Chapter 10
Thinking/Cognition & Language
Part I: Thinking
Thinking (a.k.a. ______) refers to a process that involves knowing, understanding, remembering and communicating.
Thinking involves a number of ______:
- Concepts
- Problem solving
- Decision making
- Judgment formation
A ______is a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.
- For example, there are a variety of chairs, but their common features define the concept of a
“chair”.We organize concepts into ______.
- We form some concepts with ______. For example, a triangle has three
sides. Mostly, we form concepts with mental images or ______
(______). For example, a robin is often a prototype of a bird, but a
penguin is not. This may change according to the group (location, etc.) for a person
from Louisiana might say a pelican.
______are mental molds into which we pour our experiences.
- The process of ______involves incorporating new experiences into our
current understanding (all men are daddy).
- The process of adjusting a schema and modifying it is called ______
(all older men with brown hair and glasses are daddy).
______involves a sudden novel realization of a solution to a problem. It is the “______.” Both humans and animals have insight & it is often related to creativity.
______– Reasoning from general principles to a conclusion about a specific case. This is the basis of the field of logic. (“bottom-up reasoning”)
______– Reasoning from a set of specific facts and trying to develop a general principle. (“top-down reasoning”)
- Obstacles in Reasoning:
▪Distraction by irrelevant information
▪______– tendency to abandon logical rules in favor of personal
beliefs
There are two ways to ______:
1. ______-the step-by-step, logical rules or procedures that guarantee
solving a particular problem.Algorithms, which are very time consuming, exhaust all
possibilities before arriving at a solution. Computers use algorithms.
2. ______- the simple, thinking strategies that allow us to make judgments
and solve problems efficiently. Heuristics are less time consuming, but more error-
prone than algorithms.Heuristics make it easier for us to use simple principles to
arrive at solutions to problems. They are a ______or “rule of thumb”
that is based on previous experience.
- There are two kinds of heuristics:
- ______is judging the likelihood of things or objects in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, a particular prototype (______).
2. ______is whatever increases the
ease of retrieving information increases its perceived availability. If it
comes to mind easily, we presume it as common.
Obstacles to solving problems:
- ______- thetendency to search for information that
confirms a personal bias.
- ______is the inability to see a problem from a fresh perspective. This
impedes creativity and problem solving.
Two examples of fixation:
- ______- atendency to approach a problem in a particular way, especially if that way was successful in the past.
- ______- atendency to think only of the familiar functions of an object. Other than spend it, what else can I do with a quarter?
______- is a tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments.The opposite of having overconfidence ishaving an______about what may happen. Such fears may be unfounded and caused by an availability heuristic (flying after 9/11).
______- decisions and judgments may be significantly affected depending upon how an issue is framed (75% lean v. 25% fat).
______- the tendency of one’s preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning by making invalid conclusions.
______- the tendency to cling to our beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. It takes ______for us to change our minds!
______- the awareness and understanding of your owncognitive abilities. “Thinking about your thinking.”
Part II: Language
______is our spoken, written, or gestured word. It is the way we communicate meaning to ourselves and others.
- ______are thesmallest distinct ______ unit in a spoken
language. Forexample: bat, has three phonemes b · a · t while chat, has three phonemes
ch · a · t.
- ______are thesmallest ______ that carry meaning. It may be a word or
part of a word (prefixes & suffixes). For example: Milk (1) = milk, Pumpkin (2) = pump .
kin, Previewed (3) = pre . view . ed, Unforgettable (4) = un · for · get · table.
______is the system of rules in a language that enable us to communicate with and understand others.
- ______is the set of rules
by which we derive______
from morphemes, words, and sentences.
For example:adding –ed to the word “laugh”
means that it happened in the past.
- Syntax consists of the rules for combining words into
______sentences. For example: In English,
syntactical rule says that adjectives come before nouns; white house. In Spanish, it is
reversed; casa blanca.
Surface and deep structure often causes us to use contextual cues to determine meaning.
They are hunting dogs. They heard the shooting of the hunters.
Children learn their native languages much before learning to add 2+2.We learn, on average (after age 1), 3,500 words a year, amassing 60,000 words by the time we graduate from high school.
- ______: Beginning at 4 months, the infant spontaneously utters various ______, like ah and goo. Babbling is not imitation of adult speech. By 10 months, the babbling begins to resemble the phonemes of the parent’s language(s) – possibly because it has been reinforced.
- ______(aka Holophrase): Beginning at or around his first birthday, a child starts to speak ______at a time and is able to make family members understand him. The word doggy may mean “look at the dog out there.”
- ______(aka Telegraphic Speech): Before the 2nd year a child starts to speak in ______. A child speaks like a telegram: “Go car,” means “I would like to go for a ride in the car.”
- ______: After telegraphic speech, children begin uttering ______(Mommy get ball) with syntactical sense, and by early elementary school they are employing humor.
______believed that language development may be explained on the basis of ______learning principles such as association, reinforcement, andimitation (Social Learning Theory).
______opposed Skinner’s ideas and suggested the ideaof ______. He believes that the rate of
language acquisition is so fast that it cannot be explained through learning principles, and thus most of it is inborn.
- All humans are born with a biological mechanism called a
______(LAD) that
helps kids learn language. All languages have auniversal grammar structure which is
programmed in the LAD.
- Evidence has found that young children will often ______
______, or apply grammatical rulesincorrectly. For instance, “I
goed to the store” or “the firemans.” They understand past and plural, but have to learn
to use it correctly.
- Well before our first birthday, our brains are discerning word breaks (speech
segmentation) by statistically analyzing which syllables in hap-py-ba-by go together.
These statistical analyses are learned during critical periods of child development.
- Learning new languages gets ______with age. Those who learn a second
language as adults usually speak it with the accent of the firstlanguage. Those who are
not exposed to either a spoken or signed language prior to adolescence (within the
______) lose their ability to master any language.
______suggested the idea of ______
______. In other words, language determines the way we think (words and thoughts are linked). For example, he noted that the Hopi people do not have the
past tense for verbs. Therefore, the Hopi cannot thinkreadily about the past.
- When a language provides words for objects or events, we can think about these objects
more clearly and remember them.
- To a large extent ______is language-based. When alone, we may talk
to ourselves. However, we also think in images.
______display cultures and customs that are learned and transmitted (through communication) over generations.
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