Exam 9: Language and Thinking

The fact that a child will generally have great difficulty learning a language if he is first exposed to it after puberty is generally taken as evidence that language has a sensitive period.

Rosch studied the Dani people from New Guinea who had only two words for colour: one for bright colours and one for dark colours. Her results revealed that the Dani were capable of distinguishing the difference between a wide assortment of colours, providing evidence that contradicted ____________.

Two biases that can be major obstacles to making correct predictions and decisions are ________.

A psychologist has a theory that a certain mood disorder is largely due to a deficiency of the neurotransmitter ACS2. The psychologist believes that if the theory is correct then increasing the levels of ACS2 in people with that mood disorder will reduce their symptoms of the mood disorder. To test that hypothesis, the psychologist conducts a well-designed experiment. This example best represents

To infer how closely something fits our prototype for a particular class, and also to infer the likelihood that it belongs to that class, we use the ______________.

In brain-imaging studies of bilinguals, is the second language represented the same way in the brain as the first language?

A student describes their friend as turning "red with rage" when their car was vandalized. This means This student __________.

Define the following concepts: the representativeness heuristic, the availability heuristic, and the confirmation bias. Discuss how each of them can produce errors in probability estimates or reasoning.

Professor Krizan is studying the remote people in the interior of New Zealand. She claims that there is a strong relation between their language and their way of thinking. In fact, she claims that language determines how they think. Her observations are most consistent with

A heuristic is most strongly associated with __________.

You are studying a child's language abilities. You note that she is able to perceive phonemes in any language. This supports the idea of

Surface structure is to deep structure as ________.

____________ fire in response to a particular stimulus (such as a baseball), regardless of whether the stimulus is actually seen or only imagined.

In the majority of people, the area located in the left hemisphere's frontal lobe, most certainly involved in word production and articulation is known as the ________ area, and in the rear portion of the temporal lobe, is the area more centrally involved in speech comprehension called the ___________ area.

How does "The Crow and the Trains" problem demonstrate the importance of framing a problem?

When learning to speak another language, it can be difficult to hear the individual words in a native speakers' utterance. This is a problem with

A person who is generating many possible solutions to a problem and is attempting to incorporate new and unusual ideas into these solutions is engaged in convergent thinking.

One morning, John decides to have oatmeal for breakfast, and he later performs very well on a math test that he takes that day. He doesn't think too much about this until a few weeks later when he does very well on an English test and recalls that he had oatmeal for breakfast before that test too. He concludes that eating oatmeal in the morning helps him perform better on exams. This example best demonstrates

That fact that language-deprived children are generally unable to acquire normal language skills when they are found past puberty is most relevant to which of the following?

"The Crow and the Trains" problem was presented to demonstrate the importance of framing a problem correctly.