language and language use

Question 1

nicaraguan sign language

Answer 1

deaf children created the language to communicate with each other, humans are born to use language

Question 2

primary use of language

Answer 2

interpersonal

Question 3

common ground

Answer 3

info shared by people engaged in conversation, set knowledge

Question 4

adjacency pair

Answer 4

people that are conversing

Question 5

audience design

Answer 5

Constructing utterances to suit audiences knowledge, taking previous knowledge into account

brief labels=more knowledgeable
descriptive words=less knowledgeable

Question 6

Four speaker rules/conversational maxims according to Grice (1975)

Answer 6

1. trying to be informative (maxim of quantity)
2. truthful (maxim of quality)
3. relevant (maxim of relation)
4. clear and unambiguous (maxim of manner)

Question 7

amount of ppl in conversation is usually

Answer 7

no more than four (more than 90% of comvos happen w less than 4 ppl)

Question 8

Pickering and Garrod (2004) different levels of language use used to achieve conversation coordination by alining with others? aka interpersonal alignments
what are the four main components of lang?

Answer 8

• lexicon (words and expressions)
• syntax (grammatical rules for arraging words and expressions together
• speech rate
• accent

Question 9

situation models

Answer 9

• mental representation of an event, object or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description
• often are shared if people have same common ground

Question 10

priming (in relation to language)

Answer 10

the activation of certain thoughts or feelings that make them easier to think of and act upon
ex. ‘ring’ makes you think of ‘wedding, marriage, etc’

Question 11

imitate and infer definitions

Answer 11

imitate: interpersonal ability, executing the same action as another person
infer: cognitive ability, one idea leading to other ideas

both lead to people coordinating common ground, sharing situational models and communicate with each other

Question 12

what percent of conversations turn out to be gossip (and define it)

Answer 12

60-70%
activities to think and communicate about our social world

Question 13

define in group and outgroup? what is used to describe their attributes?

Answer 13

ingroup: the group to which a person belongs (enlarged by gossip)
outgroup: group to which a person does not belong ( gossip helps agaisnt it)
argued by Dunbar

Positive things about ingroups=adjectives
Negative things about outgroup=adjectives

Question 14

What did Dunbar believe about gossip? what were his other findings?

Answer 14

• Social brain hypothesis:
  Social effects of gossip have given humans evolutionary advantages and larger brains=help humans think more complex and abstract thoughts and maintain larger ingroups. larger brains=larger groups
• estimated an equations that predicts average group size from average neocortex size
• average group size humans can support=150 ppl approx. (size of modern hunter-gatherer community
• human, brain, and language have co evolved, language and human sociality are inseparable

Question 15

According to Semin and Fiedler, what are the 4 ways someones action can be described? What do the differences indicate?

Answer 15

1. action verb that describes a concrete action (ex he swims)
2. a state verb that describes the actor’s psychological state (ex. he likes swimming)
3. an adjective that describes the actor’s personality (ex. he is athletic)
4. a noun that describes the actor’s role (ex. he is an athlete)

Verb=particularity, adjectives=permanency

Question 16

Define Linguistic intergroup bias

Answer 16

tendency for people to characterize both positive things about their ingroups and negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions (adjectives)
People in ingroups showcasing bad behaviours and people in outgroups showcasing good behaviour is an exception

Question 17

define social networks

Answer 17

networks of social relationships among individuals through which information travels
through a chain of communication, information spreads fast from first to second to third sources and so on

Question 18

True or false: when using language to describe an experience, thoughts and feelings are shaped by linguistic representation produced rather than the original experience

Answer 18

True

Question 19

What happens in the brain when people linguistically label negative images?

Answer 19

The amygdala (responsible for processing negative emotions) is activated more than when they are not labeled

Question 20

True or false: writing, talking and thinking about negative past life events improve people’s psychological well being.

Answer 20

False, just thinking about it worsens it

Question 21

Define the Sapir Whorf hypothesis

Answer 21

language that people use determines their thoughts
ex. some languages have words that other languages can only use multiple words together to describe

Question 22

If psychology is the science of behavior, then the ______of language must be one its most central topics, since it exists for almost all human beings.

Answer 22

use

Question 23

On Monday morning, Chad asks Jason, “Did you see that amazing game yesterday?” Chad assumes that Jason knows which game he is talking about. This assumption of shared information is called ______in language

Answer 23

common ground

Question 24

When he is talking to his best friend, Tom says, “Damon and I are going out for dinner.” When he is talking to a stranger, Tom says, “My partner Damon and I are going out to dinner.” Crafting what you say based on the knowledge of the person you are speaking to is called ______.

Answer 24

audience design

Question 25

The rules for how we arrange words and expressions together to communicate in a meaningful and understandable way are called the ______of language.

Answer 25

syntax

Question 26

Consider these two sentences: “The boy was sick from eating so much ice cream,” and, “That boy ate so much ice cream, it made him sick.” These sentences have similar ______but different _____.

Answer 26

similar lexicons, different syntax

Question 27

Evelyn meets Dee from Australia and is very attentive to Dee’s accent. If Evelyn is like most people, what will she start doing?

Answer 27

mimicking the accent without realizing it

Question 28

______occurs when thinking about one concept causes you to think about other related concepts.

Answer 28

Priming

Question 29

The basic notion that the language used by a given group of people has a significant impact on how they think is called the ______hypothesis, after its original founder(s).

Answer 29

Sapir-Whorf

Question 30

aphasia

Answer 30

• problem in frontal lobe of left hemisphere
• brocas area
• temporal lobe - wernickes area (comprehension)