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Because the first few sounds are easy to make, there are words and
sounds that are common in a cross-cultural sense, such as “mama” and “pappa.” However, what
is the process once babies do begin to speak?
Overextensions
When learning to speak formally, children are limited by vocabulary size, so they generalize one
concept to include many others. For example, if a child had learned to say “banana”, she may refer
to all fruit, generically, as “banana”, at least for a short time. “Ball” is another frequently
generalized word, and is often applied to anything that is round. This process exemplifies the
child’s use of one concept to include others beyond its original meaning.
Holophrases
Holophrases are single-word utterances that represent the meanings of several words. This is due
to the child’s lack of ability to form more complex word patterns at an early age. “Car” is an
example of a holophrase. Many children simply say, “car” to indicate that they want to ride in a car
or to tell a parent to look at a car. Before syntax, children express themselves by naming the most
critical aspects of a thought process.
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Telegraphic Speech
Telegraphic Speech uses content words and leaves out prepositions, articles, and anything else that
is not critical to expression of the thought. At this time, you get comments such as, “car fast.” As the
child’s vocabulary expands, sentences increase in length and their specific meaning becomes easier
to discern.
Metalinguistic Awareness
Metalinguistic Awareness is the ability to think about using language. Sentences get longer, more
complex, and you see the emergence of puns and jokes, such as play-on-word games, begin to
appear in the vocabulary of the school-aged child.
Language Acquisition Theories
For most of its history, psychology has expressed little interest in language. Once it did express
interest in language, however, a number of theories followed in quick succession.
Learning Theories
B. F. Skinner proposed that children learn language by imitation and reinforcement. This idea
would hold that children learn to speak by imitating older children and adults. Specifically,
Skinner proposed that children learn by association of words within sentences, with each word
being a stimulus for the one following it.
Nativist Theories
This perspective was proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s and 60s as a rebuttal to Skinner’s
theory, a theory Chomsky regarded as flawed. Chomsky felt that the flaw was in the association of
ideas, stating that if that was a valid premise, the same stimulus word would always lead to the
same response. He proposed that humans are born with a “native” ability to learn language, that
we have a built-in or hardwired capability for language acquisition. Part of Chomsky’s logic for his
theory is that the language acquisition process is the same, cross-culturally. No matter where you
are or what language you learn to speak, the process is the same. He felt that as children learn to
speak, they mastered two basic sets of rules about language and its use. These are:
. Phrase–structure rules that tell us how to combine words and phrases into sentences
. Transformational rules that tell us how to make questions, negations, and other sentences
from declarative statements.
Cognitive Theories posit that language and thought are intermixed, throughout the cognitive
developmental process, and that language is reflective of the changing thought of the child, as he or
she matures. This implies that in order to understand a child’s progress through the process of
language development, you must first understand the course of a child’s cognitive developmental
process. This construct was advocated by Piaget, in his position that language development is
dependent on cognitive development. Central to the cognitive theories of language acquisition are
the premises that:
. Humans are born with limited capacity for information processing
. Language acquisition places high demand on that capacity
. Children learn and acquire language by listening, associating, attending, and remembering
word orders and meanings of words in conversations
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FUNCTIONAL FIXEDNESS
An example you might use is the “two-strings” problem. In this problem, a person is placed in a
room. There are two strings hanging from the ceiling. The strings are far enough apart that you
cannot hold onto one string and reach the other one while it is hanging straight down. Even if you
grab one string and pull it toward the other string as far as you can, the other string is just barely
out of reach. In the corner of the room is a table with a screwdriver on it. Your task is to hold onto
both strings at the same time. To solve the problem, you must recognize that the screwdriver can be
tied to the bottom of the other string and used as a pendulum weight. Then you can swing that
string back and forth. While it is swinging, you can now grab the other string, pull it toward the
swinging string and grab it when it swings toward you. Functional fixedness often prevents people
from seeing how to properly use the screwdriver. (Note: Some problems are much easier to solve if
you can visually represent the problem. This is one of those problems. Students tend to have a much
easier time of it if they can see the situations represented in a drawing or photograph.)
BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILES
Wolfgang K.hler (1887–1967)
K.hler was born in Estonia, grew up in northern Germany, and received his formal education at the
University of Berlin, obtaining his doctorate in 1909. K.hler trained under both Carl Stumpf and the
eminent physicist, Max Planck. While a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Frankfurt,
K.hler served as a research participant for Max Wertheimer in studies of the phi illusion. This
experience stimulated K.hler’s interest in such perceptual phenomena. With Werthiemer and
another Frankfurt colleague, Kurt Koffka, he sparked the Gestalt movement in psychology. While
stationed on Tenerife Island in the Canaries during World War I, K.hler conducted a classic
program of research on insight learning in apes. In 1925, The Mentality of Apes was published and
became a monumental contribution to Gestalt literature. In response to growing Nazism in Europe,
K.hler immigrated to the United States, assuming a position at Swarthmore College in 1935. During
his American tenure, K.hler received many awards and citations from scientific associations,
including presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1959.
Herbert Simon (b. 1916)
Herbert Simon is a modern Renaissance man. He is a creative and influential economist,
psychologist, political scientist, sociologist, computer scientist, and philosopher. Simon is best
known as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978. Simon departed from then classic
economic theory by describing how modern businesses, in an increasingly complex world that
contains more relevant information than they can use, reach decisions that do not maximize profits
but merely seek to reach satisfactory goals.
Simon has been a member of Carnegie-Mellon University’s psychology department since 1949. He
is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books on problem solving, models of thought,
discovery, organizations, public administration, and automation. Simon’s father, an electrical
engineer, and mother, an accomplished pianist, taught him that curiosity is the beginning of all
science and is to be encouraged in all areas. If there was a question or phenomenon the Simons
failed to understand, they immediately set out to find the answers and reasons.
Simon applied the same rigorous methodology to his college major, political science, and to other
social science pursuits employed in the “hard” sciences. As a result, his insight was demonstrated
to a variety of college participants, and led to his receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago
in 1943 despite his being involved in numerous academic and work projects.
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His major professional life divides into two periods. In the first, from 1947 to 1958, he focused on
decisions, particularly in organizations. This is Simon’s work that is best known in economics,
political science, and sociology. Since 1958, Simon’s major interest shifted to human problem
solving and artificial intelligence. Much of his work, done in collaboration with Allen Newell, is
best known in psychology and computer science. Simon demonstrated how psychological
phenomena such as intelligent decision making could be simulated by modem high-speed
computers. These mechanical information processors could be programmed to play a winning
game of chess or to produce their own programs to solve a problem.
One of the programs he developed, now known as the General Problem Solver (GPS), involves a
strategy that many expert human problem solvers use. Called subgoal analysis, this strategy
involves two processes that follow each other in repeated cycles. The first is to determine
appropriate subgoals and select a promising one for further exploration. An example of a subgoal
in this course is to earn a desirable midterm grade. The second GPS process is to identify any
difference between a subgoal and the current situation and then eliminate or reduce this difference.
If you are not currently headed toward the grade you want, your computer—mental or
mechanical—runs through strategies for changing conditions to achieve that subgoal. If the initial
subgoal cannot be achieved, the cycle continues with different, perhaps initially smaller, subgoals.
Setting subgoals and reducing discrepancies is the heuristic by which GPS approximates the
systematic progress of efficient human problem solving.
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TIMELINE
Year Event
1925 Wolfgang K.hler published The Mentality of Apes, documenting his studies of
insight learning principles.
19391945
World War II was fought.
1945 Karl Duncker published On Problem Solving, a summary of his research and
thinking on problem solving and impediments to effective problem solving.
19501953
The Korean War was fought.
1956 Allen Newell and Herbert Simon published The Logic Theory Machine: A Complex
Information, Processing System.
1959 Donald Broadbent published Perception and Communication, outlining a new and
important theory of attention.
1963 John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
1972 J. Bransford and J. Franks published the results of an experiment showing that
people use schemas in recalling information.
1972 Allen Newell and Herbert Simon published Human Problem Solving, summarizing
the cognitive model of problem solving in humans.
1973 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman published “On the Psychology of
Prediction”, a paper outlining the means by which people make decisions and
describing some of the notable errors in decision making.
1973 W. Chase and Herbert Simon published The Mind’s Eye in Chess, stimulating
interest in understanding expert systems.
1974 The Vietnam War ended.
1976 U. Neisser published Cognition and Reality, one of the earlier texts to set forth
clearly the principles of cognitive psychology.
1978 E. Rosch published Principles of Categorization, a summary of her work on concept
formation showing that people base some forms of psychological inferences on
naturally occurring concepts.
1980 Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States of America.
1982 R. Shepherd and L. Cooper published Mental Images and Their Transformations, a
summary of the kinds of mental manipulations involved in imagining.
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SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READINGS
Clark, H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suggests that language is
a joint action carried out by two or more people acting in concert with each other. Clark sets
language in a social context and argues that language is more than just the sum of a speaker and
a separate listener.
Gabrieti, J. D. E. (1998). Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Memory. Annual Review of Psychology, 49,
87–115. Summarizes current knowledge on long-term memory processes and discusses memory
in terms of neural networks that support specific mnemonic processes. Research from
neurophysiological studies is used to explain the memory functioning in normal individuals
and in individuals with several forms of memory impairment.
Gazzaniga, M. (1995). The Cognitive Neurosciences. Cambridge: MIT Press. An important work that
helps define the rapidly emerging field of cognitive neuroscience. Contains the views and ideas
of many leaders in the field.
Kosslyn, S. M., & Koenig, O. (1992). Chapter 2: Computation in the Brain. In Wet Mind: The New
Cognitive Neuroscience, pp. 17–51. A wonderful volume that marries the fields of cognitive and
neuropsychology in a concise and readable format.
McLeod, P., Plunkett, K., & Rolls, E. (1998). Introduction to Connectionist Modeling of Cognitive
Processes. New York: Oxford University Press. Introduces students to the connectionist model of
cognitive processes. Provides custom software, “Learn,” that allows students to create their own
models. (“Learn” runs on both PC and Mac systems.)
McNeil, D. (1987). Psycholinguistics: A New Approach. New York: Harper & Row. A short but
complete look at the relationship between linguistics and psychology. Extended coverage of
linguistic relativity as well as gesture and sign language.
Posner, M. (1989). Foundations of Cognitive Science. Cambridge: MIT Press. A thorough reference on
the field of cognitive science, with contributions from leading researchers.
Premack, D. (1986). Gavagai!