COG Psych

a shared symbolic system for communication

shared by all users of a language culture

characteristics that are common to all known languages

Hockett

• Semanticity
• Arbitrariness
• Flexibility
• Naming
• Displacement
• Productivity
• Grammer

language conveys meaning

there is no inherent connection between words and what they refer to

onomonopia - buzzz, hmmm

there is a flexibility of symbols (words)

we give everything a name

language permits us to talk about times other than the present

an infinite number of utterances are possible in any language

the complete set of rules that will generate all the acceptable utterances and will not generate any unacceptable ill-formed ones

• 1) Phonology - sound
• 2) Syntax - word order, grammaticality
• 3) Semantics - accessing and combining word meanings into a meaningful whole

the internalized knowledge of language and it's rules that fully fluent speakers of a language have.

the actual language behavior a speaker generates, the string of sounds and words that the speaker utters

Chomsky

linguistic relativity

the assertion that the speakers of different languages have differing cognitive systems and that these different cognitive systems influence the ways in which people speaking the various languages think about the world

the basic sounds of speech AKA speech sounds and is a category of language sounds that are treated as the same despite physical differences among the sounds

about 200 total

40

no

refers to the way in which users of a particular language put words together to form sentences.

Chomsky. Involves the study of transformational rules that guide th ways in which underlying propositions can be rearranges to form various phrase structures

meaning the patio is a mess, not that it resembles an actual junkyard

The deep structure represented the core semantic relations of a sentence, and was mapped on to the surface structure (which followed the phonological form of the sentence very closely)

a rule that takes an input typically called the Deep Structure and changes it in some restricted way to result in a Surface Structure

our mental dictionary of language of words and their meanings

the study of meaning of a language

• the smallest unit of language that has meaning
• example - cars is made of two 1:car 2:s

many words have multiple meanings

syntax is sensitive to the accessibility of words in that more accessible words appear earlier in a sentence. Semantic knowledge can overpower sybtax

in 1974 his study gave participants oddly ordered sentences and told participants to rephrase them. 60% of people automatically re-ordered them to make them normal i.e. john dressed and had a bath became john had a bath and got dressed. of those who corrected, 50% did not realize that the original sentence was odd.

the period of time when we have to quit working on the problem.. allows our brain to take a "breather" when trying to solve hard problems

• a behavioral approach cannot account for the AHA! experience.
• also functional fixedness highlighted the difficulties people have with problem solving

usually thought of as a deep, useful understanding of the nature of something, especially with a difficult problem

confronts the relationship between 2 similar situations, problems or concepts.

in 1980 they conducted the study using the captain capturing the castle stories. if the story given to the Pp was related to the next problem about radiation then the Pp were more likely to figure out the radiation problem

• Goal Directedness
• Sequence of Operations
• Cognitive Operations
• Subgoal Decomposition
• Problem Space
• Initial State
• Operators
• Goal State

an immediate goal on the way to a solution.

the problem solver's mental representation of the problem and includes the initial, intermediate, and goal states as well as knowledge

problem as it is presented at the beginning

set of legal operations or moves that can be performed during problem solving

solution or ginal state of the problem

the problem is solved by repeatedly determining the difference between the current state and the goal state and then finding and applying an operator that reduces this difference. *uses smaller problems as a means to an end

• 1) set up the goal or subgoal
• 2) look for difference between current state and goal state/subgoal state
• 3) look for an operation that will reduce or eliminate this difference
• 4) apply operator
• 5) apply steps 2-5 repeatedly until all subgoals and final goal are acheived

variation of means-end analysis. involves moving toward the goal state in incremental steps but not working backward.

• (1964) Recorded several conversations.
• Subjects in their experiment had to identify the words in the conversation.
• When Pollack & Pickett spliced individual words out of the conversation and then presented them auditorily, subjects identified the correct word only 47% of the time.
• The longer the segment of speech from the conversation played, the more intelligible the individual words became. Speech analysis is both Bottom Up and Top Down. The conceptual knowledge helps to aid the identification of basic phonetic utterances.