Exam 9: Language and Thinking

A researcher asks a four-year-old how to make cookies. The child answers: "You mix the sugar and butter and flour, you put them in the oven, then you eat them!" This four-year-old shows evidence of a rudimentary _________ for baking cookies.

Breaking the word PLAYERS into PLAY-ER-S is a form of producing a __________.

You are trying to unscrew the battery cover on your alarm clock, but you do not have a screwdriver. If you realize that a dime can be used as a screwdriver and then use it, you have avoided the problem of

The rules that govern the organization of the surface structure of a language are called __________, whereas the rules that determine how symbols are connected to what they represent are called __________________.

Writing summaries of psychology principles you are trying to learn can improve your __________; writing these summaries after a delay can also improve your __________.

Akio has decided to improve her health by incorporating exercise into her lifestyle. She tells her friend Ewan that she has taken up the sport of Tae Kwon Do. Ewan laughs and says, "That's not a sport! Sports have teams!" Akio disagrees, because, she says, "Any kind of organized physical activity is a sport, even if you're the only one doing it." Who is correct, and why?

According to your textbook, does research support the view that mental imagery is perceptual in nature or that it is based on linguistic concepts?

The errors in logic that occurred in response to the "Linda the feminist bank teller" problem are best explained and interpreted by the ____________________.

Miguel is taking an introductory French course and has to complete several oral comprehension labs. These involve listening to audio recordings of French conversations while writing down everything that is said. Although he can recognize most of the French vocabulary words when they're already written down, Miguel finds it extremely difficult to understand when those words are said by the people in the recordings. His biggest obstacle seems to be breaking up the audio into singular coherent words. What process is Miguel struggling with?

When the availability heuristic leads us astray, it is assumed that this happens because we confuse how readily something comes to mind from memory with

Following a car accident, Mr. Jones had a great deal of difficulty speaking. At the hospital, the brain scan is most likely to show damage to

The crow-and-trains problem discussed in the text was presented to demonstrate the importance of ________.

A system of knowledge about the meaning and conduct of life is known as

The number of phonemes in the English language is about

The smallest unit of sound that can be distinctly recognized in a language is known as a

Josh really wants to lose about 30 pounds. So he figures out that all he needs to do is lose a pound a day for a month and he'll be there. Josh has just engaged in

Your ability to comprehend what your friend is saying even if loud noises obscure some of what she says would be an example of using bottom-up processing for language comprehension.

In French, the phrase "haven't the police found you yet?" is written "la police, ne t'a pas encore trouvé?" Since French speakers arrange words differently from English speakers, the literal translation is "the police, not you have yet found?" In other words, French and English speakers use different rules, called ________________, to govern word order.

The position that language not only influences but determines what we are capable of thinking is known as the

Human children begin to master language without any formal instruction, and languages throughout the world have common underlying structural characteristics. These two things suggest an inborn tendency to learn language that has been termed a _____. On the other hand, various factors in the social environment may also assist with learning a language. Collectively, these social factors have been referred to by the term _____.