Language and Thought in AP Psychology

cognition

The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.

concept

A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.

prototype

A mental image or best example of a category.

algorithm

A methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem.

heuristic

A simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently.

insight

A sudden realization of a problem's solution.

confirmation bias

The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs.

fixation

The inability to see a problem from a new perspective.

mental set

A tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past.

functional fixedness

The tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions.

representative heuristic

Judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes.

availability heuristic

Estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory.

overconfidence

The tendency to be more confident than correct.

belief perseverance

Clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited.

illusory correlation

The perception of a relationship where none exists.

fundamental attribution error

The tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences on others' behavior.

interviewer illusion

The tendency of interviewers to overrate their discernment of a candidate's personality.

self-serving bias

The tendency to attribute positive events to one's own character but attribute negative events to external factors.

hindsight bias

The tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen it.

intuition

An effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought.

framing

The way an issue is posed; it can significantly affect decisions and judgments.

divergent thinking

A type of creative thinking that generates multiple solutions to a problem.

convergent thinking

A type of critical thinking in which one evaluates existing solutions to find the best one.

language

Our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.

phoneme

The smallest distinctive sound unit in a language.

morpheme

The smallest unit that carries meaning in a language.

grammar

A system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others.

semantics

The set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences.

syntax

The rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences.

babbling stage

The stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language.

one-word stage

The stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in single words.

two-word stage

The stage in speech development during which a child speaks in two-word statements.

telegraphic speech

Early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram—using mostly nouns and verbs.

aphasia

Impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca's area or Wernicke's area.

Broca's area

Controls language expression—an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech.

Wernicke's area

Controls language reception—a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression.

Angular gyrus

A region of the brain that is involved in the processing of language.

linguistic determinism

The strong form of Whorf's hypothesis—language controls the way we think and interpret the world around us.

universal grammar

The theory that all the world's languages share a similar underlying structure.

language acquisition device

A hypothetical tool in the brain that helps children quickly learn and understand language.