1. Language and Thought
m30

2. Review

3. Turn to a neighbor and explain to them how you
would find your lost keys using
• an algorithm,
• a heuristic, and
• insight,

4. With your neighbor, make up examples of
• Mental Set
• Functional Fixedness
• Representativeness Heuristic
• Availability Heuristic

5. Language Structure

6. Language: our spoken, written, or signed
words and the ways we combine them to
communicate meaning.
Conveys meaning
Arbitrary
Flexible
Allows us to name objects
Enables us to talk about something not present
Generative; we generate, not repeat sentences
Steven Pinker

7. Phoneme – a sound
• B, P, and Th
Morpheme — the smallest unit with meaning
• “-ed”, “-ing”, “anti-”, “pre”

8. Grammar — rules of a language
Syntax — rules for combining words into
grammatically correct sentences
• “The yellow chair is lovely”
• “She skated elegantly”
• “My son has grown another foot”
Semantics — rules of meaning
• “I sawed the chair”
• “That depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is”

9. Language Development

10. High school graduates know 80,000 words
That averages to 13 new words per day

11. Month Stage
4 Babbles all human phonemes
10 Babbling reveals household language
12 One-word stage
24 Two-word, telegraphic speech
Language develops rapidly into
24+
complete sentences

12. Two theories on language acquisition
Noam Chomsky BF Skinner
Nature Nurture

13. Chomsky
• Inborn Universal Grammar
• Children’s errors come from
overgeneralizing a rule
• “I petted the rabbit”
• “Granma holded me tightly”
• Nicaraguan Sign Language

14. Skinner
• Operant Learning
• Association: sights of things with sounds of
words
• Imitation: copying words & syntax
• Reinforcement: success, smiles & hugs when
child is correct
• “Genie”

15. Thinking & Language

16. Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis): a culture’s linguistic concepts
affect the perception and cognition of
members of that culture
In the extreme: linguistic determinism

18. • Thinking in nonlinguistic animals
• Thinking in nonlinguistic adults
• Nonlinguistic thinking in linguistic adults

19. Do not read the word, just say the
name of the color . . .

20. BLUE GREEN YELLOW
PINK RED ORANGE
GREY BLACK PURPLE
TAN WHITE BROWN
Stroop Effect

21. Animal Thinking & Language

22. So, do animals have/ use “Language”?

23. Language: our spoken, written, or signed
words and the ways we combine them to
communicate meaning.
Conveys meaning
Arbitrary
Flexible
Allows us to name objects
Enables us to talk about something not present
Generative; we generate, not repeat sentences
Steven Pinker