- Unit 7 Memory Thinking/languagemr Volkmar's Course Pages Printable
- Unit 7 Memory Thinking/languagemr Volkmar's Course Pages Pdf
- Unit 7 Memory Thinking/languagemr Volkmar's Course Pages Page
What Do You Think?: The Meaning of Language
Moved Permanently. The document has moved here. The course is longer than other elementary courses. Many Myanmar learners have few opportunities to practise English outside the classroom, so there are more opportunities to use the language within the course. For classes with less time, we provide guidance on what parts to skip. At the end of each unit is a short, optional. Cherie Deville - Stalk The Cock (Thumb 09), Amateur big boobs natural boobs, Fat White Chick Sucking Her Lovers BBC Best Japanese Sex. Charlie's Dating Profile.
Think about what you know of other languages; perhaps you even speak multiple languages. Imagine for a moment that your closest friend fluently speaks more than one language. Do you think that friend thinks differently, depending on which language is being spoken? You may know a few words that are not translatable from their original language into English. For example, the Portuguese word saudade originated during the 15th century, when Portuguese sailors left home to explore the seas and travel to Africa or Asia. Those left behind described the emptiness and fondness they felt as saudade (Figure 1). The word came to express many meanings, including loss, nostalgia, yearning, warm memories, and hope. There is no single word in English that includes all of those emotions in a single description. Do words such as saudade indicate that different languages produce different patterns of thought in people? What do you think??
Language may indeed influence the way that we think, an idea known as linguistic determinism. One recent demonstration of this phenomenon involved differences in the way that English and Mandarin Chinese speakers talk and think about time. English speakers tend to talk about time using terms that describe changes along a horizontal dimension, for example, saying something like “I’m running behind schedule” or “Don’t get ahead of yourself.” While Mandarin Chinese speakers also describe time in horizontal terms, it is not uncommon to also use terms associated with a vertical arrangement. For example, the past might be described as being “up” and the future as being “down.” It turns out that these differences in language translate into differences in performance on cognitive tests designed to measure how quickly an individual can recognize temporal relationships. Specifically, when given a series of tasks with vertical priming, Mandarin Chinese speakers were faster at recognizing temporal relationships between months. Indeed, Boroditsky (2001) sees these results as suggesting that “habits in language encourage habits in thought” (p. 12).
Language does not completely determine our thoughts—our thoughts are far too flexible for that—but habitual uses of language can influence our habit of thought and action. For instance, some linguistic practice seems to be associated even with cultural values and social institution. Pronoun drop is the case in point. Pronouns such as “I” and “you” are used to represent the speaker and listener of a speech in English. In an English sentence, these pronouns cannot be dropped if they are used as the subject of a sentence. So, for instance, “I went to the movie last night” is fine, but “Went to the movie last night” is not in standard English. However, in other languages such as Japanese, pronouns can be, and in fact often are, dropped from sentences. It turned out that people living in those countries where pronoun drop languages are spoken tend to have more collectivistic values (e.g., employees having greater loyalty toward their employers) than those who use non–pronoun drop languages such as English (Kashima & Kashima, 1998). It was argued that the explicit reference to “you” and “I” may remind speakers the distinction between the self and other, and the differentiation between individuals. Such a linguistic practice may act as a constant reminder of the cultural value, which, in turn, may encourage people to perform the linguistic practice.
One group of researchers who wanted to investigate how language influences thought compared how English speakers and the Dani people of Papua New Guinea think and speak about color. The Dani have two words for color: one word for light and one word for dark. In contrast, the English language has 11 color words. Researchers hypothesized that the number of color terms could limit the ways that the Dani people conceptualized color. However, the Dani were able to distinguish colors with the same ability as English speakers, despite having fewer words at their disposal (Berlin & Kay, 1969). A recent review of research aimed at determining how language might affect something like color perception suggests that language can influence perceptual phenomena, especially in the left hemisphere of the brain. You may recall from earlier chapters that the left hemisphere is associated with language for most people. However, the right (less linguistic hemisphere) of the brain is less affected by linguistic influences on perception (Regier & Kay, 2009)
Link to Learning
Learn more about language, language acquisition, and especially the connection between language and thought in the following CrashCourse video:
You can view the transcript for “Language: Crash Course Psychology #16” here (opens in new window).
front 1 | back 1 the mental activities associated with thinking, knowledge, remembering, and communicating |
front 2 | back 2 a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people |
front 3 | back 3 a mental image of best example of a category. Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototype-typical bird, such as a robin) |
front 4 | back 4 a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrast with the usually speedier – but also more error-prone – use of heuristics |
front 5
| back 5 a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms |
front 6 | back 6 a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to the problem; it contrast with strategy-based solutions |
front 7 | back 7 a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence |
front 8 | back 8 the inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental set |
front 9 | back 9 a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past |
front 10 | back 10 judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information |
front 11 | back 11 estimating the likelihood of events based on their ability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common |
Unzip for free. front 12 | back 12 the tendency to be more confident than correct – to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments |
front 13 | back 13 clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited |
front 14 | back 14 an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning |
front 15 | back 15 the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments |
front 16 | back 16 our spoken, written, or signed words and the way we combine them to communicate |
front 17 | back 17 beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language |
front 18 | back 18 the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words |
front 19 | back 19 beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two-word statements |
front 20 | back 20 early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram – “go car” – using mostly nouns and verbs |
front 21 | back 21 Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think |
front 22 | back 22 mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations |
front 23 | back 23 a general intelligence factor that, according to Spearman and others, underlie specific mental ability and is therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test |
front 24 | back 24 a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (called factors) on a test; used to identify different dimensions of performance that underlie a person’s score. |
front 25 | back 25 a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation drawings |
front 26 | back 26 |
front 27 | back 27 the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions |
front 28 | back 28 a method of assessing an individual’s mental aptitude and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores |
Unit 7 Memory Thinking/languagemr Volkmar's Course Pages Printable
front 29 | back 29 a measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance. Thus, a child who does as well as an average eight year old is said to have a mental age of 8 |
front 30 | back 30 the widely used American revision (by Terman at Stanford University) of Binet’s original intelligence test. |
front 31 | back 31 defined originally as the ratio of mental age (ma) to chronicle age (ca) multiplied by a 100 (thus IQ = ma/ca x 100). On contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for a given age is assigned a score of 100 |
front 32 | back 32 the WAIS is the most widely used intelligence test; contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests |
front 33 | back 33 defining meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group |
front 34 | back 34 the symmetrical bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many physical and psychological attributes. Most scores fall near the average, and fewer and fewer scores lie near the extreme |
front 35 | back 35 the extent to which a test yields consistent results, as assessed by the consistency of scores on two halves of the test, or on retesting |
front 36 | back 36 the extent to which a test measures or predicts what is supposed to. |
Unit 7 Memory Thinking/languagemr Volkmar's Course Pages Pdf
front 37 | back 37 the extent to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest |
front 38 | back 38 a condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence score of 70 or below and difficulty in adapting to demands of life; varies from mild to profound |
front 39 | back 39 a condition of mild to severe intellectual disability and associated physical disorder caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21 |
front 40 | back 40 the success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict; it is assessed by computing the correlation between test scores and the criterion behavior |
Unit 7 Memory Thinking/languagemr Volkmar's Course Pages Page
front 41 | back 41 the proportion of variation among individuals that we can attribute to genes. The heritability of a trait may vary, depending on the range of the population and environmental studied |
front 42 | back 42 A self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype |