Chapter 8 Language & Thinking

1. Chapter 8Language & Thinking

2. Language • Communication: the sending and receiving of information • Language: the primary mode of communication among humans • A systematic way of communicating information using symbols and rules for combining them • Speech: oral expression of language • Approximately 5,000 spoken languages exist today.

3. Language & the Brain • Broca’s area: small clump of neurons near front of brain • Influences brain areas that control the muscles of the lips, jaw, tongue, soft palate, and vocal cords during speech; thus, Broca's area is important in language production. • May also be involved when using grammatical language rules in both producing and comprehending sentences. • Wernicke’s area: connected by nerve bundle to Broca’s area • Important for language comprehension

4. Broca’s & Wernicke’s Areas

5. Do Animals Use Language? • Since 1930s, numerous attempts have been made to teach language to a few select species. • The most appropriate conclusion to draw: • Nonhuman species show no capacity to produce language on their own, but • Certain species can be taught to produce languagelike communication.

6. Infants Born Prepared to Learn Language • Language acquisition – learning vs. inborn capacities • Behaviorism’s language theory • People speak as they do because they have been reinforced for doing so. • Behaviorists assumed children were relatively passive. • The problem with this theory is that it does not fit the evidence. • Operant conditioning principles do not play the primary role in language development.

7. Infants Born Prepared to Learn Language • The nativist perspective: • Language development proceeds according to an inborn program. • Language Acquisition Device (Noam Chomsky): humans are born with specialized brain structures (Language Acquisition Device) that facilitates the learning of language. • Interactionist perspectives: • Propose environmental and biological factors interact together to affect the course of language development. • Socialinteractionist perspective strongly influenced by Lev Vygotsky’s writings

8. Infants Born Prepared to Learn Language • Assessing the three perspectives on language acquisition: • General consensus: • Behaviorists place too much emphasis on conditioning principles. • Nativists don’t give enough credit to environmental influences. • Interactionist approaches may offer best possible solution.

9. Stages of Language Development • All human languages are composed of: • Phonemes: smallest sound units in speech • Morphemes: smallest units that carry meaning

10. Stages of Language Development • Language development begins with children using primitive-sounding phonemes. • One-word stage—use only one-word phrases. • Consequently, they overextend their words—application of the process of assimilation. • By the age of 2—two-word stage—begin using two separate words in the same sentence. • A phase of telegraphic speech begins. • Child-directed speech—motherese • Parents help infants recognize specific language forms and skills necessary for future language learning by the way they talk to them (slowly, high pitch, simple words, heightened expression).

11. The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis • Does language determine thought? • Benjamin Lee Whorf’s linguistic relativity hypothesis • Proposed that the structure of language determines the structure of thought (without a word to describe an experience, you cannot think about it). • However, research indicates that just because a language lacks terms for stimuli does not mean that language users cannot perceive features of the stimuli. • The answer is no. Most psychologists believe in a weaker version of Whorf’s hypothesis—that language can influence thinking.

12. Thinking • Thinking—cognition • The mental activity of knowing • The processes through which knowledge is acquired • The processes through which problems are solved

13. Concept Formation • Concept: a mental grouping of objects, ideas, or events that share common properties • Concepts enable people to store memories in an organized fashion. • Categorization is the process of forming concepts. • We form some concepts by identifying defining features. • Problem with forming concepts by definition is that many familiar concepts have uncertain or fuzzy boundaries.

14. Concept Formation • Thus, categorizing has less to do with features that define all members of a concept and has more to do with features that characterize the typical member of a concept. • The most representative members of a concept are known as prototypes.

15. When Is It a “Cup,” and When Is It a “Bowl”?

16. Fuzzy Boundaries • Determine whether something belongs to a group by comparing it with the prototype. • Objects accepted and rejected define the boundaries of the group or concept. • This is different for different people.

17. Problem-Solving Strategies • Common problem-solving strategies: • Trial and error: trying one possible solution after another until one works • Algorithm: following a specific rule or step-by-step procedure that inevitably produces the correct solution • Heuristic: following a general rule of thumb to reduce the number of possible solutions • Insight: sudden realization of how a problem can be solved

18. “Internal” Obstacles Can Impede Problem Solving • Confirmation bias: the tendency to seek information that supports our beliefs, while ignoring disconfirming information • Mental set: the tendency to continue using solutions that have worked in the past, even though a better alternative may exist • Functional fixedness: the tendency to think of objects as functioning in fixed and unchanging ways and ignoring other less obvious ways in which they might be used

19. The Candle Problem

20. Decision-Making Heuristics • Representativeness heuristic: • the tendency to make decisions based on how closely an alternative matches (or represents) a particular prototype • Availability heuristic: • the tendency to judge the frequency or probability of an event in terms of how easy it is to think of examples of that event

21. Decision-Making Heuristics Five conditions most likely to lead to heuristic use: • People don’t have time to engage in systematic analysis. • People are overloaded with information. • People consider issues to be not very important. • People have little information to use in making a decision. • Something about the situation primesa given heuristic.

22. Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development - Four Stages • Jean Piaget contended that cognitive development occurs as children organize their structures of knowledge to adapt to their environment. • A schema is an organized cluster of knowledge that people use to understand and interpret information.

23. Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development - Four Stages • Acquisition of knowledge occurs through the complementary processes of assimilation and accommodation. • Assimilation: the process of absorbing new information into existing schemas • Accommodation: the process of changing existing schemas to absorb new information

24. Piaget’s Stages • Sensorimotor stage (birth–2 years): • experience the world through actions (grasping, looking, touching, and sucking) • One of the major accomplishments at this stage is the development of object permanence. • Preoperational stage (2–6 years): • represent things with words and images but having no logical reasoning

25. Piaget’s Stages • Concrete operational stage (7–11 years): • think logically about concrete events; understanding concrete analogies and performing arithmetic operations • Formal operational stage (12 years–adulthood): • develop abstract reasoning

26. The Three-Mountains Problem

27. Conservation

28. Conservation of Mass

29. Conservation of Number

30. Piaget’s Conclusions Have Been Questioned • Development may be less “stagelike” than he proposed. • Children may achieve capabilities earlier than he thought. • All adults may not reach formal operational thought.

31. Evaluating Piaget • Despite criticisms, most developmental psychologists agree that Piaget has generally outlined: • An accurate view of many of the significant changes that occur in mental functioning with increasing childhood maturation; and • That children are not passive creatures merely being molded by environmental forces, but that they are actively involved in their own cognitive growth.