Exam 8: Cognition and Language

At what age do children begin to make creative, original sentences that they have not heard before?

Activity decreases in the visual cortex, and people become temporarily almost blind, during

When students hear a sentence with part of a word missing, they report

The context provided by words at the end of a sentence influences

What reason do we have for believing that children as young as age 2 or 3 years understand certain grammatical rules?

An expert chess player and a beginner look at a series of pictures of a chessboard. After each, the two people try to draw them from memory. How will their performances compare?

Audrey sees someone sitting in a fast-food restaurant who looks like the President of the United States. Before she goes over to ask for an autograph and offer her advice on the world situation, she should consider the base-rate information. That is, she should consider

The language acquisition device

When we read, we read a "window" of letters that may include letters in the next word as well as letters in the word we are focusing on. What happens when people are prevented from seeing those letters in the next word (i.e., are only allowed to read one word at a time)?

Expert chess and average chess players look at a chess board for a few seconds and try to memorize the location of the chess pieces. Under what circumstances, if any, will the expert chess players show much better memory than the others?

An expert chess player and a beginner both look at a picture of chess pieces arranged on a chessboard as they might appear during a well-played game. Then both try to draw the picture from memory. Which one (if either) will probably do better, and why?

During a saccadic eye movement,

Although years of playing chess improves people's expertise at playing the game, it does not improve their overall memory. What evidence do we have for this conclusion?

You look at three letters. Part of each letter has been covered by an ink smear. The first letter could be either P or R; the second could be either E or F; the third could be either B or D. You immediately "see" the letters RED. Which theory attempts to explain this observation?

You develop the belief (hypothesis) that your significant other wants to break up with you. You have a phone conversation in which your significant other sounds stressed out but says several nice things about you. According to the confirmation bias, you are most likely to

Under which circumstances are people most likely to take a gamble?

Which of the following types of people would be LEAST likely to show the word-superiority effect?

Children begin to use grammatical rules, such as how to make a plural,

Following extensive training, the use of symbols by common chimpanzees has failed to show the flexibility of human language. Greater success has been demonstrated in studies using

It has been argued that children have a built-in mechanism for learning language that is called the