Thinking
Language & Thought

Cognition
• Mental activities of thinking, knowing,
remembering, & communicating
information.

Concepts
• Mental groupings of similar:
• Objects
• Evetns
• Ideas
• People

prototypes
• A mental image (best example) of a
category.

Initial thinking about a new stimulus often
changes after it is integrated into our
conceptual worldview.
Our first perceptions typically become
more embedded as time passes.
Asian face is remembered as “more
Asian” after time (Corneille, et al.,
2004).

Problem Solving

Algorithm
• Logical, methodical rule for solving a
problem.

Heuristic
• Simple thinking strategy that quickly
solves a problem.
“rule of thumb”

Insight
• Sudden realization of a solution to a
problem -without a strategy.

Once we form a belief, we tend to use all
information to support that belief.

Confirmation Bias
• The tendency to search for information
that supports our preconceptions.
• The tendency to avoid evidence that is
contradictory to our preconceptions.

Fixation
• The inability to see a problem in a
different way.

Mental Set
• The tendency to approach a problem in
a certain way -”set” in one’s bias.
• Predisposes how we think.
• (Perceptual Set- predisposition to what
we see.)

Making Judgments

Intuition
• A “gut feeling”
• Fast
• Automatic
• Emotionally based
• Not reflective or logic based

Availability Heuristic
• Estimating the likelihood of something
based on our memory of previous
occurrences (Tversky & Kahneman,
1974).
• Casino bells & lights give us the sense
that a lot of winning is going on.

Overconfidence
• The tendency to be more confident than
correct.

Belief Perseverance
• Clinging to one’s initial bias, despite
contradictory evidence.

Framing
• The way an issue is presented
influences our interpretation of it.

Framing
• 10% of patients die in this operation.
• 90% of patients live through this
operation (Marteau, 1989).
• Condoms have 95% success rate in
stopping HIV.
• Condoms have a 5% fail-rate (Linville et
al., 1992).

Nonhuman Animal Cognition

Nonhuman Cognition
• Pigeons can sort objects into categories
(Wasserman, 1995).
• Great apes can categorize images
(Freedman, 2001).
• Wolfgang Köhler (1925) chimpanzee “Sultan”
insight problem solving.
• Chimpanzee tool use (& imitating tool use).
• Altruism
• Voice recognition

Language & Thought
(psycholinguistics)

Language
• Spoken, written, or signed
communication.

3 building blocks of spoken
language
1. Phonemes
2. Morphemes
3. grammar

Phoneme
• Smallest sound unit.
• B, t, k/c
• 40 in english

Morpheme
• Smallest sound unit that carries
meaning.
• I
• A
• “Pre….” “…ed”
• 100,000 in English

Grammar
• System rules that structure meaning.

Semantics
• meaning

Language Development
• Babbling (4 months)
• One-Word Stage (1-2 years)
• Two-Word Stage (2 years)

Language Development
• 1-18 years we learn about 60,000
words.
• After age 2, we learn about 3,500 words
a year (Bloom, 2000).

Receptive Language
• By 4 months babies recognize
differences in speech sounds.
• By 4 months can read lips.
• Prefer to look at the face that is making
the motion & sound.
• 7 months can distinguish sound
segments into separate words
(Newman, 2006).

Productive Language
• Follows receptive language in development.
• Can recognize incorrect noun/verb placement
before being able to speak it (Bernal, 2010).
• Deaf infants babble with their hands.
• By 10 months, babbling becomes words.
• Without exposure to other languages, babies
lose their ability to hear certain sounds (l & r
in Japanese & English natives).

Language
• 7,000 different languages.
• Noam Chomsky
• Universal Grammar
• LAD: Language Acquisition Device

Telegraphic Speech
• Nouns & verbs
• “go, car”

Critical Period
Sensitive period
Age when development in most effective.
Accent before age 3.
By age 7 children lose their sensitivity to learn
language as a mother tongue.

Brain & Language

Aphasia
• Impairment of language

Broca’s Area (1865)
• Left frontal lobe
• Speech production

Wernicke’s Area (1874)
• Speech comprehension
(understanding)

• Language production & comprehension
is distributed across the entire brain.
• Neural networks are activated for
nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc…
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O101aJ-XG

Nonhuman speech
• 1960s Gardner & Gardner taught
“Washoe” (chimp) 245 signs.
• Chimps can develop can communicate
on the level of a 2 year old human.

Jane Goodall
• http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_goodall_on_wh

Why Dogs Smile and
Chimpanzees Cry
http://youtu.be/DIV9mYHdpwU
• Part II http://youtu.be/cvtiALFufi8

Language & Thought
“We don’t do language, language does
us.” -Martin Heidegger

Linguistic Determinism
• Whorfian Hypothesis (1956)