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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