language

Concepts

mental categories that help us organize objects, people, ideas, or experiences that share common features.

Prototype

The mental image or best example of a category.

Exemplar

A specific example of a category stored in memory.

Heuristic

A mental shortcut or rule of thumb

Algorithm

A systematic procedure with steps

representativeness heuristic

judging how likely something is based on how closely it matches your mental image or stereotype of a category.

availability heuristic

judging how common or likely something is based on how easily examples come to mind.

Functional fixedness

tendency to see an object as useful only for its usual purpose.

Incubation

Taking a break from consciously working on a problem while your mind continues processing information.

Insight

sudden realization of how to solve a problem, sometimes described as an "aha!" moment.

Mental set

tendency to keep using a strategy that worked before, even when a different strategy would work better.

Serial processing

means handling information or steps one at a time.

Parallel processing

handling multiple pieces of information or aspects of a task at the same time.

phoneme

the smallest unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a language.

morpheme

the smallest unit of language that carries meaning or grammatical function.

Semantics

the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences.

Syntax

the rules governing how words are arranged to form sentences.

Semanticity

Language uses symbols that represent meanings.

Infinite creativity

Language allows us to create and understand an enormous number of new sentences using a limited set of words and grammatical rules.

Displacement

Language allows us to communicate about things that are not present in the immediate environment.

linguistic-relativity hypothesis

the language we speak can influence how we perceive, categorize, or think about the world.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

a proposed inborn mental mechanism that helps children acquire language.