CogPsych Chap 9-12
Terms
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- Language
- the use of an organize means of combining words in order to communicate
- Psycholinguistics
- the psychology of our language as it interacts with the human mind
- Verbal comprehension
- the receptive ability to comprehend written and spoken linguistic input, such as words, sentences, and paragraphs
- Verbal fluency
- the expressive ability to produce linguistic output
- phoneme
- the smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance in a given language from another
- morpheme
- the smallest unit that denotes meaning within a particular language
- content morphemes
- the words that convey the bulk of the meaning of a language
- function morphemes
- add detail an nuance to the maning of the content morphemes or help the content of morphemes fit the grammatical context
- communication
- exchange of thoughts and feelings
- syntax
- refers to the way in which users of a particular language put words together to form sentences
- noun phrase
- contains at least one noun and includes all the relevant descriptors of the noun
- verb phrase
- contains at least one verb and whatever the verb acts on
- semantics
- the study of meaning in a language
- discourse
- encompasses language use at the level beyond the sentence, such as in conversation, paragraphs, stories, chapters, and entire works of literature
- Coarticulation
- occurs when phonemes or other units are produced in a way that overlaps them in time
- categorical perception
- discontinuous categories of speech sounds
- denotation
- street dictionary definition of a word
- connotation
- a word's emotional overtones, presuppositions, and other nonexplicit meanings
- grammar
- the study of language in terms of noticing regular patters
- phrase-structure grammars
- analyze the structure of phrases as they are used
- transformational grammar
- involves the study of transformational rules that guide the ways in which underlying propositions can be rearranged to form various phrase structures
- deep structure
- refers to an underlying syntactical structure that links various phrase structures through the application of various transformation rules
- surface structure
- refers to any of the verious phrase structures that may result from such transformations
- Thematic roles
- ways in which items can be used in the context of communication
- babbling
- the infant's preferential production largely f those distinct phonems - oth vowels and consonants - that are characteristic of the infant's own language
- Telegraphic speech
- can be used to describe two or three word utterances and even slightly longer ones, if they have omissions of some function morphemes
- language-acquisition device
- a biologically innate mechanism that facilitates language acquisition
- hypothesis testing view
- children acquire language by mentally forming tentative hypotheses regarding language, based on their inherited facility for language acquisition and then testing these hypotheses in the environment
- child-directed speech
- simpler sentence constructions when speaking with infants and young children
- over-regularization
- occurs when individuals apply the general rules of language to the exceptional cases that vary from the norm
- lexial processes
- used to identify letters and words
- comprehension processes
- used to make sens of the text as a whole
- lexical access
- the identification of a word that allows us to gain access to the meaning of the word from memory
- word-superiority effect
- letters are read more easily when they are embedded i nwords than when they are presented either in isolation or with letters that do not form words
- linguistic relativity
- the assertion that the speakers of different languages have differing cognitive systems and that these different cognitive systems influence the ways in which people speaking the various languages think about the world
- linguistic universals
- characteristic pattersn across all languages of various cultures - and relativity
- bilinguals
- people who can speak two languages
- monolinguals
- people who can speak only one language
- single-system hypothesis
- suggests that two languages are represented in just one system or brain region
- dual-system hypothesis
- suggests that two languages are represented somehow in separate systems of the mind
- dialect
- a regional variety of language distinguished by features such as vocabulary, syntax, and pronunciation
- slips of the tongue
- inadvertent linguistic errors in what we say
- metaphors
- juxtapose two nouns in a way that positively asserts their similarities, while not disconfirming their dissimilarities
- speech acts
- address the question of what you can accomplish with speech
- cooperative principle
- by which we seek to communicate in ways that make it easy for our listener to understand what we mean
- problem solving cycle
- includes problem identification, problem definition, strategy formulation, organization of information, allocation of resources, monitoring, and evaluation
- analysis
- breaking down the whole of a complex problem into manageable elements
- synthesis
- putting together various elements to arrange them into something useful
- divergent thinking
- generating a diverse assortment of possible alternative solutions to a problem
- convergent thinking
- narrowing down the multiple possibilities to converge on a single best answer
- well-structured problems
- clear paths to solutions
- illstructured problems
- lack clear paths to solutions
- problem space
- universe of all possible actions that can be applied to solving a problem, given any constraints that apply to the solution of the problem
- algorithms
- sequences of operations that may be repeated over and over again and that, in theory, guarantee the solution to a problem
- heuristics
- informal, intuitive, speculative strategies that sometimes lead to an effective solution and sometimes do not
- isomorphic
- formal structure is the same, and only content differs
- insight
- a distinctive and sometimes seemingly sudden understanding of a problem or of a strategy that aids in solving the problem
- prodtuctive thinking
- involves insights that go beyond the bounds of existing associations
- selective-encoding insights
- involve distinguishing relevant from irrelevant information
- selective-comparison insights
- involve novel perceptions of how new information relates to old information
- selective-combination insights
- involve taking selectively encoded and compared snippets of relevant information and combining that information in a novel, productive way
- functional fixedness
- the inability to realize that something known to have a particular use may also be used for performing other functions
- stereotpes
- beliefs that members of a social group tend more or less uniformly to have particular types of characteristic
- transfer
- any carryover of knowledge or skills from one problem situation to another
- negative transfer
- occurs when solving an earlier problem makes it harder to solve a later one
- positive transfer
- occurs when the solution of an earlier problem makes it easier to solve a new problem
- transparency
- people see analogies where they do not exist becaouse of similarity of content
- incubation
- putting the problem aside for a while without consciously thinking about it
- fallacy
- erroneous reasoning
- judgment and decision making
- used to select from among choices or to evaluate opportunities
- subjective utility
- where is a calculation based on teh individual's judged weightins of utility, rather than an objective criteria
- subjective probability
- a calculationbased on the individual's estimates of liklihood, rather than on objective statistical computations
- bounded rationality
- we are rational but within limits
- satisficing
- we consider options one by one, and then we select an option as soon as we find one that is satisfactory or just good enough to meet our minimum level of acceptability
- elimination by aspects
- we eliminate alternatives by focusing on aspects of each alternative, one at a time
- representativeness
- we judge the porbablility of an uncertain event according to how obviously it is similar to or representative of the population from which it is derived and the degree to which it relfects the salient feature of the process by which it is generated
- base rate
- refers to the prevalence of an event or charactersitc within is population of events or characteristics
- availability heuristic
- we make judgements on the basis of how easily we can call to mind what we perceive as relevant instances of a phenomenon
- illusory correlation
- which we tend to see particular events or particular attributes and categories as going together because we are predisposed to do so
- overconfidence
- an individual's overvaluation of her or his own skills
- hindsight bias
- when we look at a situation retrospectively we believe we easily can see all the signs and events leading up to a particular outcome
- reasoning
- the process of drawing conclusions from principles and from evidence