Cognitive Psychology: Language, Imagery, and Development

Practice flashcards covering cognitive psychology topics including language, brain structures, developmental neurology, memory, imagery, and universal characteristics of language.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Linguistic relativity hypothesis)

The theory that the language you know shapes the way you think about events in the world around you; in its strongest form, you cannot think about things for which your language has no word.

ERP signal (Brain signals)

Brain signals that react differently to normal sentences than to sentences with an anomaly, such as "The woman persuaded to catch up."

Broca's area

A region in the left hemisphere of the brain responsible for speech production and syntactic features.

Wernicke's area

A region in the brain responsible for language comprehension and semantic features.

Aphasia

A disruption of language caused by a brain-related disorder.

Conduction aphasia

A language disorder characterized by trouble with the repetition of words and sentences, even though Broca and Wernicke areas remain intact.

Anomia

A language disorder involving trouble finding words, retrieving semantic concepts, and saying their names.

Lexical ambiguity

A type of ambiguity where a single word has multiple meanings, such as "bank" in "She drives to the bank."

Syntactic ambiguity

A type of ambiguity involving word order or grammaticality, such as "They are cooking apples."

Referential ambiguity

A type of ambiguity occurring when a pronoun could refer to multiple subjects, such as "Susan told Tina that she had to write a paper."

Longitudinal studies

A method of studying development by assessing the same group of people through time, featuring lower noise from individual differences.

Cross sectional studies

A method of studying development by assessing different groups of people at different stages, which allows data to be gathered quickly but includes more noise from individual differences.

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)

A brain structure implicated in executive functioning and the working memory component that becomes less effective in older adults.

Ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC)

A brain structure implicated in emotion and emotional responding that is notably not affected by aging.

Iconic memory in infants

A visual memory system that functions at adult levels very early on, as shown by babies preferentially looking at stars that change color in sets of $2, 4, ext{ or } 6$.

Precise system (Number sense)

A system for small numbers where babies preferentially crawl toward a cup with more items (e.g., $2$ crackers vs. $1$ cracker) without seeing inside the cup.

Approximate system (Number sense)

A system for sets of items where $6$-month-olds can discriminate a $1:2$ ratio (e.g., $8$ and $16$) and $9$-month-olds can discriminate a $2:3$ ratio (e.g., $8$ and $12$).

Infantile amnesia

The phenomenon where earliest memories typically begin between the ages of $2$ and $4$ years old.

Overextension

A phenomenon in early category learning where children call all four-legged animals "doggie" before learning more specific names.

Object permanence

The ability to remember the presence of an object when it is removed from view, appearing around $6$ months when infants begin to show surprise if items disappear.

Holophrasic speech

A stage in the single-word phase of language acquisition ($12$ to $18$ months) where one word is used to represent an entire sentence or idea (e.g., "MILK!").

Overregularizing

A developmental language error where children apply general rules to exceptions (e.g., saying "falled" instead of "fell") because they remember rules before specific exceptions.

Waggle dance

A communication method used by bees to indicate a route to nectar based on the orientation of the sun.

Competence (Chomsky)

The internalized knowledge of language and its rules that fully fluent speakers possess.

Performance (Chomsky)

The actual language behavior a speaker generates, consisting of the string of sounds and words uttered.

Polysemy

A characteristic of language where many words have multiple meanings.

Semanticity

A key feature of language where specific sounds/symbols carry meaning where other noises do not.

Arbitrariness

A feature of language where there is no inherent connection between communication units (sounds/words) and their meanings, except in cases like onomatopoeias.

Displacement

The ability to talk about things outside the present moment, such as the past, future, or abstract ideas.

Productivity (Novelty)

The ability to generate an infinite number of novel sentences and words rather than just repeating them.

Spatial (Depictive) representation

A mental representation that shares some characteristics of the actual item represented.

Propositional representation

A mental representation that converts images into concepts or propositions with an arbitrary relationship to the item presented (e.g., "ARE ON, FLOWERS, WINDOWSILL").

Imagery neurons

Neurons that fire both when visually perceiving an object and when imagining the same object.

Psycholinguistics

The study of language as it is learned and used by people, focusing on acquisition, comprehension, and production.

Universal characteristics of language (Hockett)

A set of $13$ characteristics common to all human languages, such as Duality of patterning and Cultural transmission, that set them apart from animal communication.