Week 12 Flashcards
(39 cards)
What is common about language among humans
Every human group has language; human infants learn at least one language without being taught. Even children who don’t have much language to begin with are brought together, they can begin to develop and use their own language
common ground
A set of knowledge that the speaker and listener share and they think, assume, or otherwise take for granted that they share. It evolves as people take turns to assume the roles of speaker and listener, and actively engage in the exchange of meaning. helps people coordinate their language use
Audience design
Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge. If audiences are seen to be knowledgeable about an object, they tend to use a brief label of the object to help the audience understand their utterances
How do we achieve our conversational coordination
By virtue of our ability to ineractively align each other’s actions at different levels of language use; lexicon, syntax, as well as speech
How is language a cooperative activity
The number of people engaging in a conversation at a time is rarely more than 4. By some counts more than 90% of conversations happen in a group of four individuals or less. Coordinating conversation among four is not as difficult as coordinating conversation among 10
lexicon
Words and expressions
Syntax
Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences. When one person uses a certain expression to refer to an object in a conversation, others tend to use the same expression
What did Pickering and Garrod suggest
That interpersonal alignments at different levels of language use can activate similar situation models in the mind of those who are engaged in a conversation
Situation models
Representations about the topic of a conversation. You describe a situation using language, and many other aspects of language use converge.
Similar situation models
Begin to be built in everyone’s mind through the mechanism known as priming
Priming
Occurs when your thinking about one concept reminds you about other related concepts
Gossiping
The human equivalent of grooming. An act of socializing, signaling the importance of one’s partner. Allows humans to communicate and share their representations about their social world. They can regulate their social world-making more friends and enlarging one’s own group against other groups
ingroup
the group to which one belongs. Typically good, and if they do anything bad, that’s more an exception in special circumstances
Outgroup
More likely to one’s enemies. Typically bad, and if they do anything good, that’s more of an exception
How can someone’s action be described
By an action verb that describes a concrete action, a state verb that describes the actor’s psychological state, and adjective that describes the actor’s personality, or a noun that describes the actor’s role.
Linguistic intergroup bias
the tendency to communicate positive in-group and negative out-group behaviors more abstractly than negative in-group and positive out-group behaviors.
How can gossip spread through broader social networks
I If gossip is repeatedly transmitted and spread, it can reach a large number of people. When stories travel through communication chains, they tend to become conventionalized
What happens when people use language to describe an experience
Their thoughts and feelings are profoundly shaped by the linguistic representation that they have produced rather than the original experience per se
Sapir Whorf hypothesis
If a certain type of language use is repeated by a large number of people in a community, it can potentially have a significant effect on their thoughts and action
theory of mind
the human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts and processes detection, imitation, empathy, perspective-taking
What interactions deeply rely on theory of mind?
Teaching another person new actions or rules by taking into account what the learner knows or doesn’t know, learning the words of a language by monitoring what other people attend to and are trying to do when they use certain words, figuring out our social standing by trying to guess what others think and feel, sharing experiences, collaborating on a task by signalling to one another that we share a goal
Describe some characteristics of how individuals diagnosed with autism differ in their processing of others’ minds
Some individuals with autism report that they perceive others “in a more analytical way. This mode of processing is very tiresome and slow
Mental processes underlying theory of mind
What underlies people’s capacity to recognize and understand mental states is a whole host of components-a toolbox, as it were, for many different but related tasks in the social world
Pyramid that reflects the complexity of involved processes
From simple and automatic on the bottom to complex and deliberate on the top. This organization also reflects development-from tools that infants master within the first 6-12 months to tools they need to acquire over the next 3-5 years. Reflects evolution
