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In multilingual countries such as Belgium (Dutch, French, and German), Switzerland (German, French, Italian and Romansh), Luxembourg (Luxembourgish, French and German) or Spain (Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician), it is common to see employees mastering two or even three of those languages.
Many minor Russian ethnic groups, such as Tatars, Bashkirs and others, are also multilingual. Moreover, with the beginning of compulsory study of the Tatar language in Tatarstan, there has been an increase in its level of knowledge of the Russian-speaking population of the republic.
Continued global diversity has led to an increasingly multilingual workforce. Europe has become an excellent model to observe this newly diversified labor culture. The expansion of the European Union with its open labor market has provided opportunities both for well-trained professionals and unskilled workers to move to new countries to seek employment. Political changes and turmoil have also led to migration and the creation of new and more complex multilingual workplaces. In most wealthy and secure countries, immigrants are found mostly in low paid jobs but also, increasingly, in high-status positions.
It is extremely common for music to be written in whatever the contemporary lingua franca is. If a song is not written in a common tongue, then it is usually written in whatever is the predominant language in the musician's country of origin, or in another widely recognized language, such as English, German, Spanish, or French.
The bilingual song cycles "there..." and "Sing, Poetry" on the 2011 contemporary classical album "Troika" consist of musical settings of Russian poems with their English self-translation by Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Nabokov, respectively.
Songs with lyrics in multiple languages are known as macaronic verse.
American novelists who use foreign languages (outside of their own cultural heritage) for literary effect, include Cormac McCarthy who uses untranslated Spanish and Spanglish in his fiction.
Multilingual poetry is prevalent in US Latino literature where code-switching and translanguaging between English, Spanish, and Spanglish is common within a single poem or throughout a book of poems. Latino poetry is also written in Portuguese and can include phrases in Nahuatl, Mayan, Huichol, Arawakan, and other indigenous languages related to the Latino experience. Contemporary multilingual poets include Giannina Braschi, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña
The P600 is an event-related potential (ERP), or peak in electrical brain activity measured by electroencephalography (EEG). It is a language-relevant ERP and is thought to be elicited by hearing or reading grammatical errors and other syntactic anomalies. Therefore, it is a common topic of study in neurolinguistic experiments investigating sentence processing in the human brain.
The P600 was first reported by Lee Osterhout and Phillip Holcomb in 1992. It is also sometimes called the syntactic positive shift (SPS), since it has a positive polarity and is usually elicited by syntactic phenomena.
The P600 was originally considered a "syntactic" ERP, as it is elicited by several types of syntactic phenomena, including ungrammatical stimuli, garden-path sentences that require reanalysis, complex sentences with a large number of thematic roles, and the processing of filler-gap dependencies (such as wh-words that appear at the beginning of a sentence in English but are actually interpreted somewhere else).
A P600 may be elicited by several kinds of grammatical errors in sentences, such as problems in agreement, such as "the child *"throw" the toy". In addition to this sort of subject-verb disagreement, P600s have also been elicited by disagreements in tense, gender, number, and case, as well as phrase structure violations. A 2009 study has suggested that these errors elicit stronger P600s than the other syntactic stimuli that have been implicated.
P600s are also elicited by errors in musical harmony, such as when a chord is played out of key with the rest of a musical phrase. This implies that P600s are not "language-specific," but "can be elicited in nonlinguistic (but rule-governed) sequences."
demonstrated a so-called "semantic P600" in sentences that are grammatically correct but semantically anomalous, and in which syntactic reanalysis is more appealing than semantic reanalysis. For example, a P600 may be elicited in the following sentence: The hearty meal was devouring the kids.This suggests that the reader would rather interpret the sentence as containing a morphosyntactic error (saying "devour"ing"" instead of "devour"ed by"") rather than a semantic one (meals can't devour kids, but can be devoured by them). The interpretation of "semantic P600s" has attracted considerable attention and controversy in the literature.
Articulatory phonology is a linguistic theory originally proposed in 1986 by Catherine Browman of Haskins Laboratories and Louis M. Goldstein of Yale University and Haskins. The theory identifies theoretical discrepancies between phonetics and phonology and aims to unify the two by treating them as low- and high-dimensional descriptions of a single system.
Unification can be achieved by incorporating into a single model the idea that the physical system (identified with phonetics) constrains the underlying abstract system (identified with phonology), making the units of control at the abstract planning level the same as those at the physical level.
The plan of an utterance is formatted as a gestural score, which provides the input to a physically based model of speech production – the task dynamic model of Elliot Saltzman. The gestural score graphs locations within the vocal tract where constriction can occur, indicating the planned or target degree of constriction. A computational model of speech production developed at Haskins Laboratories combines articulatory phonology, task dynamics, and the Haskins articulatory synthesis system developed by Philip Rubin and colleagues.
The intentional stance is a term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett for the level of abstraction in which we view the behavior of an entity in terms of mental properties. It is part of a theory of mental content proposed by Dennett, which provides the underpinnings of his later works on free will, consciousness, folk psychology, and evolution.
Dennett (1971, p. 87) states that he took the concept of "intentionality" from the work of the German philosopher Franz Brentano. When clarifying the distinction between mental phenomena (viz., mental activity) and physical phenomena, Brentano (p. 97) argued that, in contrast with physical phenomena, the "distinguishing characteristic of all mental phenomena" was "the reference to something as an object" – a characteristic he called "intentional inexistence". Dennett constantly speaks of the "aboutness" of "intentionality"; for example: "the aboutness of the pencil marks composing a shopping list is derived from the intentions of the person whose list it is" (Dennett, 1995, p. 240).
John Searle (1999, pp. 85) stresses that "competence" in predicting/explaining human behaviour involves being able to both recognize others as "intentional" beings, and interpret others' minds as having "intentional states" (e.g., beliefs and desires):
According to Dennett (1987, pp. 48–49), folk psychology provides a systematic, "reason-giving explanation" for a particular action, and an account of the historical origins of that action, based on deeply embedded assumptions about the agent; namely that:
This approach is also consistent with the earlier work of Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, whose joint study revealed that, when subjects were presented with an animated display of 2-dimensional shapes, they were inclined to ascribe intentions to the shapes.
Further, Dennett (1987, p. 52) argues that, based on our fixed personal views of what all humans ought to believe, desire and do, we predict (or explain) the beliefs, desires and actions of others "by calculating in a normative system"; and, driven by the reasonable assumption that all humans are rational beings – who do "have" specific beliefs and desires and do "act" on the basis of those beliefs and desires in order to get what they want – these predictions/explanations are based on four simple rules:
The core idea is that, when understanding, explaining, and/or predicting the behavior of an object, we can choose to view it at varying levels of abstraction. The more concrete the level, the more accurate "in principle" our predictions are; the more abstract, the greater the computational power we gain by zooming out and skipping over the irrelevant details.
Dennett defines three levels of abstraction, attained by adopting one of three entirely different "stances", or intellectual strategies: the physical stance; the design stance; and the intentional stance:
Even when there is no immediate error, a higher-level stance can simply fail to be useful. If we were to try to understand the thermostat at the level of the intentional stance, ascribing to it beliefs about how hot it is and a desire to keep the temperature just right, we would gain no traction over the problem as compared to staying at the design stance, but we would generate theoretical commitments that expose us to absurdities, such as the possibility of the thermostat not being in the mood to work today because the weather is so nice. Whether to take a particular stance, then, is determined by how successful that stance is when applied.
Dennett argues that it is best to understand human behavior at the level of the intentional stance, without making any specific commitments to any deeper reality of the artifacts of folk psychology. In addition to the controversy inherent in this, there is also some dispute about the extent to which Dennett is committing to realism about mental properties. Initially, Dennett's interpretation was seen as leaning more towards instrumentalism, but over the years, as this idea has been used to support more extensive theories of consciousness, it has been taken as being more like Realism. His own words hint at something in the middle, as he suggests that the self is as real as a center of gravity, "an abstract object, a theorist's fiction", but operationally valid.
As a way of thinking about things, Dennett's intentional stance is entirely consistent with everyday commonsense understanding; and, thus, it meets Eleanor Rosch's (1978, p. 28) criterion of the "maximum information with the least cognitive effort". Rosch argues that, implicit within any system of categorization, are the assumptions that:
Also, the intentional stance meets the criteria Dennett specified (1995, pp. 50–51) for algorithms:
The general notion of a three level system was widespread in the late 1970s/early 1980s; for example, when discussing the mental representation of information from a cognitive psychology perspective, Glass and his colleagues (1979, p. 24) distinguished three important aspects of representation:
Other significant cognitive scientists who also advocated a three level system were Allen Newell, Zenon Pylyshyn, and David Marr. The parallels between the four representations (each of which implicitly assumed that computers "and" human minds displayed each of the three distinct levels) are detailed in the following table:
The rationale behind the intentional stance is based on evolutionary theory, particularly the notion that the ability to make quick predictions of a system's behaviour based on what we think it might be thinking was an evolutionary adaptive advantage. The fact that our predictive powers are not perfect is a further result of the advantages sometimes accrued by acting contrary to expectations.
Robbins and Jack point to a 2003 study in which participants viewed animated geometric shapes in different "vignettes," some of which could be interpreted as constituting social interaction, while others suggested mechanical behavior. Viewing social interactions elicited activity in brain regions associated with identifying faces and biological objects (posterior temporal cortex), as well as emotion processing (right amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). Meanwhile, the mechanical interactions activated regions related to identifying objects like tools that can be manipulated (posterior temporal lobe). The authors suggest "that these findings reveal putative 'core systems' for social and mechanical understanding that are divisible into constituent parts or elements with distinct processing and storage capabilities."
Robbins and Jack argue for an additional stance beyond the three that Dennett outlined. They call it the "phenomenal stance": Attributing consciousness, emotions, and inner experience to a mind. The explanatory gap of the hard problem of consciousness illustrates this tendency of people to see phenomenal experience as different from physical processes. The authors suggest that psychopathy may represent a deficit in the phenomenal but not intentional stance, while people with autism appear to have intact moral sensibilities, just not mind-reading abilities. These examples suggest a double dissociation between the intentional and phenomenal stances.
In a follow-up paper, Robbins and Jack describe four experiments about how the intentional and phenomenal stances relate to feelings of moral concern. The first two experiments showed that talking about lobsters as strongly emotional led to a much greater sentiment that lobsters deserved welfare protections than did talking about lobsters as highly intelligent. The third and fourth studies found that perceiving an agent as vulnerable led to greater attributions of phenomenal experience. Also, people who scored higher on the empathetic-concern subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index had generally higher absolute attributions of mental experience.
Language deprivation experiments have been claimed to have been attempted at least four times through history, isolating infants from the normal use of spoken or signed language in an attempt to discover the fundamental character of human nature or the origin of language.
The American literary scholar Roger Shattuck called this kind of research study "The Forbidden Experiment" because of the exceptional deprivation of ordinary human contact it requires. Although not designed to study language, similar experiments on non-human primates (labelled the "Pit of despair") utilising complete social deprivation resulted in serious psychological disturbances.
Throughout history, several rulers have claimed to have carried out this kind of experiment:
An early record of a study of this kind can be found in Herodotus's "Histories". According to Herodotus (ca. 485 – 425 BE), the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I (664 – 610 BE, i.e. 200 years before Herodotus) carried out such a study, and concluded the Phrygian race must antedate the Egyptians since the child had first spoken something similar to the Phrygian word "bekos", meaning "bread". Recent researchers suggested this was likely a willful interpretation of their babbling.
A long time after Frederick II's alleged experiment, James IV of Scotland was said to have sent two children to be raised by a mute woman isolated on the island of Inchkeith, to determine if language was learned or innate. The children were reported to have spoken good Hebrew, but historians were sceptical of these claims soon after they were made.
Mughal emperor Akbar was later said to have children raised by mute wetnurses. Akbar held that speech arose from hearing; thus children raised without hearing human speech would become mute.
Critical authors have doubted the veracity of the accounts: probably neither Psamtik I nor James IV ever conducted any such studies, and probably neither did Frederick II. Only Akbar's study is most likely authentic, but offers an ambiguous outcome.
Structural priming is a form of positive priming, in that it induces a tendency to repeat or more easily process a current sentence that is similar in structure to a previously presented prime. It is a phenomenon studied in the field of psycholinguistics. J. Kathryn Bock introduced it in 1986. Several paradigms exist to elicit structural priming. Structural priming persists cross-linguistically. One specific form of structural priming is syntactic priming.
Bock introduced a picture description task to investigate this phenomenon. In the study phase, at their own pace, participants read a list of sentences and observe a set of pictures. All these pictures describe events including an agent, patient, and theme. Half of the agents pictured are humans and the other half inanimate objects. This phase of the experiment was performed in an attempt to establish a "recognition memory" cover story. In the test phase, participants are asked to read a sentence expressing one of four conditions:
After reading a sentence, the participant repeats it. Following this repetition, the participant describes the picture.
Consider a trial wherein the participant is reading a dative double-object construction, "George gave the boy the ball". The subject is then significantly more likely to describe the a picture as "X gave Y the Z" instead of "X gave the Z to Y". This persistence in sentential form is structural priming.
At least four theories exist to explain structural priming: syntactic repetition; thematic congruency, derivation of subjects, and error-based learning.
In the Bock study, the sentences presented match their primes in syntactic structure. This is trivially true for any type-type prime. However, other structural priming patterns exist that complicate this explanation.
A structure known as the unaccusative, which is unmarked morphologically in English, is capable of priming passive transitive sentences. The two constructions differ in syntax, but in both cases the subject takes a thematic, or at least non-agentive, thematic role.
Because the two constructions have this property in common, it has been suggested that such a thematic relational mapping is what allows structural priming.
A second possibility for describing the presence of unaccusative-passive priming is their shared characteristic of having a derived subject. For instance, the passive subject is said by some scholars of syntax to be derived via movement, or "smuggling," from the same position where it is generated in the active, to wit, the complement of the transitive verb. Though the derivation of the unaccusative does not seem to be an identical process, it is nevertheless assumed to be derived.
Another explanation is that syntactic priming is a form of implicit learning supported by a prediction error-based learning mechanism.
The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. It was first documented by Wolfgang Köhler in 1929 using nonsense words. The effect has been observed in American university students, Tamil speakers in India, young children, and infants, and has also been shown to occur with familiar names. It is absent in individuals who are congenitally blind and reduced in individuals with autism. The effect has recently been investigated using fMRI.
The bouba/kiki effect was first observed by German American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929. In psychological experiments first conducted on the island of Tenerife (where the primary language is Spanish), Köhler showed forms similar to those shown at the right and asked participants which shape was called "takete" and which was called "baluba" ("maluma" in the 1947 version). Although not explicitly stated, Köhler implies that there was a strong preference to pair the jagged shape with "takete" and the rounded shape with "baluba".
In 2001, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated Köhler's experiment using the words "kiki" and "bouba" and asked American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India "Which of these shapes is bouba and which is kiki?" In both groups, 95% to 98% selected the curvy shape as "bouba" and the jagged one as "kiki", suggesting that the human brain somehow attaches abstract meanings to the shapes and sounds in a consistent way.
The effect has also been shown to emerge when the words to be paired are existing first names, suggesting that some familiarity with the linguistic stimuli does not eliminate the effect. A study showed that individuals will pair names such as "Molly" with round silhouettes, and names such as "Kate" with sharp silhouettes. Moreover, individuals will associate different personality traits with either group of names ("e.g.", easygoingness with "round names"; determination with "sharp names"). This may hint at a role of abstract concepts in the effect.
Contexts where the effect is smaller or absent.
Other research suggests that this effect does not occur in all communities, and it appears that the effect breaks if the sounds do not make licit words in the language. The bouba/kiki effect seems to be dependent on a long sensitive period, with high visual capacities in childhood being necessary for its typical development. In contrast to typically sighted individuals, congenitally blind individuals have been reported not to show a systematic bouba/kiki effect for touched shapes. Autistic individuals do not show as strong a preference. Individuals without autism agree with the standard result 88% of the time, while individuals with autism agree only 56% of the time.
In 2019, researchers published the first study using fMRI to explore the bouba/kiki effect. They found that prefrontal activation is stronger to mismatching (bouba with spiky shape) than to matching (bouba with round shape) stimuli. Interestingly, they also found that sound–shape matching also influences activations in the auditory and visual cortices, suggesting an effect of matching at an early stage in sensory processing.
The experiment was reproduced in episode 3 of season 4 of the television show "Brain Games" with the names "takete" and "maluma." One participant expressed her association of takete and maluma with their respective shapes by comparing them to the rigid movement of a toy soldier and the swaying of the hula, respectively. A similar experiment included the association of the name "lomba" with a fictitious brand of milk chocolate and "kitiki" with a fictitious brand of dark chocolate.
Language production is the production of spoken or written language. In psycholinguistics, it describes all of the stages between having a concept to express and translating that concept into linguistic form. These stages have been described in two types of processing models: the lexical access models and the serial models. Through these models, psycholinguists can look into how speech is produced in different ways, such as when the speaker is bilingual. Psycholinguists learn more about these models and different kinds of speech by using language production research methods that include collecting speech errors and elicited production tasks.
The basic loop occurring in the creation of language consists of the following stages:
According to the lexical access model (see section below), in terms of lexical access, two different stages of cognition are employed; thus, this concept is known as the two-stage theory of lexical access. The first stage, lexical selection provides information about lexical items required to construct the functional level representation. These items are retrieved according to their specific semantic and syntactic properties, but phonological forms are not yet made available at this stage. The second stage, retrieval of wordforms, provides information required for building the positional level representation.
A serial model of language production divides the process into several stages. For example, there may be one stage for determining pronunciation and a stage for determining lexical content. The serial model does not allow overlap of these stages, so they may only be completed one at a time.
This model states that the sentence is made by a sequence of processes generating differing levels of representations. For instance, the functional level representation is made on the a preverbal representation, which is essentially what the speaker seeks to express. This level is responsible for encoding the meanings of lexical items and the way that grammar forms relationships between them. Next, the positional level representation is built, which functions to encode the phonological forms of words and the order they are found in sentence structures. Lexical access, according to this model, is a process that encompasses two serially ordered and independent stages.
Fluency can be defined in part by prosody, which is shown graphically by a smooth intonation contour, and by a number of other elements: control of speech rate, relative timing of stressed and unstressed syllables, changes in amplitude, changes in fundamental frequency. In other words, fluency can be described as whether someone speaks smoothly and easily. This term is used in speech-language pathology when describing disorders with stuttering or other disfluencies.
Whether or not a speaker is fluent in one or more languages, the process for producing language remains the same. However, bilinguals speaking two languages within a conversation may have access to both languages at the same time. Three of the most commonly discussed models for multilingual language access are the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus model, the Revised Hierarchical Model, and the Language Mode model:
Speakers fluent in multiple languages may inhibit access to one of their languages, but this suppression can only be done once the speaker is at a certain level of proficiency in that language. A speaker can decide to inhibit a language based on non-linguistic cues in their conversation, such as a speaker of both English and French inhibiting their French when conversing with people who only speak English. When especially proficient multilingual speakers communicate, they can participate in code-switching. Code-switching has been shown to indicate bilingual proficiency in a speaker, though it had previously been seen as a sign of poor language ability.
There are three main types of research into language production: speech error collection, picture-naming, and elicited production. Speech error collection focuses on using the analysis of speech errors made in naturally produced speech. On the other hand, elicited production focuses on elicited speech and is conducted in a lab. Also conducted in a lab, picture-naming focuses on reaction-time data from picture-naming latencies. Although originally disparate, these three methodologies are generally looking at the same underlying processes of speech production.
Speech errors have been found to be common in naturally produced speech. Analysis of speech errors has found that not all are random, but rather systematic and fall into several categories. These speech errors can demonstrate parts of the language processing system, and what happens when that system doesn't work as it should. Language production occurs quickly with speakers saying a little more than 2 words per second; so though errors occur only once out of 1,000 words, they occur relatively often throughout a speaker's day at once every 7 minutes. Some examples of these speech errors that would be collected by psycholinguists are:
Picture-naming tasks ask participants to look at pictures and name them in a certain way. By looking at the time course for the responses in these tasks, psycholinguists can learn more about the planning involved in specific phrases. These types of tasks can be helpful for investigating cross-linguistic language production and planning processes.
Elicited production tasks ask participants to respond to questions or prompts in a particular way. One of the more common types of elicited production tasks is the sentence completion task. These tasks give the participants the beginning of a target sentence, which the participants are then asked to complete. Analyzing these completions can allow psycholinguistics to investigate errors that might be difficult to elicit otherwise.
The psychology of reasoning is the study of how people reason, often broadly defined as the process of drawing conclusions to inform how people solve problems and make decisions. It overlaps with psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, logic, and probability theory.
Psychological experiments on how humans and other animals reason have been carried out for over 100 years. An enduring question is whether or not people have the capacity to be rational. Current research in this area addresses various questions about reasoning, rationality, judgments, intelligence, relationships between emotion and reasoning, and development.
One of the most obvious areas in which people employ reasoning is with sentences in everyday language. Most experimentation on deduction has been carried out on hypothetical thought, in particular, examining how people reason about conditionals, e.g., "If A then B". Participants in experiments make the modus ponens inference, given the indicative conditional "If A then B", and given the premise "A", they conclude "B". However, given the indicative conditional and the minor premise for the modus tollens inference, "not-B", about half of the participants in experiments conclude "not-A" and the remainder concludes that nothing follows.
Other investigations of propositional inference examine how people think about disjunctive alternatives, e.g., "A or else B", and how they reason about negation, e.g., "It is not the case that A and B". Many experiments have been carried out to examine how people make relational inferences, including comparisons, e.g., "A is better than B". Such investigations also concern spatial inferences, e.g. "A is in front of B" and temporal inferences, e.g. "A occurs before B". Other common tasks include categorical syllogisms, used to examine how people reason about quantifiers such as "All" or "Some", e.g., "Some of the A are not B".
There are several alternative theories of the cognitive processes that human reasoning is based on. One view is that people rely on a mental logic consisting of formal (abstract or syntactic) inference rules similar to those developed by logicians in the propositional calculus. Another view is that people rely on domain-specific or content-sensitive rules of inference. A third view is that people rely on mental models, that is, mental representations that correspond to imagined possibilities. A fourth view is that people compute probabilities.
One controversial theoretical issue is the identification of an appropriate competence model, or a standard against which to compare human reasoning. Initially classical logic was chosen as a competence model. Subsequently, some researchers opted for non-monotonic logic and Bayesian probability. Research on mental models and reasoning has led to the suggestion that people are rational in principle but err in practice. Connectionist approaches towards reasoning have also been proposed.
It is an active question in psychology how, why, and when the ability to reason develops in infants. Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development describes a sequence of stages in the development of reasoning from infancy to adulthood. According to the neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development, changes in reasoning with development come from increasing working memory capacity, increasing speed of processing, and enhanced executive functions and control. Increasing self-awareness is also an important factor.
In their book "The Enigma of Reason", the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber put forward an "argumentative" theory of reasoning, claiming that humans evolved to reason primarily to justify our beliefs and actions and to convince others in a social environment. Key evidence for their theory includes the errors in reasoning that solitary individuals are prone to when their arguments are not criticized, such as logical fallacies, and how groups become much better at performing cognitive reasoning tasks when they communicate with one another and can evaluate each other's arguments. Sperber and Mercier offer one attempt to resolve the apparent paradox that the confirmation bias is so strong despite the function of reasoning naively appearing to be to come to veridical conclusions about the world.
Inductive reasoning makes broad generalizations from specific cases or observations. In this process of reasoning, general assertions are made based on past specific pieces of evidence. This kind of reasoning allows the conclusion to be false even if the original statement is true. For example, if one observes a college athlete, one makes predictions and assumptions about other college athletes based on that one observation. Scientists use inductive reasoning to create theories and hypotheses.
The syllogism is a form of deductive reasoning in which two statements reach a logical conclusion. With this reasoning, one statement could be “Every A is B” and another could be “This C is A”. Those two statements could then lead to the conclusion that “This C is B”. These types of syllogisms are used to test deductive reasoning to ensure there is a valid hypothesis. A Syllogistic Reasoning Task was created from a study performed by Morsanyi, Kinga, Handley, and Simon that examined the intuitive contributions to reasoning. They used this test to assess why “syllogistic reasoning performance is based on an interplay between a conscious and effortful evaluation of logicality and an intuitive appreciation of the believability of the conclusions”.
Another form of reasoning is called abductive reasoning. This type is based on creating and testing hypotheses using the best information available. Abductive reasoning produces the kind of daily decision-making that works best with the information present, which often is incomplete. This could involve making educated guesses from observed unexplainable phenomena. This type of reasoning can be seen in the world when doctors make decisions about diagnoses from a set of results or when jurors use the relevant evidence to make decisions about a case.
Judgment and reasoning involve thinking through the options, making a judgment or conclusion and finally making a decision. Making judgments involves heuristics, or efficient strategies that usually lead you to the right answers. The most common heuristics used are attribute substitution, the availability heuristic, the representativeness heuristic and the anchoring heuristic – these all aid in quick reasoning and work in most situations. Heuristics allow for errors, a price paid to gain efficiency.
Other errors in judgment, therefore affecting reasoning, include errors in judgment about covariation – a relationship between two variables such that the presence and magnitude of one can predict the presence and magnitude of the other. One cause of covariation is confirmation bias, or the tendency to be more responsive to evidence that confirms your beliefs. But assessing covariation can be pulled off track by neglecting base-rate information – how frequently something occurs in general. However people often ignore base rates and tend to use other information presented.
There are more sophisticated judgment strategies that result in fewer errors. People often reason based on availability but sometimes they look for other, more accurate, information to make judgments. This suggests there are two ways of thinking, known as the Dual-Process Model. The first, System I, is fast, automatic and uses heuristics – more of intuition. The second, System II, is slower, effortful and more likely to be correct – more reasoning.
The inferences people draw are related to factors such as linguistic pragmatics and emotion.
Decision making is often influenced by the emotion of regret and by the presence of risk. When people are presented with options, they tend to select the one that they think they will regret the least. In decisions that involve a large amount of risk, people tend to ask themselves how much dread they would experience were a worst-case scenario to occur, e.g. a nuclear accident, and then use that dread as an indicator of the level of risk.
Antonio Damasio suggests that somatic markers, certain memories that can cause a strong bodily reaction, act as a way to guide decision making as well. For example, when you are remembering a scary movie and once again become tense and your palms might begin to sweat. Damasio argues that when making a decision we rely on our “gut feelings” to assess various options, and this makes us decide to go with a decision that is more positive and stay away from those that are negative. He also argues that the orbitofrontal cortex - located at the base of the frontal lobe, just above the eyes - is crucial in your use of somatic markers, because it is the part in the brain that allows you to interpret emotion.
Another note to make is that when emotion shapes decisions, the influence is usually based on predictions of the future. When people ask themselves how they would react, they are making inferences about the future. Researchers suggest affective forecasting, the ability to predict your own emotions, is poor because people tend to overestimate how much they will regret their errors.
Studying reasoning neuroscientifically involves determining the neural correlates of reasoning, often investigated using event-related potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging?
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language.
Psycholinguistics is concerned with the cognitive faculties and processes that are necessary to produce the grammatical constructions of language. It is also concerned with the perception of these constructions by a listener.
Initial forays into psycholinguistics were in the philosophical and educational fields, due mainly to their location in departments other than applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain functioned). Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science to study how the mind-brain processes language, and less so the known processes of social sciences, human development, communication theories, and infant development, among others.
There are several subdisciplines with non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain. For example: neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right; and developmental psycholinguistics, as a branch of psycholinguistics, concerns itself with a child's ability to learn language.
Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field that consists of researchers from a variety of different backgrounds, including psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, speech and language pathology, and discourse analysis. Psycholinguists study how people acquire and use language, according to the following main areas:
A researcher interested in language comprehension may study word recognition during reading, to examine the processes involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text. A researcher interested in language production might study how words are prepared to be spoken starting from the conceptual or semantic level (this concerns connotation, and possibly can be examined through the conceptual framework concerned with the semantic differential). Developmental psycholinguists study infants' and children's ability to learn and process language.
Psycholinguistics further divide their studies according to the different components that make up human language.
In seeking to understand the properties of language acquisition, psycholinguistics has roots in debates regarding innate versus acquired behaviors (both in biology and psychology). For some time, the concept of an innate trait was something that was not recognized in studying the psychology of the individual. However, with the redefinition of innateness as time progressed, behaviors considered innate could once again be analyzed as behaviors that interacted with the psychological aspect of an individual. After the diminished popularity of the behaviorist model, ethology reemerged as a leading train of thought within psychology, allowing the subject of language, an innate human behavior, to be examined once more within the scope of psychology.
The theoretical framework for psycholinguistics began to be developed before the end of the 19th century as the "Psychology of Language". The science of psycholinguistics, so called, began in 1936 when Jacob Kantor, a prominent psychologist at the time, used the term "psycholinguistic" as a description within his book "An Objective Psychology of Grammar".

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