judgements away from that anchor. - You get anchoring effects even when the "anchor" is completely irrelevant! 4\. **Confirmation bias:** Tendency to search for confirming evidence, not disconfirming evidence **What is language?** - A system that relates sounds (or gestures) to meaning - Symbolism - Structured & meaningful - Displacement - Generativity **Components of language** 1. **Phonemes** - the smallest unit of sound - /p/ vs /b/ 2. **Morphemes** - Smallest units of meaning - Prefix 'Un' means not - Suffix '-s' means more than 1 3. **Syntax** - Rules for word combinations **Theories of language development** **1. Behaviorist Perspective:** We learn language through reinforcement - Ex. Child is praised for calling a ball a ball. **2. Nativist Perspective** - Children are born with innate mental structures that guide their acquisition of language - Noam Chomsky Language-acquisition device (LAD) ***Support for Nativist perspective:*** - Linguistic universals - Children apply rules of grammar to novel words - Language is learned more easily in the critical period - \*Genie Story - Animals don't learn language as readily or successfully as humans **3. Interactionalist Perspective:** Innate capacity for language interacts with experience - **Social interactions are important!** - Benefits of "Motherese" **Early speech production** **Categorical speech Perception** - Infants, like adults, perceive speech sounds categorically - e.g., although the acoustic difference between /b/ and /d/ falls on a continuum --we perceive these consonants as two distinct categories - Perceptual Narrowing for phonemes - **6- to 8-month-old** English learners can differentiate the Salish & Hindi contrasts - **By 10 - 12 months** they lose this ability - **Benefits Infants that are *faster* to tune into the speech sounds of their native language have larger vocabularies at age 2.** **Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis** - Strong version: - thoughts and behavior are *determined* by language - the language you speak determines the concepts and categories that you use, and, as a result, shapes what you *can* think about - Weak version: - thoughts and behavior are *influenced* by language - language influences what we pay attention to and this shapes experience, which influences how we think - Do psychologists really believe the strong version is true? - Not really. Some languages have very few words for color, but can still color match, etc. - Most psychologists believe in a weaker hypothesis: languages *influences* our *habitual* thinking about the world **Russian blues study** Light blue = *goluboy* Dark blue = *siniy* C:\\Users\\Courtney\\Desktop\\ch09\_jpeg\\ch09\_jpeg\\Sch2e\_fig\_9\_04.jpg **Questions to guide your study:** 1. **Describe each of the decision-making biases discussed in class. Give an example of each.** 2. **What is the difference between a phoneme and a morpheme?** 3. **What type of evidence supports a nativist view of language development? What type of evidence would support an empiricist (or behaviourist) view of language development.** 4. **How does infants' language experience (in the first year of life) change their ability to perceive phonemic contrasts in their native language compared to foreign languages. Make sure to highlight the specific ages (in months) when these changes are thought to occur.** 5. **What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?** 6. **Describe the Russian Blue study in your own words. How was the study set up? On what trials do Russian and English-speaking participants perform differently? On what trials do Russian and English-speaking participants perform similarly?**