PSYC Exam 3 Study Guide PDF

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Exam 3 Study Guide...

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PSYCH Exam 3 Study Guide 1. Language Phonology - Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that are recognizable as speech rather than as a random noise and has an impact on meaning - Phonological rules indicate how phonemes can be combined to produce speech sounds - Every language has them and they’re different for each language - Phonology: the study of how sounds and signs are organized and used in natural languages - Lack of invariance problem: there is no consistent relation between the physical features of the sound and how sounds are perceived - Differences across speakers (speaker identity) - Differences due to context (coarticulation) - Same sound produced differently depending on what comes before or after (“Cape Cod”) - Allophone: one set of possible spoken sounds to produce a single phoneme - Speech segmentation problem: there are no reliable physical cues to the boundaries between words (spaces show up in written language but we don’t actually pause between words) Morphology and Semantics - Morphemes, the smallest meaningful units of language, are created when phonemes combine - Morphological rules indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words - Content morphemes (free) refer to things and events (cat, dog, take) - Function morphemes (bound) serve grammatical functions, such as tying sentences together and indicating time (and, or, but, when) - About ½ of the morphemes in human languages are function morphemes - Function morphemes make human language grammatically complex enough to permit us to express abstract ideas - Morphology: the study of words, the rules for how they are formed, and the relationship between words in the same language - “Arbitrariness of the Sign”: no transparent relation between the sound of the word and the concept/meaning to which it refers - Same sounds, different configurations, not related to their meaning - Onomatopoeia: a word that phonetically resembles the sound it describes - Phonesthesia: clusters of words that share both sounds and meaning elements - Sound symbolism: sounds may actually carry some meaning - The Wug Test: you show a child one bird and say “this is a wug” you show them two and then say “there are two___” and children 3-4 years old will say “wugs” proving that they did not just memorize the word

“birds” because wug was created for this experiment; shows that children know the morphological rules and can generalize in new contexts Syntax - Syntactic rules indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences - Ex. every sentence must contain one or more nouns and verbs (English) - Syntax: the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences and how words can be combined into phrases and phrases into sentences - Chomsky’s contribution to the science of language - Highlighting creativity (“productivity”) of language - Recursion is the process that allows for an infinity of sentences with a finite number of words (invoking an instance of itself) - That syntax exists independent of meaning - “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is significant because it includes perfect syntax but has no actual meaning - Syntax is not a series of linear associations - Surface structure: how a sentence is worded - Deep structure: the meaning of a sentence Pragmatics - Pragmatics: focuses on how people use and understand language in context - Illocutionary act: what the speaker is trying to do with words - Locutionary act: what is actually said Language Development - At birth, infants can distinguish among all the contrasting sounds that occur in human languages - At 6 months, they lose this ability and can only distinguish among the contrasting sounds in the language they hear being spoken around them - They can distinguish speech sounds but cannot produce them independently - Between 4 and 6 months, they begin to babble, involving combinations of vowels and consonants that sound like real syllables but are meaningless - D and T appear in babbling before M and N - Even deaf infants babble, suggesting it is a natural part of the language development process and they aren’t just repeating sounds they hear (deaf babies babble at 11 months though, not 6 months) - Babbling shows the infant is in a state of focused attention and ready to learn - For babbling to continue, infants must be able to hear themselves - Deaf babies who learn ASL begin to babble with their hands at 6 months - At about 10-12 months, infants start to say their first words - At 18 months they can say about 50 words and understand more than that - Generally learn nouns before verbs (table, chair, mom) - When the average child begins school a vocabulary of 10,000 words is normal - By fifth grade, 40,000 words and by college, 200,000 words - Fast mapping is the process of whereby children map a word onto an underlying concept after only a single exposure (why they learn so fast)

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Around 24 months, children begin to produce telegraphic speech, sentences devoid of function morphemes and consist mostly of content words (more milk, throw ball) - Despite function words, these sentences are usually grammatical - Shows they have already learned the syntactic rules of the language Behavioral Explanations: According to Skinner, we learn to talk the same way we learn everything else: through reinforcement, shaping, extinction, etc. - Vocalizations that are not reinforced diminish (prah) while those that are reinforced remain in the child’s vocab (da da) - Children repeat speech patterns that they hear, and adults shape those speech patterns by reinforcing grammatically correct ones and punishing the incorrect ones - This theory cannot account for fundamental characteristics of language development Nativist theory holds that language development is best explained as an innate, biological capacity - According to Chomsky, the brain has a universal grammar, a collection of processes that facilitate language learning - Also that the human brain is equipped with a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) a collection of processes that facilitate language - The critical period hypothesis states that the first few years of life is the crucial time in which an individual can acquire a first language if presented with adequate stimuli, and that first-language acquisition relies on neuroplasticity - Nativist theories are criticized because they do not explain how language develops, only why The interactionist approach holds that although infants are born with an innate ability to acquire language, social interactions play a crucial role in language - Parents tailor their verbal interactions with children in ways that simplify the language acquisition process: they speak slowly, enunciate clearly, and use simpler sentences than they do when speaking with adults Deaf children in Nicaragua (before 1980) were isolated and when they finally got to go to a deaf school, they learned to sign without having been taught or ever seeing it - Researchers have studied their language for signs of other languages - The first people to use Nicaraguan sign made a gesture for something falling but children using the sign now use separate signs for describing direction and type of movement (defining characteristics) - Because they didn’t just copy the older kids it suggests a predisposition to use language to dissect experiences Studies have shown that language acquisition in preschool-age adopted children showed the same orderly progression of milestones that characterized infants’ language learning - This indicates that some of the key milestones of language development depend on experience with English - Adopted children added new words to their vocab more quickly - Main message: observed shifts in early language development reflect specific characteristics of language learning rather than general limitations of cognitive development

Language and Thought - Linguistic relativity hypothesis is the idea that language shapes the nature of thought (Whorf) - The Inuit tribe have many different terms for snow and Whorf believed that, because they have so many different terms, they perceive and think about snow differently than English speakers - Evidence that language can have effects on thought include: - People in a tribe where they have to report the direction they’re going in, stay oriented really well - Some people orient time based on the landscape and cultures who don’t have cardinal numbers (7, 8) have trouble keep track of quantities - Languages that assign masculinity or femininity to nouns cause those nouns to be associated with masculine or feminine adjectives - In English we say “he broke the vase” but in Spanish they say :the vase broke itself” causing English speakers to remember who did it and Spanish speakers to remember that it was an accident (intention) - Causing changes in punishment (language guides reasoning) - Language can have “big” effects (laying out space and time) - Can have “deep” effects (having number words allows for maths) - Can have “early” effects (differences in color recognition) - Can have “broad” effects (grammatical gender) - Can have “weighty” effects (blame and punishment) - In English there’s a color for blue that encompasses all shades of blue but in Russian there are different color names for light and dark blues - When people are tested on their ability to perceptualize these colors, Russian speakers are faster at distinguishing between light and dark blues, and they will show increased brain activity when the colors change from light to dark, but English speakers don’t have that activity Language and the Brain - Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas are connected by the arcuate fasciculus and also interconnected with many other brain regions - Aphasia is difficulty in producing or comprehending language and can result from damage to these specialized language areas - Broca’s area is located in the left frontal cortex and is involved in the production of the sequential patterns in vocal and sign languages - People with damage to this area have Broca’s aphasia, they understand language pretty well but they speak in short, staccato phrases that consist of content morphemes (cat, dog) - Wernicke’s area is located in the left temporal complex and is involved in language comprehension (spoken or signed) - People with Wernicke’s aphasia can produce grammatical speech (usually meaningless) and they have difficulty comprehending language - Active when we make judgements about word meaning, damage to this area impairs comprehension of spoken and signed language; ability to identify non language sounds is unimpaired - The right cerebral hemisphere contributes to language processing and language comprehension

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When words are presented to the right hemisphere using divided visual field techniques (only one side like one eye) the right hemisphere shows some capacity for processing meaning Individuals with damage to the right hemisphere sometimes have subtle problems with language comprehension A number of neuroimaging studies have revealed evidence of a right-hemisphere activation during language tasks Some children who have had their entire left hemispheres removed during adolescence recover many of their language abilities

Language/Communication in Non-Human Animals - Early attempts to teach apes to speak failed because their vocal tracts cannot accommodate the sounds used in human languages - Later attempts were successful, teaching them ASL and how to use computer-monitored keyboards that display geometric symbols - The Gardners worked with a monkey named Washoe as though she were a deaf child, signing to her and assisting her by manipulating her hands in a process called molding - In 4 years, Washoe learned about 160 words and could construct sentences like “More fruit” - She also formed new words like “water bird” for duck - Her offspring Loulis learned 68 signs just by watching Washoe speak ASL to other chimpanzees - Another chimpanzee named Kanzi learned the keyboard system by watching researchers try to teach his mother - Suggests that apes experience a critical period for acquiring communicative system - His passive mastery of language appears to exceed his ability to produce language - Kanzi was tested on 660 spoken sentences asked to carry out simple actions and he correctly performed 72% of the 660 - These results suggest that apes can acquire sizable vocabularies, string together words to form short sentences, and process sentences that are grammatically complex - Research with apes also suggests that the neurological wiring allowing us to learn language overlaps with theirs - Limitations apes exhibit when learning, comprehending, and using human language: - Limited vocabularies: an average 4 y/o has a vocab of 10,000 while Washoe’s was only about 160 - Limited conceptual repertoire: they have the ability to map arbitrary sounds or symbols onto objects and actions but learning the meaning for a word like economics would be difficult - Apes can learn signs for concepts they understand but the words they can master are smaller and simpler than those that humans understand - Limited understanding of grammar: they can string signs together but their sentences usually have only 3 or 4 words - Vervet Monkey Communication: they have an alarm call for certain predators and these calls cause other monkeys to have certain reactions

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They have a “leopard,” “eagle,” and “snake” call, telling them to either hide, climb, or jump Animals have their own versions of language

Cognition Theories of Concepts, Conceptual Representation, and Category Learning - Early psychologists described concepts as rules that specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in a particular category (classical) - A necessary condition is something that must be true of the object in order for it to belong to the category - Ex. a creature needs to be a mammal before it can be a dog - A sufficient condition is something that, if it is true of the object, proves that it belongs to the category - Ex. a German shepherd would be classified as a dog - Family resemblance theory: category members need not all share a definitional feature, but they tend to have several features in common - Most natural categories cannot be so easily defined in terms of this classical approach of necessary and sufficient conditions; two major theories seek to explain how people categorize - Prototype theory is based on the “best” or “most typical” member of a category (Rosch) - A prototype possessed many (or all) of the most characteristic features of the category - People make category judgements by comparing new instances with the categories prototype - Exemplar theory holds that we make category judgements by comparing a new instance with stored memories for other instances of the category - You see something that looks like a wolf in the woods but you say it’s just a dog because it looks like a German shepherd - Exemplar theory is better at accounting for certain aspects of categorization than prototype theory - According to prototype theory, we classify new objects by comparing them to the “prototype” member of a category; according to exemplar theory, we classify objects by comparing them to all category members - In one set of studies, participants classified prototypes faster when the stimuli were presented to the right visual field (left hemisphere receives input first) - Participants classified previously seen exemplars faster when images where presented to the left visual field (right hemisphere receives input first)

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These results suggest that the left hemisphere is primarily involved in forming prototypes while the right hemisphere is mainly active in recognizing exemplars Researchers using neuroimaging have found that we use both prototypes and exemplars when forming concepts and categories - The visual cortex is involved in forming prototypes - Prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia are involved in learning exemplars This suggests that exemplar-based learning involves analysis and decision making (prefrontal cortex), while prototype formation is a more holistic activity involving image processing (visual cortex) Stereotype is the process by which people draw inferences about others based on their knowledge of the categories to which others belong - Stereotypes are self-perpetuating (confirmation bias) - Stereotypes overshadow within-group variation - The data that feed stereotypes are bad/unrepresentative

Concepts, Categories, and the Brain - Category-specific deficit is an inability to recognize objects that belong to a particular category, although the ability to recognize objects outside the category is undisturbed - Have been observed even in brain trauma right after birth - Because category-specific deficit is exhibited even right after birth suggests that the brain is “prewired” to organize perceptual and sensory inputs into broad-based categories (living vs. nonliving) - The type of category-specific deficit depends on where the brain was damaged - Usually results after suffering a stroke or trauma in the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex - Damage to the front part of the left temporal lobe results in difficulty identifying humans (prosopagnosia) - Damage to the lower left temporal lobe results in difficulty identifying animals (lateral) - Damage to the region where the temporal lobe meets the occipital and parietal lobes impairs the ability to retrieve names of tools (medial) - A study on blind adults found that category-preferential regions showed highly similar patterns of activity in the blind and sighted individuals - These results provide compelling evidence that category-specific organization of visual regions does not depend on an individual’s visual experience - The simplest explanation may be that category-specific brain organization is innately determined Social Cognition and the Brain - Children fail to realize that people don’t always know what they know - Ex. if they see someone put chocolate in one cabinet but it gets moved to another, they assume people know it is in the other because they saw it (false-belief task) - Some studies have shown that infants can perform well when given modified versions of the false-belief task to make it easier to respond - Suggests the age at which children acquire these rudimentary understandings of other minds is lower than Piaget suspected

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Theory of mind, the understanding that the mind produces representations of the world and that these representations guide behavior - Children are said to have a theory of mind once they come to understand that they and others have minds that represent the world in different ways - Children typically pass the false-belief task by the age of 5 but only 20% of children with ASD (11 y/o) pass the false-belief task

Heuristics and Algorithms - Heuristics are fast and efficient strategies that may facilitate decision making but do not guarantee that a solution will be reached (system 1) - Mental shortcuts that are often effective when approaching a problem - An algorithm is a well-defined sequence of procedures or rules that guarantees a solution to a problem (system 2) - Ex. following step-by-step directions - Type 1 thinking is fast, intuitive, unconscious thought. ... From Kahneman's perspective, the big difference between type 1 and type 2 thinking is that type 1 is fast and easy but very susceptible to bias, whereas type 2 is slow and requires conscious effort but is much more resistant to cognitive biases Common Flaws in Human Reasoning - Availability bias states that items that are more readily available in memory are judged as having occurred more frequently - Ex. seeing a list of famous women’s names mixed with non-famous men’s names makes people think there are more women’s names than men’s - Affects our estimates because memory strength and frequency of occurrence are directly related - The conjunction fallacy states that people think that two events are more likely to occur together than either individual event - Ex. Linda is an act...