Chapter 9: Language and Thought Flashcards
(46 cards)
Language:
A system of communicating with others that uses signals and rules to convey meaning.
Grammar:
A set of rules that specify how units of language can be put together to give meaning.
Phoneme:
The smallest unit of sound that is recognizable as speech and not just random sounds. Ex. p, b.
A meaningful sound, and not just a random sound.
Phonological rules:
Rules that specify how phonemes can be combined to create speech sounds.
Morphemes:
The smallest meaningful units of language.
Ex. The, kid, s, hit, ball
Morphological rules:
A set of rules that specify how morphemes can be combined to create words.
Ex. cat & s = cats.
Syntactic rules:
A set of rules that indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences.
Fast mapping:
A process where children map a word onto an underlying concept after only a single exposure which helps them learn languages fast.
Content morphemes:
Morphemes that refer to things and events.
Ex. cat, dog, take
Function morphemes:
Serve grammatical functions or indicating time.
Ex. And, or, but, when
Telegraphic speech:
Sentences that consist mostly of content morphemes, and less of function words.
Ex. “Throw ball.”
Nativist theory:
Language development is due to a biological capacity to learn language and is innate, biologically set for humans.
Humans have the biological predisposition to learn language.
Universal grammar:
Chomsky believes that the human brain is equipped with a universal grammar which has processes within it that helps with learning languages.
Genetic dysphasia:
Inability to learn the grammatical rules of a language despite having otherwise normal intelligence.
Due to a single dominant gene.
Ideas are intelligence, it’s just the grammatical rules are not applied/ they can’t apply them.
Broca’s Area:
Involved in language production.
Broca’s aphasia:
Damage to Broca’s area (in the left frontal cortex): Difficulty with speech production, with function morphemes missing, difficulty understanding language as grammatical structures become more complex.
Wernicke’s area:
Involved in language comprehension.
Wernicke’s aphasia
Can produce speech but without any meaning, and difficulty understanding language.
Aphasia:
Difficulty in producing or comprehending language.
Linguistic relativity hypothesis:
The idea is that language shapes the nature of thought.
The broadness of thinking is due to language.
Whorf.
Concept:
A mental idea that groups shared features of related objects, events or other stimuli together.
Prototype theory:
The concept that we classify new objects by comparing them to a prototype, the “best” or “most typical” member of that category.
Exemplar theory:
We categorize a new thing by comparing it with stored memories of other instances of things in that category.
Ex. Comparing a new breed of a dog, with all the dogs one has in their memory.
Category-specific deficit:
The inability to recognize objects that belong to a particular category, although the ability to recognize objects outside that category is fine.