PSYC1005 Study Guide - Final Guide: Teddy Bear, Functionalism Versus Intentionalism, Maraca
Language and Perception
Development of Language - Stages
1. Pre-linguistics (cooing, babbling)
o Trying out the phonemes.
o Learning word boundaries (knowing when words start and end).
2. One-word stage (12-18 mo)
o Try out morphemes.
o One word stands for a whole idea, eg: say banana but asking for a banana.
3. Two-word (telegraphic speech) (2 years)
o Try out elementary syntax.
o Eg: Word order starts to count.
4. More than two words (2.5+ yrs)
o Eter "losed lass" ords proous, deteriers, ojutios….
How Language Connects us to others?
The Language
We Hear
(Quinn,
Creaghe, Kidd,
in preparation)
• Participants: 54 parents (50 mothers, 4 fathers) and their typically developing
monolingual infants (31 girls, 23 boys).
• Design: Two within-subjects play conditions: functional, symbolic.
• Procedure: Data was collected at three times over a 6-month period (18, 21, 24
months).
• Methodology:
o Functional condition - gave them pegs, chicken puzzle book, maracas,
hammer, whiteboard - to create functional play.
o Symbolic - teddy bear, spoons, tea set, pots and pans, phone - to
stimulate pretend play.
• Results:
• When controlling for infant age and language proficiency at 18 months:
o Conversational turns positively predicted 24 months vocabulary
production.
o Imperatives negatively predicted 24 months language complexity and
language production growth.
• The social ecology of symbolic play promotes complex parent-infant interactions
which predict language growth in early childhood.
• In play, children learn to understand others' thoughts and communicate their own
and develop a better understanding of other people's point of view improving
their social communication and cooperation skills.
Interpersonal
Communication
(Krauss and
Chiu, 2010)
• Encoding/decoding paradigm (one to one mapping, a house is a house - literal
meaning the property of the message).
• Intentionalist paradigm (intention of the speaker is accounted for, a house is a
house or a den, or a refuge - non-literal meaning is derived from the speaker's
intention).
• Perspective-taking paradigm (the same message can convey different meanings
to different recipients - meaning is derived from the others' point of view).
• Dialogic paradigm (meaning emerges from the property of the participants' joint
activity).
• Non-verbal communication (gesture, gaze, facial expression).
Intentionality
(context
matters)
(Strack et al.
1991)
A. "How happy are you with your life as a whole?"
B. "How satisfied are you with your life as a whole?"
• The two answers were correlated.
• When the two questions were put side to side, the correlation was reduced. When
looking at both questions one after the other, the participants base their answers
on the distinctiveness aspects of the content of the questionnaires.
• The order of questions and the questions asked may actually change the response.
Perspective
Taking (Levelt,
1989)
• Egocentric perspective ("to my right") - easier to produce.
• An addressee-centred perspective ("to your left") - easier to understand.
• A mutual or neutral perspective ("midway between us").
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Dialogic
Paradigm
• Communication is a process in which participants work collaboratively to produce
shared meanings, joint attention.
• Refer to experiment (Quinn, Kidd in preparation)
• Dyads were more likely to spend more time in joint attention.
Non-Verbal
Communication
(Quinn, Kidd in
preparation)
• Symbolic play may have a positive effect on communicative development via its
tendency to engage interlocutors in the shared negotiation and exchange of
meaning.
Does Language Shape Perception?
• Two basic cognitive systems which constantly interact and rely on each other in our daily existence.
• 3 theoretical perspectives:
1. Linguistic determinism - proal too strog people ho at speak ould’t thik.
2. Linguistic relativism - language modulates higher order cognitive processes → cognitive interaction
and non-modular.
3. Linguistic invariance - language separate from other higher order cognitive processes → modular
cognitive architecture (Fodor, 1983).
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
• 'We cut nature up, organise it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are
parties to an agreement to organise it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech
community and is codified in the patterns of our language' (Whorf, 1940)
• 'Hua eigs…are er uh at the er of the partiular laguage hih has eoe the ediu
of epressio for their soiet…The fat of the atter is that the "real orld" is to a large etet
unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group (Sapir, 1929).
Language and Perception
• To test the 3 linguistic hypotheses we look at:
A) Visual
Scanning
• Habitual ways of reading in a language can affect the preferred direction of visual
scanning.
• Freeman 1980 – Chinese readers were found to be better at decoding vertical arrays
of letters than their English counterparts. The difference vanished however when
testing children who had not yet learnt to read but could decipher letters in English
and Chinese, suggested that the experience of reading had an impact on the
perception itself
B) Digit-
span/Memory
• Digit-span – the number of digits one can remember in a row.
• Digit word-length influences the digit span → the language you speak shapes your
ability to memorise numbers (easier for English than Welsh).
• Verbal learning: Phonological properties of language used to encode stimulus
materials can affect verbal learning.
C) Decision-
Making
• Verbal framing of a decision problem can affect problem representation and
subsequent decisions.
• Eg: Subjects rated the treatment as more effective when told it had a "50% success
rate" and were more apt to recommend it to others, including members of their
immediate family, than when told it has a "50% failure rate" (changed their
perception).
D) Problem-
Solving
• Verbal encoding of visual stimuli can facilitate or hinder problem solving, depending
on whether or not the problem-solving task requires an accurate representation of
the visual information.
• Subjects instructed to think of novel shapes in terms of relevant names made fewer
errors in recalling a serial ordering of the shapes, but made errors in solving a
mental jigsaw puzzle and in drawing the shapes from memory, than subjects
instructed to visualise the shapes without using words.
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