PSYCH 10 - Language and Decision Making

Decision Making

Evaluation of alternatives and making choice

Availability Bias

Items that are more readily available in memory are judged as having occurred more frequently

Framing Effects

Changing how an issue is presented can change people’s decisions

Loss Aversion

People tend to want to avoid losses more than they want to achieve gains

Sunk Cost Fallacy

The tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made, leading to irrational decision-making.

Anchoring

The bias to be affected by an initial anchor, even if the anchor is arbitrary, and to insufficiently adjust our judgements away from that anchor.

• Occurs when anchor is irrelevant

Confirmation bias

Tendency to search for confirming evidence, not disconfirming evidence

Language

A system that relates sounds (or gestures) to meaning

• symbolism

• structured and meaningful

• displacement

• generatively

Components of Language

Phonemes, morphemes, syntax

Phoneme

smallest unit of sound

Morphemes

Smallest units of meaning

• un = not

Syntax

rules for word combinations

Theories of Language Development

Behaviorist, nativist, interactionalist,

Behaviorist Perspective

We learn language through reinforcement

• child is praised for calling a ball a ball

Nativist Perspective

Children are born with innate mental structures that guide their acquisition of language

Noam Chomsky - Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Mental structure that enables children to learn language quickly and efficiently even with limited input.

Support for Nativist perspective

linguistic universals, children apply rules of grammar to novel words, language is learned more easily in the critical period

Genie Story

Critical period hypothesis - if a child is not exposed to language before a certain age they may never fully acquire it.

• genie learned words and could communicate nonverbally but never developed normal grammar or syntax

Interactionalist Perspective

innate capacity for language interacts with experience

Benefits of Motherese

The benefits of motherese include promoting language acquisition in infants due to its engaging and simplified nature, which emphasizes key linguistic elements and encourages communication and emotional bonding.

Early Speech Production

• 0 mo - crying

• 1 mo - cooing

• 6 mo - babbling

• 1 year - patterned speech - first words 10-15 mo

• 18 mo - naming explosion

• 24 mo - combining words

Categorical Speech Perception

Infants, like adults, perceive speech sounds categorically

• although the acoustic difference between /b/ and /d/ falls on a continuum, we perceive these consonants as two distinct categories

Perceptual Narrowing for phonemes

• 6-8 mo English learners can differentiate the Salish and Hindi contrats

• 10-12 months they lose the ability

• Benefits - infants are faster to tune into the speech sounds of their native language have higher larger vocabularies at age 2

Spain-Whorf Hypothesis

• Strong Version

  • thoughts and behavior are determined by language

  • the language you speak determined the concepts and categories you use, and as a result shapes what you can think about

• Weak Version

  • thoughts and behaviors are influenced by language

  • language influences what we pay attention to and this shapes experience which influences how we think

Russian Blues Study

A study examining how speakers of Russian categorize different shades of blue, demonstrating the influence of language on color perception and cognitive processing.