Language and Thought

The Language Instinct

argues that we are born with an innate capability to understand languages

Langauge is a ________ adaptation to____________

biological; communicate information

Language

a system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules of grammar and convey meaning

Grammar

a set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to produce meaningful messages

Phonemes

the smallest units of sound that are recognizable as speech rather than as random noise
- Each differs in how it is produced

Phonological rules

a set of rules that indicate how phonemes can be combined to produce speech sounds
- e.g. the initial sound ts is acceptable in German, but not English
- If these rules are broken, speech is describes as having an accent

Morphemes

the smallest meaningful units of languages
- Phonemes, on the other hand, contain no meaning

Morphological rules

a set of rules that indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words

Content morphemes

refer to things and events (e.g. "cat," "dog")

Function morphemes

serve grammatical functions, such as tying a sentence together (e.g. "and," "or")

Syntactical rules

a set of rules that indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences

Deep structure

the meaning of the sentence

Surface structure

how the sentence is worded

Three characteristics of Language Development

1. Children learn language at an astonishingly rapid rate
• Average 1-year-old has a vocabulary of 10 words
• Expands to 10,000 words in the next 4 years - (that's 6 or 7 new words per day) - 2. Children make few errors when learning to speak
• Many of them are systematic
• There are over 3 million ways to rearrange the words in any 10- word sentence
- Few of them will be grammatically correct and meaningful
3. Passive mastery develops faster than active mastery
• At every stage of language development, children understand language better than they speak

Distinguishing Speech Sounds

At birth, infants can distinguish among all the contrasting sounds that occur in human languages
• Within the first 6 months, they lose this ability

Behaviorist Explanations to Language

B. F. Skinner - we learn language the same way we learn any other skill through reinforcement, shaping, extinction, and other basic principles of operant conditioning
- Skinner and Watson

Issues with Behaviorist explanation for language

Cannot account for fundamental characteristics of language development
- Parents don't spend time teaching their children to speak grammatically
- Children generate more grammatical sentences than they ever hear
- Errors children make when learning to speak are often overgeneralizations of grammatical rules

Noam Chomsky

• Claimed that language-learning capacities are built into the brain
• Claimed that the brain is specialized to acquire language rapidly through simple exposure to speech

Nativist Theory of Language

the view that language development is best explained as an innate, biological capacity

Language acquisition device (LAD)

a collection of processes that facilitate language learning

Interactionist approach

Although infants are born with an innate ability to acquire language, social interactions play a critical role in language

Linguistic relativity hypothesis****GO OVER

the proposal that language shapes the nature of thought

Do we think in a language?* IAN

No. Language leaves out information and is ambiguous but our thoughts aren't.

the 'language of thought' in which knowledge is couched can leave nothing to the imagination, because it is the imagination." -- Pinker (1994)

the lines of code of mentalese have to be extremely exhaustive

Concept

a mental representation that groups or categorizes shared features of related objects, events, or other stimuli

Necessary condition of a category

something that must be true of the object in order for it to belong to the category
• Being an animal is a necessary condition of being a dog

Sufficient condition of a category

something that, if it is true of the object, proves that it belongs to the category
• e.g. "German Shephard" is a sufficient condition for being a dog

Family Resemblance Theory

members of a category have features that appear to be characteristic of category members but may not be possessed by every member

Prototype theory

psychological categories are best described as organized around a prototype
- Prototype: the "best" or "most typical" member of a category

Exemplar theory

we make category judgments by comparing a new instance with stored memories for other instances of the category

Difference between prototype and exemplar theory

Prototype has a singular prototype while exemplar has several

Ill-defined problem

one that does not have a clear goal or well-defined solution path
- e.g. being.a better person

Well-defined problem

one with clearly specified goals and clearly defined solution paths
- e.g. following a clear set of directions to school

Means-ends analysis

a process of searching for the means or steps to reduce the differences between the current situation and the desired goal

Duncker

we solve problems using a mean-end analysis

Means-Ends Analysis Steps

1. Analyze the goal state (i.e., the desired outcome you want to attain)
2. Analyze the current state (i.e., your starting point, or the current situation)
3. List the differences between the current state and the goal state
4. Reduce the list of differences by
• Direct means (a procedure that solves the problem without intermediate steps)
• Generating a subgoal (an intermediate step on the way to solving the problem)
• Finding a similar problem that has a known solution

Analogical Problem Solving

solving a problem by finding a similar problem with a known solution and applying that solution to the current problem

Functional fixedness

the tendency to perceive the functions of objects as fixed - A process that constricts our thinking