Chapter 9: Language and Thought

Question 1

Language:

Answer 1

A system of communicating with others that uses signals and rules to convey meaning.

Question 2

Grammar:

Answer 2

A set of rules that specify how units of language can be put together to give meaning.

Question 3

Phoneme:

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

Phonological rules:

Answer 4

Rules that specify how phonemes can be combined to create speech sounds.

Question 5

Morphemes:

Answer 5

The smallest meaningful units of language.

Ex. The, kid, s, hit, ball

Question 6

Morphological rules:

Answer 6

A set of rules that specify how morphemes can be combined to create words.
Ex. cat & s = cats.

Question 7

Syntactic rules:

Answer 7

A set of rules that indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences.

Question 8

Fast mapping:

Answer 8

A process where children map a word onto an underlying concept after only a single exposure which helps them learn languages fast.

Question 9

Content morphemes:

Answer 9

Morphemes that refer to things and events.

Ex. cat, dog, take

Question 10

Function morphemes:

Answer 10

Serve grammatical functions or indicating time.

Ex. And, or, but, when

Question 11

Telegraphic speech:

Answer 11

Sentences that consist mostly of content morphemes, and less of function words.
Ex. “Throw ball.”

Question 12

Nativist theory:

Answer 12

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.

Question 13

Universal grammar:

Answer 13

Chomsky believes that the human brain is equipped with a universal grammar which has processes within it that helps with learning languages.

Question 14

Genetic dysphasia:

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

Broca’s Area:

Answer 15

Involved in language production.

Question 16

Broca’s aphasia:

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

Wernicke’s area:

Answer 17

Involved in language comprehension.

Question 18

Wernicke’s aphasia

Answer 18

Can produce speech but without any meaning, and difficulty understanding language.

Question 19

Aphasia:

Answer 19

Difficulty in producing or comprehending language.

Question 20

Linguistic relativity hypothesis:

Answer 20

The idea is that language shapes the nature of thought.

The broadness of thinking is due to language.

Whorf.

Question 21

Concept:

Answer 21

A mental idea that groups shared features of related objects, events or other stimuli together.

Question 22

Prototype theory:

Answer 22

The concept that we classify new objects by comparing them to a prototype, the “best” or “most typical” member of that category.

Question 23

Exemplar theory:

Answer 23

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.

Question 24

Category-specific deficit:

Answer 24

The inability to recognize objects that belong to a particular category, although the ability to recognize objects outside that category is fine.

Question 25

Rational choice theory:

Answer 25

We make decisions on how likely something is to happen, judging the value of that outcome, and then multiplying the two.
Ex.
Likely to happen = 20%
Value of that outcome = $4000
Rational choice theory (0.20*4000) = $800 and we make decisions based on this technique by comparing it with others.

Question 26

Frequency:

Answer 26

Simply the number of times something will happen.

Ex. “10 out of 1000 women have breast cancer.”

Question 27

Probability:

Answer 27

The likelihood that something will happen.

Ex. 1% of the population has breast cancer.

Question 28

Availability bias:

Answer 28

The concept that is more familiar in memory seems to have occurred more frequently.

Greater familiarity to something makes it seems as if it has occurred more frequently.

Ex. Having seen more women’s names just because those names were of familiar celebrities.

Question 29

Heurisitics:

Answer 29

Finding a solution based on memory, or “fast and efficient” solutions that may not produce solutions.

Question 30

Algorithm:

Answer 30

Well-defined sequence of steps/ procedures that guarantee a solution to a problem.

Question 31

Conjunction fallacy:

Answer 31

The misconception that two events are more likely to occur together than they are to occur one their own.

Chance that both things are true at the same time is less, than one of those things being true.

The is less chance that two events will occur together, and a higher change that one event will occur without the other on its own.

Question 32

Representativeness heuristic:

Answer 32

Ignoring the base rate (ex. 70% are lawyers, and 30% are doctors) and the probability of an event (that there will thus be more lawyers) and making a decision based on their judgments on the things’ similarity to a category.

When we’re trying to assess how likely a certain event is, we often make our decision by assessing how similar it is to an existing mental prototype.

Making classification judgments on the basis of familiarity to prototypes.

Question 33

Framing effects:

Answer 33

When people give different answers to the same problem depending on how the problem is phrased/ framed.

Question 34

Sunk-cost fallacy:

Answer 34

The framing effect is where people see what they lose instead of what they win due to what they have previously invested in that situation.

People make decisions about a situation on the basis of what they have previously invested in the situation.

Question 35

Optimism bias:

Answer 35

People believe that compared to others, they are more likely to experience positive events in the future.

Question 36

Expected utility:

Answer 36

People should seek to make decisions that maximize value for themselves.

Question 37

Prospect theory:

Answer 37

The theory that people choose to take a risk to avoid potential losses, and people don’t take risks to not lose benefits.

Able to decrease a loss = take a risk.
May decrease benefits one gains = not take a risk.

People are likely to take risks to decrease losses, and not take risks to not decrease benefits.

Question 38

Ill-defined problem:

Answer 38

A problem that does not have a clear goal or well-defined paths to the solution.

Question 39

Well-defined problem:

Answer 39

A problem that does have clearly specified goals and clearly defined solution paths.

Question 40

Means-end analysis:

Answer 40

A process of searching for the steps to reduce the differences between the current state and the goal state.

Question 41

Analogical problem solving:

Answer 41

Solve a problem by finding another problem that has a good solution for the current problem.

Finding a solution from another problem.

Question 42

Functional fixedness:

Answer 42

The tendency to see the functions of objects as unchanging.

Question 43

Reasoning:

Answer 43

A mental activity of organizing information or beliefs in a series of steps to reach conclusions.

Logic is a tool for evaluating reasoning, but it is not the same as reasoning. Reasoning is more personal, and logic is facts.

Question 44

Belief bias:

Answer 44

People’s judgements about whether to accept conclusions is more dependent on how believable the conclusions are to them than on whether the arguments are valid.

Question 45

Syllogistic reasoning:

Answer 45

Determining whether a proposed conclusion is true from two statements mentioned.

Question 46

Illusory truth effect:

Answer 46

Repeated exposure to a statement increases the likelihood that people will believe that statement to be true.