language and thought slides prepared by randall e. osborne, texas state university-san marcos...

Language and Thought

Slides prepared by Randall E. Osborne, Texas State University-San Marcos

Revised by Dr. Donna Bar-Navon

PSYCHOLOGYSchacter

Gilbert

Wegner

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7.1 Language and Communication

-What is language??

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

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- What are the Basic Characteristics of Language?

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•Phoneme - The smallest unit of sound that is recognizable as speech rather than as random noise.

•Morpheme - A morpheme is a combination of phonemes.

•A morpheme carries meaning whereas the phonemes do not carry meaning.

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- The English language has about 40 different phonemes, whereas other languages have between 12 and 85.

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- Every language has phonological rules that indicate how phonemes can be combined to produce speech sounds.

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- People learn these phonological rules without instruction, and if the rules are violated, the resulting speech sounds so odd that we describe it as speaking with an accent.

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Infants are born with the ability to distinguish phonemes, and language rules for combining them occurs automatically.

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- All languages have a grammar, or a set of rules that specific how we combine units of language to produce meaningful messages.

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- Grammar rules fall into two categories:

- Morphological Rules and Syntax Rules

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•Morphological Rules indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words. Some are content morphemes (cat, dog) and some functional morphemes (and, or) that tie words together.

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- Syntaxical Rules indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences. Example a sentence has to have a noun and verb

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- If the syntaxical rules are not followed we don’t’ have a sentence.

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7.1 Units of Language

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7.1 Syntactical Rules

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- Deep structure vs. surface structure•deep = meaning•surface = wording

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•Deep structure refers to the meaning of the sentence.

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•Surface Structure refers to how a sentence is worded.•.

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7.1 Language Development

- At birth—infants can distinguish all contrasting sounds in human language

- 6 months—can only distinguish those sounds in language being spoken around them

- 4-6 months—begin to babble speech sounds

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7.1 Language Milestones

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- Theories of Language Development:

- Behaviorist Explanations

- Nativist Explanations

- Interactionist Explanations

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7.1 Theories of Language Development

- Behaviorist explanations• principles of operant conditioning• learn to talk through reinforcement, shaping, and

extinction• limits:

(1) parents don’t spend much time teaching grammar,

(2) children generate more grammatical sentences than they hear,

(3) errors children make do not duplicate what they hear

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- In this theory, children acquire language through simple principles of operant conditioning. As infants start to vocalize they lose vocalizations that are not reinforced and continue with those that are reinforced. Example prah (no response from parent) but dada (great response from parents)

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- The behaviorist explanation is attractive because it offers a simple account of language development, but the theory cannot account for many fundamental characteristics of language development

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- Parents don’t spend that much time teaching children to speak grammatically

- Children generate many more grammatical sentences than they ever hear so they do more than imitate

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- Nativist Explanation:

- This theory holds that language development is best explained as an innate, biological capacity. As the brain matures language naturally progresses.

- This theory is criticized becauSe it does not explain how language developes, only why.

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- So interactionists say that while infants are born with an innate ability to acquire language, social interactions play a crucial role in language development.

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- Interactionist Explanation:

- Interactionists point out that parents tailor their verbal interactions with children in ways that simplify the language acquisition process by speaking slowly, using simpler sentences, and enunciating clearly.

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- Interactionist explanations•how does innate, biological capacity for language

combine with environmental experience?•parents tailor verbal interactions with children in

ways that simplify language acquisition•deaf children NOT taught sign language often

develop own system of hand signals

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- Neurological specialization

• Broca’s area (involved in language production)

• Wernicke’s area (involved in language comprehension)

• Aphasia

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- In most people the Broca's area is in the lower part of the left frontal lobe. It is one of the main language areas in the cerebral cortex because it controls the motor aspects of speech.

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- Persons with a Broca aphasia can usually understand what words mean, but have trouble performing the motor or output aspects of speech. Thus, other names for this disorder are 'expressive' and 'motor' aphasia.

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- Depending on the severity of the lesion to Broca's area, the symptoms can range from the mildest type (cortical dysarthria) with intact comprehension and the ability to communicate through writing to a complete loss of speaking out loud.

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- Wernicke’s area is specialized for language comprehension.

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- Wernicke's aphasia is a language disorder that impacts language comprehension and the production of meaningful language.

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- The disorder is related to damage to the Wernicke&'s Area. Individuals with Wernicke'&'s aphasia have difficulty understanding spoken language but are able to produce sounds, phrases, and word sequences.

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- While these utterances have the same rhythm as normal speech, they are not language because no information is conveyed.

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- Can other species learn human language?

- Washoe taught sign language• learned 160 words•could construct simple sentences•novel constructions•can learn signs for concepts they understand

(not abstract)

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- Apes can learn new vocabulary and construct simple sentences but compared with humans are limited in terms of vocabulary and grammatical complexity.

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- So do you think that bilingualism interferes with cognitive development?

PSYCHOLOGYSchacter

Gilbert

Wegner

7.2

Concepts and Categories: How We Think

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7.2 Memory Storage

- We store our knowledge in three main ways:

- Our experiences in terms of individual memories

- Generalizations that take the form of prototypes

- Factual information that is codified in terms of rules

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7.2 Categories

Category-specific deficits•damage to front part of left temporal lobe—

difficulty identifying humans•damage to lower left temporal lobe—trouble

identifying animals•damage where temporal and occipital lobes meet

—trouble naming tools

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7.2 Concepts

- The brain organizes concepts into distinct categories, such as living thing and human-made things.

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7.2 Concepts

- We use family resemblance, prototypes and exemplars to categorized and keep track of our knowledge about the world.

- What does family resemblance mean?

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7.2 Concepts and Categories

- Family resemblance are features that appear to be characteristic of category members but may not be possessed by every member.

- For example, you and your sister may have your mother’s eyes.

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- For example, many members of the bird family have feathers so these are characteristic features

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- What’s a prototype or the prototype theory?

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- The prototype theory states that psychological categories that we form naturally are best described as organized around a prototype which is the best or most typical member fo the category.

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- According to this theory if your prototypical bird is a robin, then a canary would be considered a better example of a birth than would be an ostrich because they have more features in common.

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- Apples, oranges, and bananas are members of the category fruit.

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- How about the Exemplar Theory

- This theory holds that we make category judgments by comparing a new instance with stored memories for other instances of the category.

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- We use concepts and categories to solve problems, make inferences, and guide judgments.

PSYCHOLOGYSchacter

Gilbert

Wegner

7.4

Problem Solving: Working It Out

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7.4 Problem Solving

- Problem solving is a process in which new information is interpreted in terms of old knowledge.

- The solutions we generate often depend on the organization of our knowledge as well as the objective characteristics of the problems.

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7.4 Problem Solving

- Approaches to problem solving: Problem solving can be accomplished in a variety of ways.

- Means-end analysis is a process of moving a current state more in line with a desired end state.

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7.4 Problem Solving

- Analogical problem solving is an attempt to solve a problem by finding a similar problem with a known solution and applying that solution to the current problem.

- Creative and insightful solutions often involve restructuring a problem so that it turns into a problem for which a solution procedure is already known.

language and thought slides prepared by randall e. osborne, texas state university-san marcos...

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