Psych 120A Monti Final

Linguistic Relativism

"how language affects thought" speakers of different languages have different mental representations of the world physical reality --> language --> thoughts/concepts

Law of Effect

"the responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again in that situation, and responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that situation."

Linguistic Determinism

"what are the effects of language on thought" strong: determines thought weak: language influences thought (makes it easier to think) weakest form: language affects memory because the length of words and their frequency makes it more/less easy to remember

Universalism

(Pinker, Chomsky, Fodor) we have a fully formed cognitive system independent of language; we use language to convey thoughts from mind to another (verbalize) but our thoughts exist independent of language

modus ponens

(affirming the antecedent): observe that the antecedent is true we can conclude that the consequent is true If A, then B A Therefore, B

modus tollens

(denying the consequence) observe that the consequent is false and conclude that the antecedent must be false - If p then q Not q Therefore, not P

Spelke (cognitive view)

*Fundamental difference between a mind that has language and one that does not* continuity --> discontinuity: language provides the medium for combining the representations of our core knowledge systems

Apes/Nim Chimpsky

-brought up by human surrogate parents and talked to him only with ASL -language was in large part imitation of utterances -Apes can learn many isolated symbols [...] but they show no unequivocal evidence of mastering the conversational, semantic, or syntactic organization of language

lexical decision task (LDT)

-experimental method in which the participant is presented with a string of letters and must decide whether they are a real word or not -shows that the brain briefly entertains multiple meanings of a word before settling on one based on the rest of the sentence

characteristics of human natural language

-symbolic: uses arbitrary relationships between symbols (words) and meaning (concepts) -discrete infinity: ability to generate an infinite set of possibilities by combining a finite set of elements -structure dependent: governed by rules -displacement: we can refer and speak about things that are not immediately in front of us

According to Vygotsky, the relationship between language and thought is dynamic and changes over time. Order the three main phases of the relationship between language and thought in the order in which they occur in development according to Vygotsky:

1) language and thought are unrelated 2)speech serves an external purpose 3)speech serves an internal function

Tomasello and Farrar Prerequisite Model

Before you can start using words that describe non visible objects or movements you need to have understood that objects can exist out of sight (object permanence) (good example of Piaget's idea)

Vygotsky (cognitive view)

Does having language make a difference in how we think? Language and thought have independent origins but they become interdependent through development -external speech turns into internal speech which a child (and adult) can use to "direct their thoughts" and make more complex thoughts possible.

E-language vs I-language

I-language: internalized mental set of constraints that allow us to learn, understand, and produce language E-language: Languages out there in the world, encompasses all other notions of what a language is

Fodor

Language of Thought (LOT): thought and thinking take place in a mental language that is innate and compositional ... we don't need language to achieve thought... we translate thoughts into language

Lennenberg & Roberts (1953) demonstrated that speakers of Zuni, compared to speakers of English, often confuse the colors yellow and orange in tests of color recognition. This finding supports

Linguistic Relativism/Determinism

Phonemic Restoration Effect

When a phoneme in a word is heard even though it is obscured by a noise, such as a cough. This typically occurs when the word is part of a sentence. (top-down effect)

experts vs novices (chess)

While experts have a leg up in many cases in problem solving, novices benefit from creativity while experts are stuck with conventional ways of thinking. (slow start but quickly catch up)

garden-path sentence

a case in which people almost always derive the incorrect parsing, leading to an interpretational 'path' that is a dead end

well-defined problem

a problem with clear specifications of the start state, goal state, and the processes for reaching the goal state... can be effectively solved by computers

Chomsky's Transformational Grammar

a process of translation from a mental representation of meaning to natural language and vice versa surface structure-way words are organized deep structure-underlying meaning of sentence

categorical syllogism

a syllogism in which the argument is based on membership in a group (has 2 premises and 1 conclusion)

anchoring bias

a tendency to fixate on initial information, from which one then fails to adequately adjust for subsequent information

confirmation bias

a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence

productivity/digital infinity

ability to combine words in novel ways

Gestalt

an organized whole. Gestalt psychologists emphasized our tendency to integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes when people are suddenly hit with the solution to a problem, they are in the process of restructuring

Spelke & number cognition

analog magnitude system & object individuation system = old knowledge enter language w/ exact representation of numbers = new knowledge counter: patients who lose ability to understand grammar can still understand algebra

3 facets of intelligence

analytical, practical, and creative

Late Closure

as long as it makes grammatical sense, we tend to attach incoming words to the phrase we are currently processing rather than assuming they belong to a different phrase that is still coming up

poverty of the stimulus:

chomsky argued that some language capabilities must be innate because grammar rules are ambiguous -we never explicitly learn some rules as children, but we know how to do it

deductive reasoning vs induction

deduction starts with rules and induction infers rules from observations

why there is such a difference between the second example of the card task versus Wason's original

eople perform logical reasoning more effectively when dealing with concrete, real-world examples that are similar to the kind of reasoning people engage in all the time

expected utility hypothesis

given the right information, people will generally choose the action that is most likely to lead to the highest expected value

statistical syllogism

going from a generalization to a conclusion; we go from observations about a group to an inference about an individual

the most fundamental difference between human and animal language is the presence of

grammar

prosody

how sounds are produced

mental rules theory

human reasoning is based on mental representations that resemble the sentences of natural language -an inference is easy if there is a clear rule to derive the conclusion and if you only have to apply one or a few rules

Denying the Antecedent

if the antecedent is not true then the consequent is not true If P then Q Not P Therefore, not Q

affirming the consequent

if the consequent is true, then the antecedent is true If P then Q Q Therefore P

Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated that people are often predictably

irrational

Piaget

language depends on cognition (until you develop certain cognition skills you cannot develop certain linguistic skills)

Communicative View

language is a conduit for thought, not thought itself (it COMMUNICATES thought) "thought is rich, language is sketchy"

Cognitive view of language

language is constitutive to thought -Sapir Whorf: we use labels made available in order to categorize the world

statistical learning theory

language learning is in large part based on the ability to extract regularities from the language we are exposed to

innateness hypothesis:

linguist Noam Chomsky proposed that the human capacity for language is endowed and part of our DNA, no different than vision and attention -Universal Grammar: people are born with some basic scaffolding of syntax, but learn and build on top of it

productive process

occurs when you are thinking about a problem and is characterized by the restructuring of information in your mind

the study in which participants were presented with sentences about apples and towels while tracking their eye movements showed

parsing ambiguity can be overcome by the contextual environment

basic aspects of language necessary to understand speech and often present inherent ambiguity

phonological, lexical, parsing

Luchin's Water Jug Problem

ppl become fixated on using the same formula to figure out how much water needs to be used from each jug, and they do not recognize that by the end of the test a more efficient formula is available for use. used to see how people create mental sets to solve problems

Metcalfe and Wiebe (1987)

presented participants with insight versus non-insight problems; people have no idea how close they are to solving an insight problem until they get the answer unexpectedly...determined they were, in fact, 2 different classes of problems,s that relied on different processes

mental models theory

reasoning involves diagrammatic (visuo-spatial) representations, referred to as mental models... rather than language-like representations

Skinner proposed that all of language is learned based on

reinforcement and modeling (learning)

Heuristics

shortcuts (rules of thumb or informal guidelines) used to reduce the amount of thinking that is needed to make decisions

reproductive process

solving a problem by using previous experiences

the colorful debate

the exact boundaries of where one color starts and the other ends, across languages, is a bit flexible - hence, their conclusion is that color perception is mostly universalistic but with some cross-linguistic flexibility at the edges

ideational fluency

the number of ideas a person can generate about a particular topic or item, is commonly used to assess a person's creativity

syntax first approach

the parsing of a sentence is first derived based on principles of grammar alone, without regard to the meaning of the words, except insofar that their language category (e.g., noun, verb) is concerned **syntactic structure implies some meaning all on its own

belief bias

the tendency for one's preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning, sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem valid, or valid conclusions seem invalid

framing bias

the tendency of decision makers to be influenced by the way a situation or problem is presented to them

functional fixedness

the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving

Think of the O'Kaine and Spelke (2001) experiment on number cognition in bilingual speakers of Spanish and English. If Spelke's hypothesis is correct, how do you expect participants to perform, on facts and calculation concerning approximate large numbers, in the trained versus untrained language?

they should be equally accurate in the two languages

Imagine someone suffered a brain injury which caused them to become aphasic. According to Universalism, this should not affect their ability to understand a number such a 42. (T/F)

true

Alex the African Grey Parrot

used over 200 words including abstract ones... shape, colors, and numbers

atmospheric effect

when a conclusion is influenced by the way information is phrased

endowment effect

when ownership increases the value of an item

When evaluating syllogisms, people are generally ____________ at correctly identifying a syllogism as invalid and ____________ at establishing that they are valid, which demonstrates a type of confirmation bias.

worse; better