Week 12 - learning, language use, and development

Nicaragua sign language development

1980s, deaf children were brought together in schools

- teachers couldn't teach them spanish

- students develped own set of hand gestures to commuicate, developing nicaraguan sign language

Common Ground in language

Set of knowledge that the speaker ad listener share and they think, assume, and or take for granted that they share

what does common ground help

helps people coordinate their language use

what happens to common ground as conversations progress

common ground shifts and changes as participants add NEW info and cooperate to help one another understand

Audience design

Speakers design their utterances for their audiences by taking into account the audiences' knowledge.

constructing utterances to suit the audiences knowledge

Crafting what you say based on the knowledge of the person you are speaking to

lexicon and syntax

lexicon - words and expressions

syntax - grammatical rules for arranging words and expressions together

what do people in conversation tend to exhibit with each other

similar accents and rates of speech

--> associated with social idetity

Situation models

A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description.

EXAMPLE:

- someone says they're gonna propose, you picture a proposal in your head

Priming

the activation, often unconsciously, of certain associations, thus predisposing one's perception, memory, or response

the activation of certain thoughts or feelings that make them easier to think of and act upon

EXAMPLE: think about a ring, remiding you about other related concepts like marriage and wedding ceremony

do people share situational models?

YES!

people likely construct shared situational models making use of our highly developed interpersonal ability to IMMITATE

what kind of conversation is most prominent?

convos about GOSSIP

60-70% are gossip related

-- GOSSIP: talking about themselves or others who they know

gossip

thinking and interacting and communicating about our social world

-->regulates our social world

ingroup and outgroup

ingroup - group to which a person belongs

outgroup - group to which a person does not belong

social brain hypothesis

The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.

-- max size is around 150 people

so what does everyday language do with our ingroups

MAINTAINS the existing structureof intergroup relationships

what language aspects convey permanence and particularity

verbs --> particularity

adjectives --> permanence

EX:

o He runs /he likes running- verb and action verb

o He is athletic - adjective

linguistic intergroup bias

A tendency for people to characterize positive things about their ingroup using more abstract expressions, but negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions.

social networks

networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel

what happens to stories when they travel through social networks

they become conventionalized

AKA: info transmitted multiple times was transformed to something that was easily understood by many

--> because of this, the info can be assimilated into the COMMON GROUND, shared by most people in linguistic communities

what social construct is more likely to be retained because they are a part of common ground shared by community

STEROTYPES

o Contribute to how conversational retellings are likely to reproduce convetipnal content

o Counter-sterotypical info (the man was vaccuming vs. the man was watching football on Sunday)

psychological consequences of language use

When people use language to describe an experience, their thoughts and feelings are profoundly shaped by the linguistic representation that they have produced rather than the original experience per se

o   EX: in a study where they had people verbaly explain why a target person was expressing an emotion rather than just label it, they tended to remember the person as feeling that emotion more intensely than when they simply labeled the emotion

how is a linguistic representatio of another persons emotions sometimes biased by the speakers memory of that person

when we linguistically label a person's emotional experience --> it alters neural processes

EX: labeling negative emotions, the amygdala was activated less than when they were not given a chance to label them

--> signs that verbalizing emotional experiences can have therapeutic effects on those who suffer traumatic experiences

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

the idea that language structures thought and that ways of looking at the world are embedded in language

that the language we use determines our thoughts

--> PROBABLY WRONG, because our thoughts are too flexible for that

EX: People who live in countries where pronoun drops languages are used tend to have more collectivistic values like in JAPANESE as compared to non-pronoun drop languages like English

Theory of mind

The human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts and processes

Concepts --> agent and intentionality

Processes --> goal detection, imitation, empathy, and perspective taking

what is the role of theory of mind in social life

Frames and interprets perception of human behaviour in a particular way

o Perceptions of agents who can act intentionally and who have desires, beliefs and other mental states that guide their actions

need it to egage in complex interactions

what are the 5 social interactions that rely deeply on TOM

o   Teaching another person new actions or rules by taking into account what the learner knows or doesn’t know, and how one miht best make him understand

o   Learning the words of a language by monitoring what other people attend to and are trying to do when they use certain words

o   Figuring out our social standing by trying to guess what others think and feel about us

o   Sharing experiences by telling a friend how much we liked a movie or by showing her something beautiful

o   Collaborating on a task by signaling to one another that we share a goal and understand and trust the other’s intetipon to pursue this joint goal

autism and theory of mind

children with autism have special trouble mastering theory of mind tasks - suggest that impaired social interaction seen in autism may be partly due to an inability to "get inside someone else's head" --> inability to ingage

o They struggle to use theory of mind and tend to approach individuals I a more analytical way in which they can't fully grasp how someone feels but can understand their visible appearance and scruitinize and fixate on small things

concepts of theory of mind triangle

bottom to top: simple to complex

1st row:

- identifying agetns

- recognizing goals

- assessing intentionality

2nd row

- imitation

- mimicry

- automatic empathy

3rd row

- joint attention

- visual perspective taking

4th row:

- projection

- simulation

TOP:

- Mental state inference

1st row:

- identifying agents

agent - allows humans to identify moving objects in the world that can act on their own

Features of being an agent:

- having eyes

being self-propelled

reacting systematically to the interaction partners behaviour

first row - recognizing goals

To recognize goals --> is to see the systematic and predictable relationships between a particular agent pursuing a particular object across various circumstances

first row - assessing intentionality

to pursue goals, you have to have intentional behaviour

o   Intentionality: the quality of an agents performing a bahviour intentionally: that is with skill and awareness and executing an intention based on a desire and relevant beliefs

o   Some behaviours are Unintentional even if they are goal-directed

example: embarrassing yourself on a date accidently, when you want to impress

row 2 - imitation

human tendency to carefully observe others behaviours and do as they do --> even if its their first time experienceing that behaviour

row 2 - mimicry

copying others behaviours, often without awareness

row 2 - synchrony

two people displaying the same behaviours or having the same internal states --> BECAUSE OF MIMICRY

o If two people mimic the same body posture and gestures they "synchronize" their behvaiours by way of largely unconscious imitation

o People who enjoy an interaction synchronize their behaviours more, and increased synchrony makes people enjoy their interaction more

mirror neurons

Frontal lobe neurons that fire when performing certain actions or when observing another doing so. The brain's mirroring of another's action may enable imitation, language learning, and empathy.

human mirroring and imitation

is selective --> triggering actions that are relevant to the perceivers current state or aim

Automatic empathy

A social perceiver unwittingly taking on the internal state of another person, usually because of mimicking the person's expressive behavior and thereby feeling the expressed emotion.

row 3 - joint attention

Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they are both attending to it.

--> Shared engagement is critical for children to learn the meaning of objects

row 3 - visual perspective taking

Percieving something from another person's spatial vantage point OR more generally to effortful mental state inference

--> how they are feeling, their thoughts, and desires

row 4 - simulation

process of representing the other persons mental state

--> helps us understand the other thoughts or feelings by using one's own mental state as a model for other mental states

row 4 - social projection

a social perceivers assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, knows, or feels

--> assuming its equal to our own

--> egocentric thought

what happens if common ground is lacking regarding social projection

people use their OWN current state of knowledge concern of perception, to grasp other people's mental states

- need to recognize our egocentricism and actively take other people's perspective

- grasping mental states even if they are different from our own

false-belief test

An experimental procedure that assesses whether a perceiver recognizes that another person has a false belief—a belief that contradicts reality.

example of false belief task

(a) An adult shows a child the contents of a Band-Aid box and of an unmarked box. The Band-Aids are in the unmarked container. (b) The adult introduces the child to a hand puppet named Pam and asks the child to predict where Pam would look for the Band-Aids and to explain Pam's behavior. The task reveals whether children understand that without having seen that the Band-Aids are in the unmarked container, Pam will hold a false belief.

what is the false belief test used to determine?

explicit mental state inference

--> see what the kid has developed in the triangle

what age is false belief difficult for?

before age of 4

how do people explain other's behaviours

By referring to their beliefs, and desires, and the specific reasons for which they acted

TOM gives INTENTION AND MEANING behind inexplicable motions

at what age do most people develop theory of mind

in first year of life

what tool of theory of mind develops in early childhood and is AUTOMATIC

Assessing intentionality

specifically the capacity to interpret agents as having goals.