Chapter 7:
Language and
thought
Slides prepared by
Randall E. Osborne, Texas State University-San Marcos,
adapted by Dr Mark Forshaw, Staffordshire University, UK
1
Language and Communication:
Nothing’s More Personal
2
Language and Communication
The complex structure of human language:
– phoneme
– morpheme
– phonological rules
– grammar
– morphological rules
– syntactical rules
3
Units of Language
4
Syntactical Rules
5
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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Language Milestones
7
Language Milestones
• Fast mapping
– Children can ‘glue’ a word onto a concept
after hearing it just once
• Telegraphic speech
– Content words only but can convey basic
meaning
• Overgeneralisations
– “you eated”, “we ranned”, “he singed all day”
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Theories of Language
Development
•
Behaviourist 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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Theories of Language
Development
•
Nativist explanations
– language acquisition
device (LAD)
– “wired” to learn grammar
– Those with genetic
dysphasia cannot grasp
grammar – e.g. the
“wug” test
10
Theories of Language
Development
• 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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Theories of Language
Development
•
Neurological
specialisation
– Broca’s area
(involved in
language
production)
– Wernicke’s area
(involved in
language
comprehension)
– Aphasia
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Theories of Language
Development
• Can other species learn human language?
• Washoe taught sign language
– learned 160 words
– could construct simple sentences
– novel constructions
– apes can learn signs for concepts they
understand (not abstract)
13
Thought and Language
• How are thought and language related?
• Linguistic relativity hypothesis
– Inuit: many different words for “snow” is not
true
• Language and colour processing
• Language and views of time
– forward and backward (time is horizontal)
– up and down (time is vertical)
14
Concepts and Categories:
How We Think
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Concepts and Categories
• Concept
– fundamental to our ability to think
• 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
16
Concepts and Categories
• Nature of human
concepts
• Early theories focused on
rules
• Later theories focused on
“family resemblance”
17
Concepts and Categories
•
Rosch’s Prototype theory
– “best” example defines the set
– Typicality enables categorisation
•
Medin & Schaffer’s Exemplar theory
– We compare new examples with other stored
examples, and categorise accordingly.
– Explains how we can identify specific dogs, not
just prototypical dogs…
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Judging, Valuing, and
Deciding: Sometimes We’re
Logical, Sometimes Not
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Decision making
• Rational choice theory
– likelihood of something happening multiplied
by perceived value of that outcome
• Heuristics
• Algorithms
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Heuristics
• Availability bias
• Conjunction fallacy
– decreasing probability
of all things being true
of person
• Representativeness
heuristic
• Framing effects
• Sunk-cost fallacy
21
Decision making
• Prospect theory
– people simplify available information
– choose prospect that offers best value
(personal)
• Frequency format hypothesis
– Our minds evolved to notice how often things
occur, not how likely they are
• Decision making and the brain
– Prefrontal lobe damage can create inability to
judge risk or decide importance of tasks
22
Problem Solving:
Working It Out
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Problem Solving
• Two major types of problems that
complicate our lives:
– ill-defined problem (no clear goal or solution)
– well-defined problem
• Means-ends analysis
• Analogical problem solving
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Creativity and Insight
• Analogical problem solving does not
work for all problems
• Research suggests insight is
actually incremental
• Functional fixedness
25
Creativity and Insight
Word Association
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Creativity and Insight
Answers
Solutions:
• Card, paper, pawn, carpet, ball, bar
27
Transforming Information:
How We Reach
Conclusions
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Reaching Conclusions
• Reasoning
– practical reasoning
– theoretical reasoning
• Belief bias
– focus on conclusions instead of arguments
– does the answer ‘ring true’?
• Syllogistic reasoning
– does conclusion follow from statements we
assume to be true?
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