Chapter%208:%20Language%20and%20Thought

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Chapter 8 Language and Thought
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The Cognitive Revolution

• 19th Century focus on the mind
• Introspection
• Behaviorist focus on overt responses
• arguments regarding incomplete picture of human
  functioning
• Empirical study of cognition 1956 conference
• Simon and Newell first computer program
  simulating human problem solving
• Chomsky new model that changed the study of
  language
• Miller famous paper arguing for the 7 plus or
  minus two capacity of STM

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Language Turning Thoughts into Words

• Cognitive science has since grown into a robust,
  interdisciplinary field focusing on language,
  problem solving, decision-making, and reasoning

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Language Turning Thoughts into Words

• Properties of Language
• Symbolic people use spoken sounds and written
  words to represent objects, actions, events, and
  ideas
• Semantic meaningful
• Generative a limited number of symbols can be
  combined in an infinite number of ways to
  generate novel messages
• Structured there are rules that govern
  arrangement of words into phrases and sentences

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The Hierarchical Structure of Language

• Basic sounds are combined into units with
  meaning, which are combined into words, which are
  combined into phrases, which are combined into
  sentences.
• Phonemes smallest speech units
• 100 possible, English about 40
• Morphemes smallest unit of meaning
• 50,000 in English, root words, prefixes, suffixes
• Semantics meaning of words and word
  combinations
• Objects and actions to which words refer
• Syntax a system of rules for arranging words
  into sentences
• Different rules for different languages
• (Verb or subject first in a sentence?)

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Language Development Milestones

• Initial vocalizations similar across languages
• Crying, cooing, babbling (of all phonemes.)
• 6 months babbling sounds begin to resemble
  surrounding language
• 1 year first word
• similar cross-culturally usually dada, mama,
  papa, etc
• While few words are spoken (expressive language)
  at this stage, research indicates that very young
  children may actually understand (receptive
  language) more language than they can produce.

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Language DevelopmentMilestones Continued

• 18-24 months vocabulary spurt, slow acquisition
  of new words suddenly spurts
• fast mapping process by which children map a
  word onto an underlying concept after only one
  exposure
• Toddlers often make errors in using new words.
  Overextensions occur when a child incorrectly
  uses a word to describe a wider set of objects or
  actions than it is meant tousing the word ball
  for anything round

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Language DevelopmentMilestones Continued

• End of second year children begin combining
  words to produce meaningful sentences
• These sentences are characterized as telegraphic,
  because they resemble telegrams, consisting
  mainly of content words, with articles,
  prepositions, and other less critical words
  omittedex., Give doll,"
• Researchers study the language of young children
  by calculating the MLU (mean length of
  utterance), the average length of their spoken
  statements (measured in morphemes).

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Language DevelopmentMilestones Continued

• End of third year complex ideas, plural, past
  tense
• Overregularization generalizing grammatical
  rules incorrectly to irregular cases where they
  do not applyhe goed home, for example.
• Years 4-5 Largest strides in developing language

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Table 8.2 Overview of Typical Language
Development
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BilingualismLearning More Than One Language

• Research findings
• Smaller vocabularies in one language, combined
  vocabularies average
• Higher scores for middle-class bilingual subjects
  on cognitive flexibility, analytical reasoning,
  selective attention, and metalinguistic awareness
• Slight disadvantage in terms of language
  processing speed
• 2nd languages more easily acquired early in life
• Greater acculturation facilitates acquisition
• Acculturation is the degree to which a person is
  socially and psychologically integrated into a
  new culture

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Figure 8.4 Age and second language learning
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Can Animals Develop Language?

• Researchers have attempted to teach language to a
  variety of animals, but the most success has been
  shown with chimpanzees.
• Dolphins, sea lions, parrots, chimpanzees
• One of the biggest problems in teaching human
  language to non-human animals is that the vocal
  apparatus is not the same
• American Sign Language

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Can Animals Develop Language?

• Allen and Beatrice Gardner (1969)
• Chimpanzee - Washoe
• 160 word vocabulary, combining them into simple
  sentences, but showing little evidence of
  mastering the rules of language

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Can Animals Develop Language?

• Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
• Bonobo chimpanzee Kanzi
• geometric symbols that represent words on a
  computer-monitored keyboard
• the star pupil, has taught his younger sister
  much that he has learned about this system. Kanzi
  has acquired hundreds of words and has used them
  in thousands of combinations, many apparently
  spontaneous and rule governed
• his receptive language appears much more
  developed, as he was able to carry out 72 of 660
  spoken requests such as Pour the Coke in the
  lemonade."

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Theories of Language Acquisition

• Behaviorist
• Skinner
• B.F. Skinner from the Behaviorist School
• Baby may imitate a parent.
• If they are reinforced they keep saying the word.
• If they are punished, they stop saying the word.

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Theories of Language Acquisition

• Nativist
• Chomsky
• assert that humans have an innate capacity to
  learn the rules of language
• Language Acquisition Device (LAD) facilitates
  language development.
• We learn language too quickly for it to be
  through reinforcement and punishment.

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Theories of Language Acquisition

• Interactionist hold that biology and experience
  both make important contributions
• Cognitive asserts that language development is
  an important aspect of more general cognitive
  development, depending, like all development, on
  both maturation and experience.
• Social communication interpersonal communication
  has functional value and emphasizes the social
  context in which language evolves.

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Figure 8.5 Interactionist theories of language
acquisition
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Theories of Language Acquisition

• Emergentist theories
• neural circuits supporting language are not
  prewired,
• rather emerge gradually in response to learning
  experiences via incremental changes in
  connectionist networks

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Whorfs Linguistic Relativity

• The idea that language determines the way we
  think.
• The Hopi tribe has no past tense in their
  language, so Whorf says they rarely think of the
  past.

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Problem Solving Types of Problems

• Greeno (1978) three basic classes
• Problems of inducing structure
• Series completion and analogy problems
• where people are required to discover relations
  among numbers, words, symbols, or ideas
• Problems of arrangement
• String problem and Anagrams
• where people arrange the parts of a problem in a
  way that satisfies some criterion. These types
  of problems are often solved by insight, a sudden
  discovery of the correct solution following
  incorrect attempts based primarily on trial and
  error

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Problem Solving Types of Problems

• Problems of transformation
• involve carrying out a sequence of
  transformations in order to reach a specific goal
• Hobbits and orcs problem
• Water jar problem

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Figure 8.6 Six standard problems used in studies
of problem solving
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Effective Problem Solving

• Well defined vs. ill defined problems
• Problems vary in the degree to which they are
  well defined, where the initial state, the goal
  state, and the constraints are clearly specified
  
• most problems in the real world are ill-defined,
  that is, one or more elements among the initial
  state, the goal state, and the constraints are
  incompletely or unclearly specified.

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Effective Problem Solving

• Barriers to effective problem solving
• getting bogged down in Irrelevant Information
• Functional Fixedness the tendency to perceive an
  item only in terms of its most common use
• Mental Set people persist in using
  problem-solving strategies that have worked in
  the past
• Unnecessary Constraints assuming unnecessary
  constraints on the problem

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Figure 8.12 The tower of Hanoi problem
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Approaches to Problem Solving

• Algorithms
• A rule that guarantees the right solution to a
  problem.
• Usually by using a formula.
• They work but are sometimes impractical.

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Guess my phone number using an algorithm.

• 000-000-0000
• 000-000-0001
• 000-000-0002
• 000-000-0003
• 000-000-0004
• Algorithms are slow, but eventually accurate.
  Computers use algorithms

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Approaches to Problem Solving

• Heuristics
• Shortcuts, guiding principles or rules of thumb
  used in solving problems no guaranteed success
• Forming subgoals allows one to solve part of the
  problem
• Working backward works well for a problem that
  has a specified end point
• Searching for analogies involves using a
  solution to a previous problem to solve a current
  one

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Heuristics

• Who would you trust to baby sit your child?
• Your answer is based on your heuristic of their
  appearances.

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Figure 8.16 Representing the bird and train
problem
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• The caravan of a wealthy desert dweller is
  approaching an oasis after a long, hot day. He
  says to two of his lieutenant, To the one of you
  whose horse gets to the oasis last, Ill give
  this camel laden with gold. Immediately they both
  stop. By the time the rear guard of the caravan
  reaches the two lieutenants, they have dismounted
  their horses and each is waiting on the sand for
  the other to become so hot and thirsty that
  getting to the oasis cannot be resisted. Finally,
  they tell the guard their dilemma and ask for
  help. He says two words to them, whereupon the
  lieutenants jump onto the horses and race toward
  the oasis. What did the guard tell them?

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Switch Horses!
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Culture, Cognitive Style,and Problem Solving

• Some cultures foster field dependence, a reliance
  on external frames of reference.
• Others foster field independence, reliance on
  internal frames of reference.
• People who are field independent tend to analyze
  and restructure problems more than those who are
  field dependent.
• Western cultures inspire field independence
• Cultural influence based in ecological demands
  the necessary survival skills in a culture

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Culture, Cognitive Style,and Problem Solving

• Holistic vs. analytic cognitive styles
• Nisbett and colleagues (2001) argue that people
  from East Asian cultures display a holistic
  cognitive style focusing on context and
  relationships among elements in a field (wholes).
• People from Western cultures show an analytic
  cognitive style focusing on objects and their
  properties rather than context (parts).
• Nisbett argues that field-dependence/
  independence is just one facet of a broader
  preference for holistic vs. analytic thinking

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Decision MakingEvaluating Alternatives and
Making Choices

• Simon (1957) theory of bounded rationality
• holds that human decision making strategies are
  simplistic and often yield irrational results
• Making Choices
• Additive strategies used to make choices by
  rating the attributes of each alternative and
  selecting the alternative with most desirable
  attributes
• Elimination by aspects making choices by
  gradually eliminating unattractive alternatives

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Decision MakingEvaluating Alternatives and
Making Choices

• Making Choices (cont.)
• Research shows that people tend to use additive
  strategies when decisions involve relatively few
  options that need to be evaluated on only a few
  attributes
• They shift to elimination by aspects when more
  options and factors are added to a decision
  making task
• Research shows that people will often pursue
  useless information that will not alter their
  decisions when making choices

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Decision MakingEvaluating Alternatives and
Making Choices

• Risky decision making making choices under
  conditions of uncertainty
• Expected value involves what you stand to gain
• Subjective utility what an outcome is personally
  worth to an individualinsurance and sense of
  security
• Subjective probability involves personal
  estimates of probabilitiesoften quite inaccurate

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Table 8.3 Application of the additive model to
choosing an apartment
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Heuristics in Judging Probabilities

• The availability heuristic involves basing the
  estimated probability of an event on the ease
  with which relevant instances come to mind
• estimate divorce rate by recalling number of
  divorces among your friends parents

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Availability Heuristic

• Estimating the likelihood of events based on
  their availability in our memory.

Although diseases kill many more people than
accidents, it has been shown that people will
judge accidents and diseases to be equally fatal.
This is because accidents are more dramatic and
are often written up in the paper or seen on the
news on TV., and are more available in memory
than diseases.

• If it comes to mind easily (maybe a vivid event)
  we presume it is common.

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Representativeness Heuristic
Below is Linda. She loves books and hates loud
noises. Is Linda a librarian or a beautician?

• A rule of thumb for judging the likelihood of
  things in terms of how well they match our
  prototype.
• Can cause us to ignore important information.

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Heuristics in Judging Probabilities

• The conjunction fallacy occurs when people
  estimate that the odds of two uncertain events
  happening together are greater than the odds of
  either event happening alone
• this also appears to be due to the powerful
  nature of the representativeness heuristic
• The alternative outcomes effect occurs when
  peoples belief about whether an outcome will
  occur changes, depending on how alternative
  outcomes are distributed
• even though the summed probability of the
  alternative outcomes is held constant.

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Figure 8.18 The conjunction fallacy
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Understanding Pitfalls in ReasoningAbout
Decisions

• The gamblers fallacy the belief that the odds
  of a chance event increase if the event hasnt
  occurred recently
• Overestimating the improbable describes how
  people tend to greatly overestimate the
  likelihood of dramatic, vivid, but infrequent,
  events that receive heavy media coverage
• Confirmation bias tendency to seek information
  that supports ones decisions and beliefs, while
  ignoring disconfirming information

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Understanding Pitfalls in ReasoningAbout
Decisions

• Belief perseverance the tendency to hang onto
  beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence
• The overconfidence effect the tendency for
  people to put too much faith in their estimates,
  beliefs, and decisions, even when they should
  know better
• Framing how decision issues are posed or how
  choices are structured
• People often allow a decision to be shaped by
  context or by the language in which it is
  presented.

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Belief Perseverance

• Clinging to your initial conceptions after the
  basis on which they were formed has been
  discredited.

All Cowboys fans who still believe that this is
their year are suffering from belief perseverance.
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Overconfidence

• The tendency to be more confident than correct.
• To overestimate the accuracy of your beliefs and
  judgments.

Considering overconfidence do you want to risk
1 million dollars on an audience poll?
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Framing

• 90 of the population will be saved with this
  medication..or
• 10 of the population will die despite this
  medication.
• You should not drink more than two drinks per
  day.or
• You should not drink more than 730 drinks a year.

• The way a problem is presented can drastically
  affect the way we view it.

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Evolutionary Analyses Flaws in Decision Making
and Fast and Frugal Heuristics

• While research shows that human decision making
  is replete with bias and error, evolutionary
  psychologists argue that this is due to the
  laboratory tasks used to measure it.
• They argue that traditional decision research has
  imposed an unrealistic standard in that questions
  are asked in ways that have nothing to do with
  the adaptive problems that humans have evolved to
  solve

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Evolutionary Analyses Flaws in Decision Making
and Fast and Frugal Heuristics

• Cosmides and Tooby (1996)
• argue that human decision making emerged to solve
  adaptive problems
• such as finding food, shelter, and mates and
  dealing with allies and enemies
• many reasoning errors disappear when problems are
  presented in ways that resemble the type of input
  humans would have processed in ancient times
• Unrealistic standard of rationality
• Problem solving research based on contrived,
  artificial problems

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Evolutionary Analyses Flaws in Decision Making
and Fast and Frugal Heuristics

• Gigerenzer (2000)
• argues that humans do not have the time,
  resources, or capacities to gather all
  information, consider all alternatives, calculate
  all probabilities and risks, and then make the
  statistically optimal decision
• Instead, they use the fast and frugal route,
  making quick, one-reason decisions which yield
  inferences that are often just as accurate as
  much more elaborate and time-consuming strategies
  
• Less than perfect but adaptive