8.1: Thinking and Reasoning

• One of the best psychology lessons we can learn is to appreciate our mental capacities.
• Think and use language.
• Almost every second of our waking hours, we rely on them, but rarely notice the complexity that goes into them.
• We only notice ourselves thinking when we have to solve problems or struggle to come up with new ideas.
• One example of the kind of challenges we face when we solve problems is described in the video above.

• We'll look at the whys and hows of our thinking and communicating in this chapter.

• We will look at our thinking and reasoning processes in everyday life and discover how we solve problems.
• We will discover how our thinking and reasoning work and how they go wrong.
• We'll look at how we communicate and comprehend meaning using words, and the enormous challenges we face, while doing so.

• There are methods for achieving cognitive economy.
• There are nearly all of the chapters that describe aspects of thinking in this text.
• Learning, remembering, perceiving, communicating, believing, any mental activity or processing is included.
• All aspects of cognitive science are fundamental.

• Behaviorists attempted to explain mental activity in terms of stimuli and response, reinforcement and punishment, as we discovered in the text.
• Communication, believing, and psychologists have known for a long time that our minds often go beyond the available information, making leaps of insight and drawing inferences.
• We fill in the gaps to create information that isn't in the environmental inputs.
• Traditional forms of behaviorism can't account for this phenomenon.

• Our brains have adapted to the complexity of the cognitive tasks we must perform every day.
• That's where the cognitive economy starts.
• A variety of ways that reduce our mental effort but allow us to get things right most of the time can be found in Chapter 8.

• Our minds use a variety of mental tricks to increase our thinking efficiency.
• Our survival is probably enhanced by the use of heuristics.
• Humans have been safe from marauders and enemy tribes since before recorded history.
• In some cases, heuristics can get in our way.
• The chance to meet a potential mate or someone with unique skills can be missed if we avoid strangers.
• They're useful in everyday life because we've developed them for a reason.

• Every day, we process an enormous amount of information.

• When we wake up, we must take into account the time we wake up, the shower time, and any obstacles on the floor between us and the shower.
• We've even stepped out the door.
• If we were to draw conclusions about every aspect of our experience, we would be so overwhelmed that we would be paralyzed.

• Most of the time, the inferences we draw steer us in the right direction.
• If our roommate's keys are lying on the coffee table, we might think he's home.
• We might conclude that the stressed-looking woman walking briskly by staring at her phone is not the best person to stop and ask for directions.
• Without actually tasting it, we can decide that the three-week-old milk in our refrigerator has gone bad based on its smell alone.

• Under rigorous standards of evidence-based reasoning, each of these conclusions is unwarranted.
• Most of the guesses are probably accurate enough to be safe bets.

• The cognitive economy allows us to simplify what we attend and keep the information we need for decision-making to a manageable minimum.

• This type of cognitive economy is referred to as "fast and frugal" thinking by Gigerenzer, Hertwig, and Pachur.

• He said that it serves us well most of the time.

• A study shows that untrained observers can make accurate judgements about people.
• A group of untrained observers were asked to look at the dorm rooms and bedrooms of students for a few minutes.
• Observers couldn't determine the sex, race, or age of the rooms' inhabitants because the researchers didn't give instructions about what features of the room to focus on.
• Observers can be open to new experiences and conscientiousness, according to research done by Samuel Gosling and his team.
• Observers think people's personality traits are based on mental shortcuts to draw conclusions from their rooms.
• What did they have to say about them?

• People are less able to figure out a person's personality from their online persona than they are from their social media accounts, suggesting that the online persona of a person may be more indicative of how they want to be perceived than how they really are.

• Another example of how cognitive economy serves us well is provided by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal.
• They showed participants silent clips of instructors teaching and asked them to evaluate their behavior.
• When the clips were only six seconds long, the participants' ratings were still predictive of the end-of-course evaluations by their students, even though they only had 30 seconds of exposure.

• After observing just 15 minutes of a couple's videotaped interaction, John and his colleagues were able to predict which couples would divorce within 15 years.
• The emotion of contempt is one of the best predictors.

• It is a mixed blessing that cognitive economy can lead to faulty conclu sions.
• Although our snap judgments are usually accurate, we can sometimes be wildly wrong.
• People with psychopathic personality, a condition marked by dishonesty, callousness, and lack of guilt, along with self-confidence and superficial charisma, often come across to others as quite appealing at first.

• If we meet someone who is shy, awkward, and a tournament chess player, we might guess that he is more likely to be a prototype computer science major than a communications major.
• This person matched our stereotype of a computer science major.

• The representative behavior can lead to incorrect conclusions.

• Imagine we met another student who is Asian American, bilingual, and vice president of the college's Figure 8.1 A Floral Demonstration of Base Rates.

• There are more psychology majors within the broad group of Asian American students than there are Asian American Studies majors.
• She's more likely to be a psychology major according to the odds.

• According to the American Psychiatric Association, alcoholism has a base rate of 5 percent in the U.S. population.

• This bouquet includes purple irises and yellow and similar that person is to other members of the category, but also how purple tulips.

• Base rates are neglected when evaluating medical information.
• The response fails to take base rates into account.
• Many students who have a grandparent with schizo irises are purple and yellow in the textbooks.
• It's 500 percent more likely that you're going to get schizophrenia if you draw a purple flower at random.
• There are more purple grandchildren of people with this condition.
• The base rate tulips as there are purple irises.
• This means that the base rate of purple tulips in this bouquet is higher than the base rate of purple irises in the general population.

• Even though there are many more words with k as the third letter in English, it's easier to think of words that start with k.

• We estimate the likelihood of an occurrence based on how easily it comes to our minds and how accessible it is in our memories.
• Availability works well like representativeness.
• If we ask you if there's a higher density of trees on your college campus or in the downtown area of the nearest major city, you're likely to say yes.
• It's not likely that you calculated the precise proportion of trees in each place after you answered the question.
• You probably called to mind mental images of your campus and of a downtown area, because the examples of the campus that came to mind more often had trees in them than the examples of downtown areas that came to mind.

• You may want to try on this example with your friends.
• Ask half of your friends to guess the number of murders per year in Michigan and the other half to guess the number of murders per year in Detroit.
• The people who were asked about the state of Michigan estimated 100 murders per year, but the people who were asked about Detroit estimated 200 murders per year.

• When we think of the state of Michigan, we conjure up images of large farms and peaceful suburbs.
• When we think of Detroit, we conjure up images of crime.
• The idea of Detroit can lead to faulty conclusions.

• When thinking of words with 'k' in them, words starting with 'k' are more likely to come to mind.
• Even though we know a lot of words with 'k' as the third letter, it's more difficult to create words with it.

• Nostradamus was a 16th-century prophet who wrote four-line poems.

• The larger part of the battlefield will be against the Hister.
• The child of Germany observes nothing when the great one is drawn.

• You won't.
• You're likely to find that the poem fits the event because it's about Hitler's rise to power.
• This is an example of hindsight bias.

• The term "Monday Morning Quarterbacking" comes from when commentators and spectators of a football game point out that a different strategy would have worked better.
• It's much easier to say "It would have worked better if..." if you already know that the action hasn't worked.
• Many American politicians were in favor of the military intervention in Iraq.
• Many American politicians insisted that it was obvious that from the misheard song lyrics, that An example of top-down processing comes sion wasn't going well.
• It was a terrible idea to invade Iraq.
• Everything seems obvious, once we know that the phenomenon was a line from the Taylor outcome.

• "Got a long list of eses or beliefs and to deny, dismiss, or distort evidence that doesn't" is the real line.
• Scientific methods help us compensate for the bias in research.
• Confirmation bias can have consequences for our real-world logic, especially if we decide to make a decision.

• Our brains have evolved to process things in other ways.
• We fill in the gaps of missing information using our experience and background knowledge.
• Topdown processing is called a phenomenon by psychologists.
• We can contrast top-down processing with bottom-up processing, in which our brain processes only the information it gets, and builds meaning from it slowly and surely.

• In the text (LO 4.1a), we saw how our perception differs from sensation because we rely on stored knowledge and raw sensory input to interpret our experiences.
• A memory aid that relies on our ability to organize information into larger units, expanding the span and detail of our memories is chunking.
• Our brain's tendency to simplify our cognitive functioning by using existing knowledge to spare us from reinventing the wheel is highlighted in each of these examples.

• One of the main sources of top-down processing that helps us to think and reason is our use of concepts.
• There are concepts of the properties that all motorcycles share.
• We have stored in our memory how certain actions, objects, and ideas relate to each other.
• When we acquire knowledge, we create schemas that allow us to know what to expect in a given situation and to draw on it when we encounter something new.

• When dealing with a new dog, a concept allows us to have all of our general knowledge at our disposal.
• We don't need to know that Rover barks when he's hot and has a stomach.
• All of these things are free once we recognize Rover as a dog.
• When we go to a new doctor's office, no one has to tell us to check in with the receptionist and sit in the waiting room until someone calls us to enter an examining room, because our schema for doctors' visits tells us that this is the standard script.

• Some high-end restaurants have begun violating our knowledge and ideas about a set dining-out model by collecting payment from diners by credit card before arrival, so that objects, actions, and characteristics don't change hands after the meal.
• Most of the time, our concepts and schemas that share core properties allow us to exert less cognitive effort over basic knowledge, freeing us to engage in more complex reasoning and emotional processing.

• We've all had times when we thought we were talking to ourselves.
• We think in words sometimes.

• There are many reasons to doubt linguistic determinism.

• The brain regions that are activated when people read are not as active during other cognitive tasks, such as spatial tests and visual imagery.
• Studies show that thought can be done without language.

• It's clear that linguistic determinism doesn't have much going for it.

• Proponents of this view believe that the characteristics of language affect our thought processes.

• Concepts are not reliant on any specific knowledge or experience.

• We don't have to start from scratch every time we encounter a new object, event, or situation because we have concepts that carry prior knowledge and experience with them.

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• The brain scans on the right show the frontal and parietal lobes being activated when the participant is engaging in motor activity that is non-linguistic.
• The right image shows no temporal activation, which shows that cognitive processing doesn't always involve linguistic processing.

• There is evidence for and against linguistic relativity.

• Several studies show that language can affect thinking.
• The memories of Russians who moved to the United States were looked at by two researchers.
• Even though they were in the United States, these participants recalled events in Russia more accurately when they spoke Russian and in the United States more accurately when they spoke English.

• Language doesn't seem to influence thought in some cases.
• One example is color categorization.

• The language of the Dani people is dark and bright, but not for individual colors.
• People in the same boat as us can distinguish colors.

• The fact that people who don't have color terms still have distinct categories of colors such as red and blue shows that language doesn't always influence thought.

• In English, we use a set of 11 basic color terms: red, blue, green, yellow, white, black, purple, orange, pink, brown, and gray.
• Other languages have fewer terms.
• Most people around the world still think of colors as being roughly the same color categories.

• Evidence suggests that language shapes some aspects of perception, memory, and thought.
• It's not easy to disentangle the influences of language and culture when researchers identify language related differences in thought.
• The priorities, emphases, and values of different language communities affect how they think about the world.
• Cross-linguistic comparisons are correlational rather than experimental.
• We need to be careful when we draw conclusions about the impact of language on thinking.

• The hypothesis suggests that the language we use to describe something can affect our thinking.

• Discover what makes us make decisions.
• It is probably the most difficult and effortful thinking we do.
• These aspects of thinking are called higher-order thinking because they require us to take all of the more basic aspects of cognitive functioning, such as perception, knowledge, memory, language, and reasoning, and integrate them to generate a plan of action.

• It's an either- or choice when we make a decision.
• There are many factors that enter into decisions.
• The question of whether to order a salad or fries is seemingly straightforward.
• Depending on a number of factors, such as whether we're watching our weight, whether we like the type of salad dressings and fries available at the restaurant, and maybe even what everyone else at our table is ordering, such a choice can often be made.
• We often weigh the considerations below conscious awareness for many small decisions.
• System 1 thinking, which is rapid and intuitive, is what this process typically involves.
• For some decisions, such as where to go to college or whether to get married, the consequences are much larger and require more careful deliberation.

• Decision-making becomes more deliberate in these cases.
• We may ask friends, family, and trusted advisers for their opinions of the pros and cons of each option.
• System 2 thinking is slow and analytical.

• It depends.
• Female college students were given a choice of five art posters to take home.
• Half of the students were asked to pick a poster they liked and the other half to list the pros and cons of each poster.
• The participants who went with their guts reported to the researchers that they were much happier with their choices.
• When it comes to emotional preferences, such as which art we like or which people we find attractive, thinking too much can get us in trouble.
• Our brains can easily become overwhelmed by excessive information and this may be the case for complex, emotionally laden decisions such as which car to buy.

• Careful analysis may be the better way to evaluate scientific claims in the laboratory and in real life.
• In chess playing or business negotiations, slower and more deliberative decision-making tends to result in better outcomes.
• Managers are being encouraged to be more strategic in their decisions about personnel, resources, and organizational structure.
• The new field of "decision management" attempts to bring scientific evidence into the business world to help organizations prosper through sound decision-making and avoid bias.

• The fact that our decisions are influenced by framing can affect our decisions.
• Decision-making about retirement savings, healthcare plan selection, and student loan repayment plans are all influenced by framing, which leads people to make irrational decisions that aren't in their best interest.
• In 2015, the U.S. President issued an executive order instructing government agencies to take framing and other behavioral science considerations into account when developing materials for U.S. citizens.

• By using fMRI to identify brain areas that become active in specific decision-making situations, researchers hope to better predict and understand how emotion, reasoning, and arousal influence our decisions.
• The decision-making process causes areas of the brain involved in processing rewards as well as areas involved in attending carefully to the relative merits of different options.

• The brain's reward areas are important for motivation, but attentional control is associated with better choices.
• It is possible to understand why decision-making goes wrong in some people.
• Clinical psychologists are exploring how to use neuroscience to diagnose psychological disorders.

• Radiation has a 100 percent post-procedure survival rate and a 22 percent 5-year survival rate.

• Imagine if you were diagnosed with a brain tumor.
• There is a 10 percent post-procedure fatality rate and a 66 percent 5-year fatality rate for surgery.

• Radiation has a 0 percent post-procedure fatality rate and a 78 percent 5-year fatality rate.

• If you chose surgery and radiation, you chose surgery in the first scenario and radiation in the second.
• This is the most common response.
• If you look closely, you can see that the two scenarios are the same.
• The survival rate is the same as the death rate.

• The different framing leads us to think differently about death.

• Even though the second scenario gave you a one in ten chance of dying, you chose surgery in both scenarios.
• The first scenario gave you the same odds, but presented differently.
• The long-term odds of survival would be higher with surgery than with radiation, if you resisted the framing bias that influences a lot of people's thinking.

• Many people are more likely to choose surgery in the first scenario because it offers a 90 percent post-procedure survival rate, but are scared off by surgery in the second scenario.
• You might have been showing a different bias.
• The 5-year survival rate would have been higher with surgery.
• When choosing a treatment plan, you may have been over emphasizing immediate survival.

• Most people have the same treatment plans.
• The majority of people choose surgery in the first scenario and radiation in the second.
• The people who picked surgery first and radiation second were influenced by the framing of the question because both of the scenarios presented the exact same information.
• 90 percent survival in the first scenario is the same as 10 percent in the second.
• The different framing made you think differently about the options.

• In the first scenario you were thinking about immediate survival being at 100 percent but in the second scenario you realized that long-term prognosis should also be taken into account.

• We're faced with a lot of problems on a daily basis.
• It's simple to figure out where we left our shoes, but it's also possible to recover a corrupted computer file or figure out how to fit luggage into an overnight bag.

• We've encountered a variety of heuristics, like accomplish a goal availability and representativeness, that we use to draw conclusions and solve problems in a fast and frugal way.
• We can draw on a variety of more deliberate solutions.

• The same basic steps for arriving at a solution every time are required to solve a problem such as replacing the starter on a car, or making a peanut butter and banana.
• They're pretty inflexible and ensure that we address all steps when we solve a problem.
• Imagine if you ran out of butter after cooking a mushroom omelet that included melting some butter.
• You could either give up or use your head to find a more flexible solution.

• A more flexible approach is to break a problem into smaller problems that are easier to solve.
• If we want to build a doghouse, we need to identify the size and dimensions of the doghouse, purchase the materials, build the floor, and so on.
• We can often solve the problem by breaking it down into smaller pieces.

• Thinking, Reasoning, and Language 293 baking recipes might work for an omelet as well.
• Similar structures are solved with these analogies.
• After observing how burrs stuck to his dog's fur by using a series of tiny hooks that attached to individual strands of fur, George de Mestral invented Velcro in 1948.

• Another approach to generating solutions to problems is distributed cognitive.

• The thinking is spread across many brains.
• People think of solutions that wouldn't have occurred to them after hearing someone else's idea.
• This approach has been used by psychologists to improve outcomes in everything from medical treatment planning to sports team performance.
• Group problem solving can be problematic if everyone gets stuck in the same mindset.
• If everyone is willing to share a unique perspective, distributed problem solving can be effective.

• We face a variety of hurdles that can interfere with the use of effective problem-solving strategies.
• salience of surface similarities, mental sets and functional fixedness are obstacles that we will consider.

• The word salience means attention- grabbing.
• We try to solve problems the same way we solved problems that exhibited similar surface characteristics by focusing our attention on the superficial properties of the problem.
• The fact that both deal with trains isn't going to help us when we have a word problem.
• It can be difficult to ignore the surface features of a problem and focus on the underlying reasoning.

• Try to solve the two problems described.

• A doctor is trying to treat a stomach tumor by using a laser, but he knows that his forces are vulnerable to attack, so he divides them up into many units to destroy the tumor.
• Can you follow a different path?
• The fortress is taken without significant loss of troops if you surround it along with a solution that destroys the tumor but protects the healthy paths.

• The reasoning process is the same as the first.
• Sending in lots of lowintensity beams from many directions would work for both the fortress scenario and the tumor problem.
• Only 20 percent of students who saw the fortress problem figured out the tumor problem.
• When researchers told students that the fortress problem could help them solve the tumor problem, their success went up to 92 percent.
• The students didn't notice that the fortress solution was relevant.

• A different solution is required for the third problem.

• When attempting to pick a topic for a term phenomenon of becoming stuck in paper, we may have trouble thinking of topics the professor hasn't already covered in class.

• Half of the participants solved eight problems that used the same formula, while the other half solved only the ninth problem that used a different formula.
• Only 36 percent of participants solved the first eight problems the same way.
• The participants who solved the ninth problem generated a correct solution 95 percent of the time.

• There are ways to break out of mental sets.
• One study showed that giving people jars to manipulate made them less likely to get stuck in a mental set.
• The approach worked well for participants with strong visual-spatial skills.
• Functional Figure 8.4 is used for studies.

• We become fixated on one use for an object.

• A classic demonstration of functional fixedness can prevent us from realizing that we could use a shoe as functional fixedness requires participants to hammer or a mailing label as tape.

• To figure out how to mount a candle on a wall, pants are needed.

• In good company are Thinking, Reasoning, and Language 295.
• The problem is difficult because it forces us to use conventional objects in unconventional ways.

• The idea of functional fixedness was challenged in the Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses study.
• The researchers found that people from a rural area of Ecuador who live in a traditional Have important alternative nontechnological society have few expectations about the functional explanations for the findings of these objects.

• One recently documented solution is to shift attention from the overall problem to smaller, obscure details, such as the color and texture of the match head or how the corners of the match box are constructed.
• The shift of focus seems to help us to see objects in a different way.

• He built food smokers out of cardboard boxes and flower pots to show how to overcome functional fixedness.
• You can either overcome functional fixedness or you can't solve a problem because of functional fixedness.

• Many psychologists used a computer analogy to explain the mind's tendency to process information.
• They suggested that thinking is like running data through a computer program.
• The brain runs data through its "software program" and spits out an answer.

• Most modern psychologists believe that a computer analogy doesn't do a good job of explaining how we think.

• Some of the tasks that humans find easiest are among the most difficult for computers.
• Although we can perceive and recognize speech without difficulty, computers are notoriously poor at this task, so anyone who's tried to use voice commands on an automated phone menu knows that.
• Humans beat out computers on such tasks because we can take context into account and draw subtle inferences that computers can't.
• In the context of him apologizing for not bringing you something he promised, we might hear someone say something like "I frog," but that occurs in the context of him apologizing for not bringing you something he promised.
• A computer won't be able to use top-down knowledge to resolve this ambiguity.
• Computers have a hard time thinking about the world because they tend to represent their knowledge in a more simplistic way.
• Humans find the answer laughably obvious because there are no aspects of salads that relate to shirts.

• Humans think differently than computers because computers don't have a chance to interact with the world.
• We observe the consequences of our actions from infancy.

• Inter allows us to practice our actual experiences.
• People who hear the sentence "The man saw the eagle in the sky" and then see a picture of an eagle are more likely to label the eagle if its wings are spread than if it is folded close.
• The studies of brain activity are consistent with the embodied approach to thinking.
• The brain's sensory areas become activated when people think about things.

• One of the main goals of this text is to raise awareness about how our cognitive systems can lead us astray and how we can guard against this tendency.
• Awareness can help us recognize situations in which we're vulnerable to faulty reasoning and to think twice about our intuitions.
• When we hear that one presidential candidate is leading in the polls or that bilingual education is bad for children, we should think about the information that the media used to make these conclusions.
• We should think about what scientific research says instead of relying on a hand when making a decision about a diet plan.

• Discuss the pros and cons of bilingualism.

• We think that words have fixed meanings, like the ones in the dictionary.
• How we interpret a word is dependent on its context.
• There are many funny misunderstandings when contextual information is missing.

• Table 8.1 shows examples of newspaper headlines that result in unintentionally humorous interpretations.

• A hallmark of most language is that its sounds, words, and sentences are not related to their meaning.
• Language is used for several important functions.
• The transmission of information is the most obvious.
• The New Yorker Collection 1987 Michael Maslin from cartoonbank.com was the author of "The party starts at nine."

• When taken out of context, language can be ambiguous and even funny.
• The examples are ambiguous because they use multiple meanings.
• There are two possible interpretations of the examples in (B).

• Key social and emotional functions are served by language.
• We spend a lot of time establishing and maintaining our relationships.

• We take language for granted because it's an automatic cognitive process.

• We don't realize how many different types of sounds our vocal complex language has until we try to learn a new one.
• Our ability to use apparatus requires coordination of an enormous number of cognitive, social, and physical skills.

• The sounds produced by our vocal apparatus are called phonemes.
• These categories are influenced by our vocal tract, which includes our lips, teeth, tongue, and throat.

• Experts disagree on the total number of phonemes in all of the world's languages, but they agree that each language has a subset of them.
• Depending on how we count them, English has between 40 and 45 phonemes.
• Some languages have as few as 15 while others have more than 60.

• Some languages contain sounds that aren't found in other languages.
• The Hawaiian language contains a small amount of learning a second language.
• The Japanese language has a single sound category that includes both "r" and "l" sounds, "ingredients" with which to construct words.
• It's difficult for native English speakers to understand why many Hawaiian words and names are different.
• Similar examples that turn the tables consist of only a few words.

• English speakers are able to distinguish between "d" and "t" sounds.

• They were created by stringing together phonemes.
• Words and sentences are what derive the meaning.
• We have strings of sounds that aren't words by themselves, but modify the meaning of words when they're tacked onto them.

• These are also morphemes, although they don't have the same meaning.

• Syntax is a set of rules for constructing sentences.
• Morphological markers change the meaning of a word based on a rule of the language.

• If you were to write down what your psychol meaning is derived from words, you would find that he or she violates at least one or two rules.
• It is similar to the formal language we read in written documents.
• Language requires a lot of cognitive processing.
• We need to know what others intend to say even if their sentences are incomplete.

• Most of the time, we think of language as self-explanatory, because we say what we mean and mean what we say.
• We take a lot of additional information for granted when interpreting the language we hear.
• Extralinguistic information is important in allowing us to interpret it.

• The context affects how we interpret a sentence.

• Context is used to interpret language.

• Misunderstandings can happen if people don't pay attention to this information or if some of it is blocked.

• There isn't enough information in this sentence to figure out what the speaker means.
• To understand her, we need to look at her facial expressions and gestures, as well as what people were saying prior to her making the statement.
• If she waved her hand in front of her face and wiped her forehead while standing in a hot kitchen, we would assume she was referring to the room's temperature.
• If she's holding her nose and looking disgusted while standing in a seafood shop, we think she's referring to a terrible smell.
• She might be referring to how crowded the room is if she has a frustrated look on her face and someone just commented on the huge number of people at the event she's attending.

• Although each language has its own set of phonemes, morphemes, and syntactic rules, there's variability in these elements within, as well as across, languages.
• People who share geographic speakers of two dialects can understand each other, even if they don't speak the same language.
• dialects may have slight variations of the standard pronunciations and vocabulary.
• You can refer to a drink as "soda," "pop," "tonic," or "Coke" depending on where you live.
• It's important to understand that speakers of dialects that differ from the standardized version of the native language are following a slightly different set of rules.

• Many people assume that speakers of nondominant dialects are trying to speak the majority version of the dialect.
• This assumption can lead to prejudice.

• The speakers of these dialects use the same rules in their speech as the "mainstream" dialect.

• They're using an equally valid rule-based form of communication as long as they're using these constructions systematically.
• People who speak non-standard dialects are stereotyped as being stupid or lazy.

• One has parents who never use the phrase "had went" while the other has parents who use it frequently.
• The child is making a mistake.

• Being turned down for a date, being ignored by a teacher, or losing out on a job are examples of Inter Fact Fiction.

• The question of how language evolved has been debated by scientists for a long time.
• Language allows us to communicate complex thoughts.
• Evolutionary theorists argue that language evolved into a complex system as our apelike ancestors began to engage in more complex social activities.
• Evolutionary theorists agree that the human species needs a strong survival advantage in order to offset its disadvantages.
• There are many disadvantages.
• Language requires a long learning period and large brainpower.
• A vocal tract that allows us to make a wide array of sounds increases our chances of choking.

• Most phonemes, words, and syntactic rules are unrelated to what they refer to.
• Many scholars think that language is arbitrary.
• We can use arbitrary words to express complex ideas that don't have sounds associated with them.

• This is probably more than a coincidence, as these phonemes tend to be those that children acquire.
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• One child is using a phrase that is not part of the dialect she is learning to speak while the other is using a phrase that is considered grammatical for the dialect her parents speak.

• In the case of mother, "m" is a sound that babies make while nursing.

• The "maluma" is on the left esthemes, if you're like most that share a common sound sequence called phon people.
• In English, the "sn" sound and the "takete" are on the right.

• The "gl" sound is related to glow, gleam, glitter, gloss, glorious, and glisten.
• That's not to say that all words with these sounds are part of the cluster.
• The word snapping has nothing to do with noses, and the word glad has nothing to do with shininess.
• These clusters show that the language is not arbitrary.

• The idea of language being completely arbitrary is challenged by the fact that certain speech sounds seem to be associated with particular meanings.

• It is possible that connections between the mother's voice and other sensory systems in the brain influenced how languages evolved in birth, as the fact that at least some sound symbolism is rhythm of their native language and learn consistent across languages raises the intriguing possibility.
• Before birth, they can learn to recognize a specific story.

• Children are more efficient learners of language than adults are.
• The process of learning a language begins long before children start talking.
• Even before they're born, it begins.
• By the fifth month of pregnancy, the baby's hearing systems are developed enough that they can begin to hear their mother's voice, learn to recognize some characteristics of their mother's native language, and even recognize specific songs or stories they've heard repeatedly.

• A method that uses operant conditioning has been developed to test newborn infants' ability to distinguish sounds.
• Two-day-old infants suck more on a pacifier when they hear their mother's native language than when they hear a foreign language.
• They prefer their mother's native language even at an early age.
• This is true of infants whose mothers speak English more than Spanish, and those whose mothers speak Spanish less than English.
• The fact that babies were tested with English and Spanish mothers is an experimental design feature.
• It allowed researchers to rule out the possibility that all babies prefer English over another language.

• They begin to figure out how to use their vocal apparatus to make sounds.
• Children's babbling plays an important role in language development because it helps babies figure out how to move their vocal tracts to generate certain sounds.

• The first year of life is when babble begins and follows a progression of stages demonstrating infants' increasing control of their vocal tracts.
• Babies engage in a type of vocal exploration when babbling.
• Some researchers think this exploration is similar to animals' search for food.
• Babies' babbling becomes more meaningful by the end of their first year.

• Babies are fine tuning their vocal tracts and ears.
• To be successful users of their native language, infants need to learn which sounds are relevant for their language.

• Babies adjust their phonemes quickly to match their native language.
• By 10 months, infants' phoneme categories seem to be similar to those of adult speakers of their native language.
• A recent analysis of the phoneme content of Chinese-learning and English-learning infants' babbling patterns indicated no apparent differences at 8 or 10 months of age.

• Children learn to read and recognize words before they are written.
• They only have a limited ability to coordinate sounds.

• Slowly, they acquire their first words.
• Between one and one-and-a-half years of age, they accumulate a vocabulary of between 20 and 100 words.
• The rate at which children acquire words increases as they learn new words, and the difference between the number of words they know and those they can say continues to narrow.

• Young children with limited vocabulary are shy about speaking to strangers.
• In order to measure what words children comprehend, researchers often ask infants to point at the correct object when hearing a familiar word.

• Most children can produce hundreds of Learning Language words when they turn two.
• Their vocabulary has grown to several thousand words by kindergarten.

• Most of the time, children get word meanings exactly right, which is a remarkable achievement.

• A child who uses the word grandpa combines words into phrases.
• Children start speaking in a man's voice.

• Most children start to combine words into two-word phrases by the time they turn two.
• When children use single-word, they are more likely to improve their comprehensibility.
• The child can now say phrases like "uh-oh juice" or "more juice" to notify his mom that he spilled his juice.

• Children have grasped something about the rules.
• Even if they leave out some words, they still use the correct order.

• Children comprehend some basic rules before they are shown them.
• They understand how word order relates to meaning.
• Two researchers showed two videos to 17-month-olds, one showing Cookie Monster tickling Big Bird and the other showing Big Bird tickling Cookie Monster.
• The children pointed toward the proficient and fluent at speaking correct video, demonstrating they could determine from word order who was the "tickler" and who was the "ticklee" (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996).

• Children use more complex sentences involving three and four words.

• The pig continues to acquire more complex rules in their early school years, even though the child is showing her comprehension of the sentence.

• How we meet a second language is part of the answer.
• In order to master a language, we usually live in a community in which the language is spoken and not in a classroom.
• Our motivation to learn a new language also plays a role.
• The easiest way to learn a second language is to be exposed to it at a young age.

• Most bilingual people use one language.
• It's usually the first language they learn, the one they heard most often as a child, and the one they use most often.
• There are cases in which a child is introduced to two languages from the beginning, as when parents speak two languages or the child has a full-time caretaker who speaks a different language from that of her parents.

• There is some evidence that bilingual children experience a delay in their language development compared to their monolingual counterparts.
• The delays that occur early in development are balanced out by a variety of long-term benefits.
• As a result, they tend to perform better on language tasks in general.
• Recent research suggests that bilingualism may offer protection from cognitive decline in patients with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.

• Those who learned a second language early in development process the two languages using the same brain areas.
• Those who learned a second language later in development use different brain areas.
• The brain may be able to separate their first and second languages.

• If you have an alternative later to be less proficient and to require more brain involvement to master their second explanations for the findings, you should.

• Younger children tend to be better at learning languages than older children and adults.
• Critical periods are narrow windows of time in the development of language in which an organisms must learn an ability if it's going to learn it at all.
• We can look at the age of exposure to see if it is necessary to learn the language during a specific time window.

• The English language skills of adults who'd come to the United States from China and Korea are measured.

• The age-of-exposure effects are more dramatic for pronunciation than for vocabulary.

• Growing up speaking two languages has cognitive benefits.

• It depends on the age of exposure.

• We put quotation marks around this term as they were less proficient.
• There is information on whether critical periods exist for learning language.

• Genie had a rudimentary ability to communicate.

• Many of the rival explanations that plague cases like Genie's were ruled out by the alternative one.

• These children are loved, cared for, fed, and given the opportunity to develop normally in all respects except language.
• Many children with hearing parents invent their own signs, even if they are not taught in sign language.
• Without being exposed to a language model such as American Sign Language, parents and homesigners don't develop full-blown language.
• This research doesn't directly address the age at which language exposure is required for children to become fluent.

• These children have cochlear implants.
• The implants have positive effects on language among younger children.

• Longer term protective effects on the brain can be found.

• Chapter 8 brain's ability to process and interpret stimulation in general or the ability to learn language specifically.

• Language learning is influenced by the age of acquisition.
• When it comes to language, there is no evi dence in humans.
• There is a gradual drop-off after the age of seven in Figure 8.7.
• Older children and adults are less able to learn new languages than younger children are.
• The "less is more" hypothesis is the most promising account.
• According to this hypothesis, a young girl named Genie, who was less specific in her language, had more limited information-processing abilities and less analytic skills than adults.
• They never learned to use language quickly.

• This is consistent with the idea of a critical impose more organization and structure on their learning, ironically making learning a period for language learning, although her abusive upbringing makes it difficult to language more challenging.

• American Sign Language is an English language that allows the use of visual signs.
• American Sign Language does not have any communication.

• There are a lot of people who don't understand signlan from English.
• There are some communities that use what's cal ed guages.
• People think of sign language as an elaborate form of Signed English, an attempt to act out silently what people would say in sign language.
• Y has otherwise spoken.
• This couldn't be further from the truth.

• It's a linguistic system of commu, and sign language has its own phonemes, words, and extralinguistic language.
• The same brain areas information are involved in processing spoken languages.
• The structure and organization of various sign languages has been analyzed by Linguists.
• Native signers' brains include both traditional Sign Language, French Sign Language, and even Nicaraguan Sign "language areas" and other brain areas that play roles in visual and Language.
• When a string of signs is a grammatical sentence, it is determined by the same stages of development that babies who learn tures as spoken languages, including a complex set of syntactic rules, pass through.
• Babies who learn spoken languages use the hands, face, body, and "sign space" the same as babies who learn Newport.

• There are many sign languages used in different countries.
• There are many myths about deafness and sign language.

• Most of the work is done behind the scenes by the throat, tongue, and teeth, so most skil ed lip-readers can only pick up about 30 to 35 percent of what's being said.

• Our lips look the same when we say nice and dice.

• Hearing children's ability to learn to speak is slowed by learning to sign.
• Children who are blind were prevented from learning to sign because they were afraid they would never learn to talk.
• It's now clear that learning a sign language is the best way to learn to talk.

• The deafness community uses the nurture side of the nature- nurture debate more than the visual nature side.
• The strongest communication nature account acknowledges that children aren't born with a specific language, they learn what they hear.
• The strongest nurture account acknowledges that children's brains are set up in a way that is receptive to learning.
• There are four major theoretical accounts of language acquisition.

• The simplest explanation of allowing an infinite number of unique children's language learning is that they learn through sentences to be created.
• This account is the most par words in novel ways.

• Babies account for language acquisition that learns the language they hear.

• The field of linguistics was invented by Noam Chomsky, who believes that humans have a specific language "organ" in words and sentences.

• Many of the claims of the nativist view are hard to make.

• Critics point out that even adults use incorrect sentences.

• The theory's weakness is that it's hard to think of an outcome that nativists couldn't explain.
• The theory that can explain every conceivable outcome essentially explains nothing, as we've noted in previous chapters.
• There are two less extreme accounts of language acquisition.

• The model states that children use the context of a conversation to infer the topic from the actions, expressions, and other behaviors of the speakers.
• This account has a weak learned component because children do too.
• Explaining child language on the basis of adopted from a different country learn social understanding requires us to assume that infants to speak the language of their adopted parents understand a lot about how other people are.

• According to social pragmatic theorists, children learn to interpret meaning from pointing because they know that the speaker's goal is to direct the child's attention to a toy.
• Children might use a simpler process.
• They may be able to tell that every time their caretakers point to an object, he or she utters the same word.
• Children may think pointing is related to word meaning.
• Children don't have to take into account the social context or communicative intentions of others.

• The brain processes language.

• It suggests that children's ability is related to the area involved in speech production and the area involved in speech comprehension.

• Children's ability to perceive, learn, and recognize patterns may be all they need to learn language.

• There would be no need for Chomsky to propose a language acquisition device.

• There are challenges to this account as well.

• They are more active in language processing than in other types of learning.

• The language acquisition device, the social pragmatics account, and the general cognitive processing account are theories of language acquisition.

• Different animal species have different communication systems.

• The primary form of communication for some species is scent marking.
• Others use visual displays, such as baring their teeth or flapping their wings.
• A fixed number of ways of expressing a fixed number of messages is what most species have.

• Sex and violence are the two most common circumstances in which communication takes place in nonhuman animals.
• A specific song to attract mates and another song to convey the message "This is my territory; back off" are produced by male songbirds.
• HONEYBEE WAGGLE slaps the ground to convey aggression.

• Chimpanzees aren't known for their subtlety.

• A fascinating example of nonhuman com munication is the waggle dance of honeybees.
• The bees use this dance to communicate with each other.

• One of the few nonhuman examples of communication is the computer chirp dance.

• Vervet monkeys use different alarm calls to signal different prey.

• When they see a leopard, a snake, or a hawk, they produce three different types of calls.
• The alarm calls are the closest thing to words scientists have observed outside of human language.

• Efforts to teach animals human language have been unsuccessful.
• Chimpanzees are one of our nearest living genetic relatives.
• Chimpanzees' vocal apparatus doesn't permit anywhere near the range and coordination of sounds we can achieve, so the researchers assumed that Chimpanzees' vocal apparatus was similar to ours.
• Recent evidence points to an orangutan having something resembling human-like vocal control, which may be more talents than previously thought.
• After giving up on trying to teach Chimpanzees to speak, researchers tried to teach them to use sign language or a lexigram board, an apparatus that allows them to point to printed visual symbols that stand for specific words.

• There were important limits to these attempts.
• Chimpanzees only learned a limited vocabulary.
• They never learned how to communicate using a bonobo.

• Two animal species are doing better.
• One is the bonobo, once thought to be a type of Chimpanzee, but now recognized as a distinct species that's genetically even more closely related to humans.
• There are few studies conducted on bonobos that suggest a different learning pathway.
• Bonobos learn better as young animals than as adults, they tend to learn through observation rather than direct reinforcement, and they use symbols to comment on or engage in social interactions rather than just for food treats.
• bonobos seem to get stuck when learning.

• The African gray parrot may be able to speak as well as we do.
• Parrots are famous for their ability to mimic sounds.
• In one case in Sand Lake, Michigan, prosecutors considered using a parrot's "testimony" to determine what had happened at a crime scene.
• Some African gray parrots seem to go beyond mere mimicry.