Language and Thought Lecture PDF

Language and Thought Language and Communication: From Rules to Meaning Language: system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules of grammar and that convey meaning Grammar: set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to produce...

Language and Thought Language and Communication: From Rules to Meaning Language: system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules of grammar and that convey meaning Grammar: set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to produce meaningful messages Human language Is more complex than other forms of communication Involves words representing intangible things Used to think and conceptualize (different than other animal species) Structure There are approximately 4,000 human languages and all have a basic structure of sounds and rules. Basic characteristics Phoneme: The smallest units of sound that are recognizable has speech rather than as random noise Phonological rules: set of rules that indicate how phonemes can be combined to produce speech sounds Morphemes: smallest meaningful units of language Morphological rules: set of rules that indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words Syntactical rules: set of rules that indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences Language Development Three characteristics of language development Children learn language at an astonishing rate. Children make few errors while learning to speak. Children’s passive mastery develops faster than their active mastery. Fast Mapping First introduced by Carey and Bartlett (1978) Refers to the process used by children to learn new words Fast Mapping: the process whereby children map a word onto an underlying concept after only a single exposure  Susan Carey (2010) provides a summary of her work with Bartlett on Fast-mapping. They completed two studies, first the pilot study with 14 children, then a follow-up study with 20 Chromium children The word “chromium” was introduced by the Study child’s teacher : “Can you get me the chromium tray, not the red one, the chromium one.” Over half of the children showed evidence of having added “chromium” to their vocabulary Theories of Language development  Behaviourist explanations state that language is learned through operant conditioning and imitation BUT: Behaviourist Parents spend little time teaching language. Children generate more than simply what they hear. Errors made cannot be explained through conditioning or imitation.  Nativist explanations argue that language is innate Nativist theory: language development is best Nativist explained as an innate biological capacity (Chomsky) Universal grammar: collection of processes that facilitate language learning  Interactionist explanations argue that social interactions play a crucial role in language. Interactionist Social experience interacts with innate, biological language abilities. The Brain Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area of the Brain Broca’s area: left frontal cortex; language production Wernicke’s area: left temporal cortex; language comprehension  Right hemisphere also contributes to language The Right Four pieces of evidence 1. Some capacity for processing verbal Cerebral meaning Hemisphere 2. Right hemisphere activation during language tasks 3. Damage = some problems with language comprehension 4. Children with left hemisphere removed can still retain language abilities Concepts and Categories  Concept Mental representation that groups or Concepts categorizes shared features of related objects, events, or other stimuli Rules that specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in a category  Conditions Necessary condition: something that must be true of the object to belong to the category Sufficient condition: something that, if it is true Psychological of the object, proves it belongs to the category Theories of Prototype theory New objects classified by comparing them to the Concepts “best” or “most typical” member (the and prototype) of a category Exemplar theory: People make category Categories judgments by comparing a new instance with stored memories for other instances of the category. The Brain The left hemisphere and visual cortex: forming prototypes The right hemisphere, prefrontal cortex, and basal ganglia: recognizing exemplars. The Brain Category-specific deficit: neurological syndrome that is characterized by an inability to recognize objects that belong to a particular category, although the ability to recognize objects outside the category is undisturbed Warrington and Shallice (1984) Observed four patients who had experienced a rare neurological disorder characterized by inflammation of the brain. a 23-year-old electronics undergraduate (J.B.R.) a 48-year-old naval officer (engineer) (S.B.Y.) a 60-year-old housewife (K.B.) a right-handed housewife aged 44 years (I.N.G.) CT scans demonstrated predominantly bitemporal damage in all 4 patients They experienced varying degrees of dementia and expressive speech functions They had severe global amnesic syndrome and a comprehension deficit (visual and verbal knowledge) In terms of “concrete topics”: knowledge of inanimate objects was spared relative to knowledge of living things and food Warrington and Shallice (1984) cont. Warrington and Shallice (1984) cont.  Four main findings Warrington Category Specificity and Comparison of Verbal Shallice and Visual Modalities (1984) Response Consistency cont. Semantic and Phonological Errors Decision Making and Problem Solving  The rational ideal Rational choice theory: classical view that we make decisions by determining how likely Rational something is to happen, judging the value of the outcome, and then multiplying the two Decision Making Decision Making Judging frequencies and probabilities People are good at estimating the frequency of an event. People are poor at tasks that require thinking in terms of probabilities. Performance varies It depends on how the problem is described.  Availability bias: items that are more readily available in memory are judged as having occurred more frequently Decision Making Heuristics: fast and efficient strategy that may facilitate decision making but does not guarantee that a solution will be reached Algorithm: well-defined sequence of procedures or rules that guarantees a solution to a problem; in contrast to heuristics  Optimism bias People believe that, compared with other individuals, they are more likely Some other to experience positive events and less likely to experience negative Mistakes we events in the future. Make  Means–ends analysis Process of searching for the means or steps to reduce the differences between the current Problem situation and the desired goal Steps Solving: 1. Analyze the goal state. 2. Analyze the current state. Working It 3. List the differences between the states. 4. Reduce the list of differences by Out Direct means Generating a subgoal Finding a similar problem having a known solution