Language and Thoughts Language Definition o Language A system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules of grammar and convey meaning Grammar A set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to produce meaningful messages Language with meaning but without grammar me ball give Language without meaning but with grammar Colorless green ideas sleep furiously Human language vs nonhuman communication o Human language evolved from signaling systems used by other species but there are three striking differences Great complexity human language can express an infinite number of novel sentences Intangibles Human language can refer to thins do not physically exist like unicorn or democracy Self talk Humans use language to describe things to themselves o Apes and language Early attempts to teach apes to speak failed Vocal tracts cannot accommodate human speech sounds Washoe First ape to learn American Sign Language 1960s Learned approximately 160 words Constructed simple sentences like more fruit novel sentences like water bird and even conceptual ideas like dirty monkey after fighting with a monkey Kanzi Communicates using a keyboard system Kanzi and other apes can understand complex sentences but they can typically only string 3 or 4 signs together Human children are quicker at picking up grammar too Apes can learn words for objects and actions but not abstract concepts e g economics democracy o Distinguishing speech sounds At birth infants can distinguish among the contrasting sounds that occur in all human languages But they lose this ability with in the first 6 months of life and then they can only distinguish among sounds in the alnguages they hear around them r vs l sound in Japanese vs English Different kinds of da in Hindi vs English video o Theories of Language development 1 Behaviorism Children learn langage the way we learn any other skill reinforcement punishment shaping extinction etc Prah gets the baby nothing Dada gets smiles and whoops I no want milk would be corrected by parents o Problems with the behaviorist interpretation Parents typically respond to content not grammar Nobody like me followed by I like you not repeat after me Nobody likes me Children generate more grammatical sentences than they ever hear They learn the rules and often overgeneralize ed for the past tense Runned or even ranned Nativism language development is est explained as an innate biological capacity o Deaf babies babble speech sounds they have never heard o The pattern of language development is similar throughout the world o Language skills can be deficient even if intelligence is unaffected o Acquired during a restricted period during development o Without grammar children will naturally create one Language and Thought o Can we have thoughts without having the language to express the thoughts o Linguistic relativity hypothesis Language shapes the nature of thought Whorf Canadian Inuit have many words for snow His observations were very anecdotal but recent empirical research suggests some language can facilitate processing Ex Russians have two common words for different shades of blue goluboy vs siniy and they can identify them faster than English speakers Concepts and Categories A Two types of categorization a Family Resemblance Theory i Members of a category may share some but not all features ii The category member with the most characteristic features is the Prototype b Exemplar Theory i People make categorizations by comparing new instances to memories of other instances 1 After all we recall not only what prototypical birds look like but also what specific examples of birds look like Decision Making The rational ideal o Expeectancy value we make decisions by Judging the likelihood expectancy of an outcome Judging the value of the outcome good vs bad Multiplying the two quantities together o This ideal was assumed in economic models of decision making behavior for a long time The Irrational Reality o Frequencies vs Probabilities It is MUCH easier to understand frequencies than to understand probabilities We naturally experience the world as frequencies not probabilities o If you watched patients come through one at a time this would be the information that you would know and use Availability Bias o Items which are more readily available in memory are judged to have occurred more frequently Also a type of heuristic A fast and efficient decision making strategy that may facilitate decision making but does not guarantee that an optimal solution will be reached Like a rule of thumb The conjunction Fallacy o The combined probability of an event is always less than the independent probability of each event o With more information you get a better and better description but the likelihood of all those events being true at the same time is very small o Representativeness Heuristic Making a probability judgment by comparing an object or event to a prototype of the object or event We are very good at forming categories based on prototypes and making judgments based on similarity to prototypes Review 6 7 8 and 9 and Psychology and law RATIO NUMBER OF TIMES INTERVAL NUMBER OF TIMES HAVE ELAPSED Nativist view of language