Cognitive Psychology PSYC 3342
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1969.6/96017
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Browsing Cognitive Psychology PSYC 3342 by Subject "language"
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Item 10 Cognitive Psychology: Module 19(4/6/2023) Scarince, CollinModule 19: Language and Psychology Perry has to prepare a presentation with his study group. They text each other and decide to meet at one of their apartments. Perry arrives right on time and enters his living-room, without closing the door. They begin working when one of the group members says: "It's gotten kind of cold in here." Perry then stands back up and closes the door. Why did Perry do that? His group member did not ask him to close the door, yet Perry knew what they meant. This banal series of events highlights the utility of language. The group members used digital visual symbols to communicate about a future meeting at a location most of them had not been to before. The group was meeting to collectively create a presentation that uses language to share specialized information. Finally, Perry was able to infer that his teammate wanted the door closed without them using the words door or close. Language is a central part of everyday life and communication a natural human necessity. For those reasons there has been a high interest in their properties. However, describing the processes of language turns out to be quite hard. We can broadly define language as a system of symbolic communication through which we code and express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.Item 10 Cognitive Psychology: Module 20(4/6/2023) Scarince, CollinModule 20: Using Language Conversations are dynamic interactions between two or more people (Garrod & Pickering, 2004; Pickering & Garrod, 2004). The important thing to mention is that conversation is more than the act of speaking. Each person brings their own knowledge, and conversations are much easier to process if participants bring in shared knowledge. In this way, participants are responsible of how they bring in new knowledge. Grice (1975) proposed a basic principle of conversation and four "conversational maxims." His cooperative principle states that the speaker and listener agree that the person speaking should strive to make statements that further the agreed goals of conversation. The four maxims state the way of how to achieve this principle. 1. Quantity: The speaker should try to be informative, no over-/underinformation. 2. Quality: Do not say things which you believe to be false or lack evidence of. 3. Manner: Avoiding being obscure or ambiguous. 4. Relevance: Stay on topic of the exchange. An example of a rule of conversation incorporating three of those maxims is the given-new-contract. It states that the speaker should construct sentences so that they include given and new information. Consequences of not following this rule were demonstrated by Haviland and Clark (1974) by presenting pairs of sentences (either following or ignoring the given-new-contract) and measuring the time participants needed until they fully understood the sentence. They found that participants needed longer in pairs of the type: "We checked the picnic supplies. The beer was warm." Rather than: "We got some beer out of the trunk. The beer was warm." The reason that it took longer to comprehend the second sentence of the first pair is that inferencing has to be done (beer has not been mentioned as being part of the picnic supplies).