Exam 10: Thinking and Language

No one claims that the internal language faculty resides in some specific anatomical location of the brain.

This problem-solving procedure always remains the same, and will work as long as you input information in the appropriate manner.

When faced with baldly disconfirming evidence, a person may engage in mental gymnastics to play down its relevance or credibility, a process known as ______.

Which of the following was NOT among the insights about fixed rules for prescriptive grammar outlined by John McWhorter?

Researchers have shown that infants prefer the sounds of spoken language as much as any other similar sounds that they hear at birth.

Michael Simmons is 5′ 7″ tall, quite slim and not particularly muscular. He likes to read mid-19th-century British poetry and diaries of the authors of literature classics like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. This heuristic will lead you to believe that Michael is more likely to be an literature professor than a truck driver.

The representativeness heuristic is stimulated by the fact that most representative events are reported nationally because they are both unusual and horrific

In linguistic theory, children can assimilate the language of their parents and community, by automatically applying the rules of

As much as it feels as though the odds are stronger with each new toss of heads that the next toss will be tails, this is an illusion, known as the

Unfortunately, most people do not take __________information into account when they make judgments of the likelihood of some event.

Daniel Kahneman's metaphorical Systems 1 and 2 describe the various degrees of complexity of our thoughts and thought processes. Briefly characterize each system and illustrate how they might be at work while humans solve problems using heuristics

According to the __________hypothesis, language is one of many factors affecting the way people construe reality.

Using this heuristic involves making instantaneous comparisons of the new person or thing with prototypes of various categories until a "match" is found.

One way to measure the extent to which a person is utilizing System 2 on any mental task is to observe

One reason that people reach impasses in problem solving is that prior experience results in being "stuck" in a specific way of mentally representing a problem. This is known as

When research subjects engage in tasks that require the construction of mental images, they utilize areas of the occipital cortex normally associated with vision

Several studies have examined the linguistic abilities of nonhuman primates. Pick two such cases and describe the aspects of human language that primates can learn. Also, describe the limits of such research on nonhuman language learning.

This term refers to the tendency to pay more attention and accord more weight to evidence that is consistent with what we already believe

This area of language research is most interested in characterizing human language according to the properties of generativity, recursion, and displacement.

Thought can be described as the active process of mentally manipulating information, and is comprised of two primary components: