Exam 9: Language and Thinking

Many concepts are difficult to describe in words,but we often can define them using typical and familiar members of a particular class called:

All of the following were mentioned by the text as examples of mental representations EXCEPT:

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.

The essential properties that define this ability are that it is symbolic,has structure,conveys meaning and is generative.This ability is:

Gina works for a widget company where her job is to bundle the widgets in packages of 25.Gina figures out a method of bundling the widgets but fails to implement the final stage of problem solving which in the long-run caused her to miss a more efficient method.This final stage was _______________.

Assume that you have a drawer that contains 19 black socks and 13 blue socks.What is the minimum number of socks that you must take from the drawer to insure that you have a matching pair? The answer is 3 socks.Most people have difficulty determining the answer because:

The surface structure of a language refers to the ways that symbols are combined within that language,while the underlying meaning of these combined symbols is considered ____________________.

A Canadian family with two children (a boy and a girl)moves to Germany where both of the children must learn a new language.The girl is 6 years old while the boy is 13 years old.Based on the results on the acquisition of a second language,we would expect that:

Research on mental rotation has found that the greater the degree of rotation,the less time it takes to judge if two shapes are the same.

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

Imaging studies examining language processing in the brain indicate that men show more activity in the _____ hemisphere of the brain than do women.

A mode of thought in which we seem to "hear" verbal sentences in our minds is referred to as imaginal thought.

Formulas such as the one used to determine the lengths of the sides of a right triangle (a2 + b2 = c2)are considered to be examples of algorithms,while problem-solving techniques such as means-ends analysis are considered to be __________.

The five properties that are common to all languages are that they are all symbolic,have structure,convey meaning,are generative,and permits displacement.

While playing one afternoon,a group of children decided to develop a special language only they would know.They decided that they would use the word "yof" to mean adults.Whenever a child used the word "yof" the others knew that the child was referring to an adult.This represents which property of language?

Morphemes are the smallest unit of sound that can be recognized as separate in a language.

A morpheme is considered to be the smallest unit of _____________ in a language.

In their most basic form,these statements express facts and consist of concepts that are combined in a particular way.These statements are called:

Recent brain imaging studies examining sex differences during a language task indicate that:

While researchers have long debated whether animals can acquire language,more recent research has clearly demonstrated that at least chimps are capable of acquiring it like humans.