chapter 7: language and thought slides prepared by randall e. osborne, texas state university-san...
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Chapter 7:Language and
thought
Slides prepared by Randall E. Osborne, Texas State University-San Marcos,
adapted by Dr Mark Forshaw, Staffordshire University, UK
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Language and Communication: Nothing’s More Personal
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Language and Communication
The complex structure of human language:– phoneme– morpheme– phonological rules– grammar– morphological rules– syntactical rules
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Units of Language
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Syntactical Rules
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Language Development
• At birth - infants can distinguish all contrasting sounds in human language
• 6 months - can only distinguish those sounds in language being spoken around them
• 4-6 months - begin to babble speech sounds
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Language Milestones
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Language Milestones• Fast mapping
– Children can ‘glue’ a word onto a concept after hearing it just once
• Telegraphic speech– Content words only but can convey basic
meaning
• Overgeneralisations– “you eated”, “we ranned”, “he singed all day”
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Theories of Language Development
• Behaviourist explanations– principles of operant conditioning– learn to talk through reinforcement, shaping, and
extinction– limits:
(1) parents don’t spend much time teaching grammar, (2) children generate more grammatical sentences than
they hear, (3) errors children make do not duplicate what they hear
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Theories of Language Development
• Nativist explanations– language acquisition
device (LAD)– “wired” to learn grammar– Those with genetic
dysphasia cannot grasp grammar – e.g. the “wug” test
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Theories of Language Development
• Interactionist explanations– how does innate, biological capacity for
language combine with environmental experience?
– parents tailor verbal interactions with children in ways that simplify language acquisition
– deaf children NOT taught sign language often develop own system of hand signals
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Theories of Language Development
• Neurological specialisation
– Broca’s area (involved in language production)
– Wernicke’s area (involved in language comprehension)
– Aphasia
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Theories of Language Development
• Can other species learn human language?• Washoe taught sign language
– learned 160 words– could construct simple sentences– novel constructions– apes can learn signs for concepts they
understand (not abstract)
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Thought and Language• How are thought and language related?• Linguistic relativity hypothesis
– Inuit: many different words for “snow” is not true
• Language and colour processing• Language and views of time
– forward and backward (time is horizontal)– up and down (time is vertical)
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Concepts and Categories: How We Think
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Concepts and Categories• Concept
– fundamental to our ability to think• Category-specific deficits
– damage to front part of left temporal lobe—difficulty identifying humans
– damage to lower left temporal lobe—trouble identifying animals
– damage where temporal and occipital lobes meet —trouble naming tools
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Concepts and Categories
• Nature of human concepts• Early theories focused on rules• Later theories focused on
“family resemblance”
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Concepts and Categories
• Rosch’s Prototype theory– “best” example defines the set– Typicality enables categorisation
• Medin & Schaffer’s Exemplar theory– We compare new examples with other stored
examples, and categorise accordingly. – Explains how we can identify specific dogs, not
just prototypical dogs…
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Judging, Valuing, and Deciding: Sometimes We’re
Logical, Sometimes Not
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Decision making
• Rational choice theory– likelihood of something happening multiplied
by perceived value of that outcome
• Heuristics• Algorithms
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Heuristics• Availability bias• Conjunction fallacy
– decreasing probability of all things being true of person
• Representativeness heuristic
• Framing effects• Sunk-cost fallacy
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Decision making• Prospect theory
– people simplify available information– choose prospect that offers best value (personal)
• Frequency format hypothesis– Our minds evolved to notice how often things
occur, not how likely they are• Decision making and the brain
– Prefrontal lobe damage can create inability to judge risk or decide importance of tasks
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Problem Solving: Working It Out
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Problem Solving
• Two major types of problems that complicate our lives:– ill-defined problem (no clear goal or solution)– well-defined problem
• Means-ends analysis• Analogical problem solving
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Creativity and Insight
• Analogical problem solving does not work for all problems
• Research suggests insight is actually incremental
• Functional fixedness
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Creativity and InsightWord Association
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Creativity and InsightAnswers
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Solutions: •Card, paper, pawn, carpet, ball, bar
Transforming Information: How We Reach Conclusions
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Reaching Conclusions• Reasoning
– practical reasoning– theoretical reasoning
• Belief bias– focus on conclusions instead of arguments– does the answer ‘ring true’?
• Syllogistic reasoning– does conclusion follow from statements we
assume to be true?
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