AP Psychology - Language and Cognition Flashcards

Advanced Placement Psychology
Enterprise High School, Redding, CA
All terms from Myers Psychology for AP (BFW Worth, 2011)

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5355210608	cognition	all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.	0
5355210609	concept	a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.	1
5355210610	prototype	a mental image or best example of a category.	2
5355210611	algorithm	a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier—but also more error-prone—use of heuristics.	3
5355210612	heuristic	a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms.	4
5355210613	insight	a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions.	5
5355210614	behaviorist theory	the theory of language development that argues humans learn language through trial/error and gradually learn more effective ways to speak to get what they want	6
5355210615	confirmation bias	a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.	7
5355210616	fixation	the inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental set.	8
5355210617	mental set	a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past.	9
5355210618	functional fixedness	the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving.	10
5355210619	representativeness heuristic	judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information.	11
5355210620	availability heuristic	estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common.	12
5355210621	nativist theory	the theory of language development that states that humans have a natural, innate ability to develop language (theorized by Chomsky)	13
5355210622	belief perseverance	clinging to one's initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited.	14
5355210623	Language Acquisition Device	this structure allows for the innate development of language (theorized by Chomsky)	15
5355210624	framing	the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments.	16
5355210625	language	our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.	17
5355210626	phoneme	in language, the smallest distinctive sound unit.	18
5355210627	morpheme	in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix).	19
5355210628	grammar	in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others.	20
5355210629	semantics	the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language; also, the study of meaning.	21
5355210630	syntax	the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language.	22
5355210631	babbling stage	babies spontaneously uttering a variety of words, such as ah-goo	23
5355210632	one-word stage	the stage in which children speak mainly in single words	24
5355210633	two-word stage	they start uttering two word sentences	25
5355210634	telegraphic speech	early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram—"go car"—using mostly nouns and verbs.	26
5355210635	linguistic determinism	Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think.	27