Language and Thought

m30
Review
Turn to a neighbor and explain to them how you
would find your lost keys using

• an algorithm,

• a heuristic, and

• insight,
With your neighbor, make up examples of

• Mental Set

• Functional Fixedness

• Representativeness Heuristic

• Availability Heuristic
Language Structure
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
Phoneme – a sound

• B, P, and Th

Morpheme — the smallest unit with meaning

• “-ed”, “-ing”, “anti-”, “pre”

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”

Language Development
High school graduates know 80,000 words

That averages to 13 new words per day

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
Babbling
Language-specific babbling
One word
Telegraphic speech
Sentences
Two theories on language acquisition

Noam Chomsky BF Skinner

Nature Nurture
 Chomsky

• Inborn Universal Grammar

• Children’s errors come from
overgeneralizing a rule

• “I petted the rabbit”

• “Granma holded me tightly”
• Nicaraguan Sign Language
 Skinner

• Operant Learning
• Association: sights of things with sounds of
words

• Imitation: copying words & syntax

• Reinforcement: success, smiles & hugs when
child is correct

• “Genie”
Thinking & Language
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

• Thinking in nonlinguistic animals

• Thinking in nonlinguistic adults

• Nonlinguistic thinking in linguistic adults

Do not read the word, just say the
name of the color . . .
Animal Thinking & Language