Unit 7: Cognition

1. WHS AP Psychology Unit 7: Cognition Essential Task 7-7: Analyze how culture impacts language (linquistic determinism) and the quality and depth of non-human thought and language-free processing.

2. Algorithms Heuristics Representativeness Heuristic Compensatory Models Decision Making Techniques Problem Solving Techniques Availability Heuristic Unit 6: Cognition Obstacles to Problem Solving Obstacles to Decision Making Biological Factors Memory Acquisition and use of Language Information Processing Model We are here Encoding Storage Retrieval Cultural Factors Cognitive Factors

3. Essential Task 7-7: Outline • Analyze how culture impacts language (linquistic determinism)

4. THINKING AND LANGUAGE Language • Our spoken, written or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.

5. THINKING AND LANGUAGE Language Structure • Phonemes are the smallest sound units in language. • Consonant phonemes carry more meaning than vowel phonemes • Morphemes are the smallest units of language that carries meaning. Includes prefixes and suffixes. • Grammar: Rules in a language that allows us to properly understand it. • Semantics:How we get meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences. • Syntax: How to combine words into meaningful sentences.

6. THINKING AND LANGUAGE How do we learn language? • Receptive language is the child’s ability to comprehend speech. Begins to mature before their productive language, which is their ability to produce words. • Productive Language is a child’s ability to produce words. (improves with improvement of receptive language) • Babbling Stage: (3- 6months after birth) A stage in speech development where the infant utters sounds unlike the family language. • One-word stage: (1-2 years old) A stage in speech development where the infant speaks single words • Two-word stage: (2 years old) Infants speak in two-word phrases that resemble Telegraphic speech – speech like a “telegram” I.e. Want candy, me play, no eat…etc

7. Theories of Language Development • Imitation • Operant Learning • Inborn Universal Grammar (Critical Period)

8. Imitation • Don’t they just listen to what is said around them and then repeat it? • But, sentences produced by children are very different from adult sentences • Cat stand up table • A my pencil • What the boy hit? • Other one pants • And children who can’t speak for physiological reasons learn the language spoken to them. • When they overcome their speech impairment they immediately use the language for speaking.

9. Operant Learning • Language acquisition is governed by operant learning principles. • Association of the sight of things with sounds of words • Imitation of the words/syntax modeled by others • Reinforcement by the caregiver • This assumes that children are being constantly reinforced for using good grammar and corrected when they use bad grammar. (Seldom occurs) • Cute mistakes?

10. Inborn Universal Grammar • Linguist Noam Chomsky • Language is almost entirely inborn • Language will naturally occur • We are hard wired to learn language • Children acquire untaught words and grammar at a rate too high to be explained through learning • Productivity? “I hate you daddy” • Many of the mistakes children make are from overgeneralizing grammar rules they picked up on • Universal Grammar • But children do learn their environment’s language

11. Universal Grammar • All human languages have the same grammatical building blocks, such as nouns and verbs, subjects and objects, negations and questions. • We all start speaking mostly in nouns • We all follow language development stages

12. Critical period • Language Machines - A one year old’s brain is statistically analyzing which syllables most often go together to discern word breaks • Can we keep it up? • No, childhood seems to represent a critical period for mastering certain aspects of language • Once the critical period is over mastering the grammar of another language is very difficult • When a young brain does not learn language its language-learning capacity never develops.

13. THINKING AND LANGUAGE Statistical Learning and Critical Periods • Infants learn statistical aspects of human speech • Saffran exposed 8 mo old infants to a computer voice speaking an unbroken string of nonsense syllables. After two minutes, the infants were able to recognize (by attention) three syllable sequences that appeared repeatedly. • Babies appear to come with a built in readiness to learn grammatical rules (Marcus) • Critical period in childhood seems to be the time that humans can master certain aspects of language. • (proven through deaf children getting cochlear implants at 2 and at 4). • Language learning capacity never fully develops when a young brain does not learn ANY language.

15. THINKING AND LANGUAGE The Brain and Language • Language depends on a chain of events in several brain regions When we read aloud, the words: 1. Register in the visual area. 2. Relayed to the angular gyrus, which transforms the words into auditory code. 3. Received and understood in nearby Wernicke’s area 4. Sent to Broca’s area 5. Brocas controls the motor cortex as it creates the pronounced word.

16. THINKING AND LANGUAGE Damaged Brain and Language: • Depending on which link in this chain is damaged, a different form of aphasia (impaired use of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage) occurs. • For example, damage to the angular gyrus leaves the person able to speak and understand but unable to read. • Damage to Wernicke’s area disrupts understanding. • Damage to Broca’s area disrupts speaking. What we experience as a continuous experience is the visible tip of a subdivided information-processing iceberg, most of which is outside our awareness. More generally, language processing illustrates how the mind’s subsystems are localized in particular brain regions, yet the brain acts as a unified whole.

18. THINKING AND LANGUAGE Explaining Language Development • Skinner described acquisition of language thru association/ operant conditioning. • Overgeneralizing causes a majority of the mistakes associated with language development in young children. • Ex.“I goed to the store” • Noam Chomsky disapproved of Skinner’s description and insisted that universal grammar underlies all human language. • Claimed that this was a natural and inborn process – language acquisition device. • The rules which combine specific phonemes, morphemes, words and sentences are known as surface structure. • Babies can detect the difference between longer syllables in different sequences suggesting that they do indeed have a built in acquisition. • A child can learn any language and will spontaneously invent meaningful words to convey their wishes. However, after age 7, the ability to master a new language greatly declines.

19. THINKING AND LANGUAGE Language influences thinking • Linguistic Benjamin Lee Whorf’s Linguistic determinism states language determines how we think. This is most evident in polylinguals (speaking 2 or more languages). • i.e. someone who speaks English and Chinese will feel differently depending on which language they are using. English has many words describing personal emotions and Chinese has many words describing inter-personal emotions. • However, thinking could occur without language. This is evident in pianists and artists where mental images nourish the mind. • Therefore, thinking and language affect each other in an enduring cycle. • Bilingual Speakers were able to inhibit their attention to irrelevant information. Known as the bilingual advantage.

20. What is the relationship between language and thinking? • Whorf’s Linguistic determinism- suggests that language determines thought, it is more accurate to say that langue influences thought. • Hopi Tribe? Whorf argued that Hopi has "no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time'", and concluded that the Hopi had "no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past". Whorf used the Hopi concept of time as a primary example of his concept of linguistic relativity, which posits that the way in which individual languages encode information about the world, influences and correlates with the cultural world view of the speakers. • In 1983 linguist Ekkehart Malotki published a 600-page study of the grammar of time in the Hopi language, concluding that he had finally refuted Whorf's claims about the language. Malotki's treatise gave hundreds of examples of Hopi words and grammatical forms referring to temporal relations. Malotki's central claim was that the Hopi do indeed conceptualize time as structured in terms of an ego-centered spatial progression from past, through present into the future. He also demonstrated that the Hopi language grammaticalizes tense using a distinction between future and non-future tenses, as opposed to the English tense system, which is usually analyzed as being based on a past/non-past distinction. Psychologist Steven Pinker, a well-known critic of Whorf and the concept of linguistic relativity, accepted Malotki's claims as having demonstrated Whorf's complete ineptitude as a linguist.

21. How about language and color? • Jules Davidoff, a psychologist from Goldsmiths University of London, who worked with the Himba tribe from Namibia. • In their language, there is no word for blue and no real distinction between green and blue.

22. Himba struggle to complete this task – takes a while to pick put the blue square

25. Not determinism but influence! • Another study by MIT scientists in 2007 showed that native Russian speakers, who don't have one single word for blue, but instead have a word for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), can discriminate between light and dark shades of blue much faster than English speakers.

26. THINKING AND LANGUAGE Language influences thinking • Studies of the effects of the generic pronoun “he” show that subtle prejudices can be conveyed by the words we choose to express our everyday thoughts • Some evidence indicates that vocabulary enrichment, particularly immersion in bilingual education, can enhance thinking • Children of signing deaf parents become fluent in sign language and outperform other students on measures of academic and intelligence achievement

27. THINKING AND LANGUAGE Thinking Images • Thinking in images is very useful especially for mentally practicing upcoming events can actually increase our skills. • Visualization can improve skills and/or performance • Procedural Memory is our unconscious memory system for motor and cognitive skills and conditioned associations.