Scribd
Upload
5 views

Lecture 7 - 1 Slide

psychologu

Uploaded by

Young Stars
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
5 views

Lecture 7 - 1 Slide

psychologu

Uploaded by

Young Stars
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 28

Language and

Thought
Language and Communication:
From Rules to Meaning
• Language: system for communicating with others using signals that are combined
according to rules of grammar and that convey meaning
• Grammar: set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to
produce meaningful messages
• Human language
• Is more complex than other forms of communication
• Involves words representing intangible things
• Used to think and conceptualize (different than other animal species)
Structure
• There are approximately 4,000 human languages and all have a basic structure of sounds
and rules.
• Basic characteristics
• Phoneme: The smallest units of sound that are recognizable has speech rather than
as random noise
• Phonological rules: set of rules that indicate how phonemes can be combined to
produce speech sounds
• Morphemes: smallest meaningful units of language
• Morphological rules: set of rules that indicate how morphemes can be
combined to form words
• Syntactical rules: set of rules that indicate how words can be combined to form
phrases and sentences
Language Development
• Three characteristics of language development
• Children learn language at an astonishing rate.
• Children make few errors while learning to speak.
• Children’s passive mastery develops faster than their active mastery.
Fast Mapping
• First introduced by Carey and
Bartlett (1978)
• Refers to the process used by
children to learn new words
• Fast Mapping: the process
whereby children map a word
onto an underlying concept after
only a single exposure
• Susan Carey (2010) provides a summary of
her work with Bartlett on Fast-mapping.
• They completed two studies, first the pilot study
with 14 children, then a follow-up study with 20
Chromium children
• The word “chromium” was introduced by the
Study child’s teacher : “Can you get me the chromium
tray, not the red one, the chromium one.”
• Over half of the children showed evidence of
having added “chromium” to their vocabulary
Theories of Language
development
• Behaviourist explanations state that
language is learned through operant
conditioning and imitation
• BUT:
Behaviourist • Parents spend little time teaching language.
• Children generate more than simply what they
hear.
• Errors made cannot be explained through
conditioning or imitation.
• Nativist explanations argue that language is
innate
• Nativist theory: language development is best
Nativist explained as an innate biological capacity
(Chomsky)
• Universal grammar: collection of processes that
facilitate language learning
• Interactionist explanations argue that social
interactions play a crucial role in language.
Interactionist • Social experience interacts with innate,
biological language abilities.
The Brain
Broca’s Area and
Wernicke’s Area
of the Brain
• Broca’s area: left
frontal cortex;
language production
• Wernicke’s area: left
temporal cortex;
language
comprehension
• Right hemisphere also contributes to
language

The Right • Four pieces of evidence


1. Some capacity for processing verbal
Cerebral meaning
Hemisphere 2. Right hemisphere activation during
language tasks
3. Damage = some problems with
language comprehension
4. Children with left hemisphere removed
can still retain language abilities
Concepts and Categories
• Concept
• Mental representation that groups or
Concepts categorizes shared features of related objects,
events, or other stimuli
• Rules that specify the necessary and sufficient
conditions for membership in a category
• Conditions
• Necessary condition: something that must be
true of the object to belong to the category
• Sufficient condition: something that, if it is true
Psychological of the object, proves it belongs to the category
Theories of • Prototype theory
• New objects classified by comparing them to the
Concepts “best” or “most typical” member (the
and prototype) of a category
• Exemplar theory: People make category
Categories judgments by comparing a new instance
with stored memories for other instances of
the category.
The Brain
• The left hemisphere
and visual cortex:
forming prototypes
• The right
hemisphere,
prefrontal cortex,
and basal ganglia:
recognizing
exemplars.
The Brain

• Category-specific deficit: neurological


syndrome that is characterized by an
inability to recognize objects that belong
to a particular category, although the
ability to recognize objects outside the
category is undisturbed
Warrington and Shallice (1984)
• Observed four patients who had experienced a rare neurological disorder characterized by
inflammation of the brain.
• a 23-year-old electronics undergraduate (J.B.R.)
• a 48-year-old naval officer (engineer) (S.B.Y.)
• a 60-year-old housewife (K.B.)
• a right-handed housewife aged 44 years (I.N.G.)
• CT scans demonstrated predominantly bitemporal damage in all 4 patients
• They experienced varying degrees of dementia and expressive speech functions
• They had severe global amnesic syndrome and a comprehension deficit (visual and verbal
knowledge)
• In terms of “concrete topics”: knowledge of inanimate objects was spared relative to knowledge
of living things and food
Warrington
and Shallice
(1984)
cont.
Warrington and Shallice (1984) cont.
Four main findings
Warrington
•Category Specificity
and
•Comparison of Verbal
Shallice and Visual Modalities
(1984) •Response Consistency
cont. •Semantic and
Phonological Errors
Decision Making and Problem Solving
• The rational ideal
• Rational choice theory: classical view that we
make decisions by determining how likely
Rational something is to happen, judging the value of
the outcome, and then multiplying the two
Decision
Making
Decision Making

• Judging frequencies and probabilities


• People are good at estimating the frequency of an
event.
• People are poor at tasks that require thinking in terms
of probabilities.
• Performance varies
• It depends on how the problem is described.
Availability bias: items that are more readily
available in memory are judged as having
occurred more frequently
Decision Making

Heuristics: fast and efficient strategy that may


facilitate decision making but does not
guarantee that a solution will be reached

Algorithm: well-defined sequence of


procedures or rules that guarantees a solution
to a problem; in contrast to heuristics
• Optimism bias
• People believe that, compared with
other individuals, they are more likely
Some other to experience positive events and
less likely to experience negative
Mistakes we events in the future.
Make
• Means–ends analysis
• Process of searching for the means or steps to
reduce the differences between the current
Problem situation and the desired goal
• Steps
Solving: 1. Analyze the goal state.
2. Analyze the current state.
Working It 3. List the differences between the states.
4. Reduce the list of differences by
Out • Direct means
• Generating a subgoal
• Finding a similar problem having a
known solution

You might also like