This idea for an edited textbook, The Psychology ofHuman Thought: An Introduction, is motivated byour view that much of the “action” in psychologicalscience today involves the study of human thought(as witnessed by the success of books such as DanielKahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011, and ofSteven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, 2007, bothof which became best sellers). The excitement ofthe field notwithstanding, we were able to find onlytwo textbooks on the topic of human thought (Manktelow, 2012; Minda, 2015). Yet, a course on “Thinking” (or any of its related course names) is one ofthe most exciting in psychology. Such a course,taught at the undergraduate level by the late Professor Alexander Wearing, was part of what motivatedRJS to enter the field of complex cognition. Because of the scarcity of recent textbooks coveringthe broad range of this field, it seemed timely topresent a new one edited and authored by experts inthe field of human thought.
Reber concluded that participants had learned about correct and incorrect sequences in an implicit way: they could not explicitly give reasons for their grammaticality judgements but showed with their above-random decisions that they had learned the rules of transitions.
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The Leipzig-based anthropologist Michael Tomasello developed another idea concerning language acquisition. He argues for a Usage-Based Theory (UBT; Tomasello, 2003) without innate grammar detection. Instead, more general cognitive modules come into play. Children use their innate faculty to categorize, to use analogies, and to understand action intentions. Through listening in social interactions, within a context of joint attention where the child and adult(s) coordinate their attention toward each other and toward a third object, children extract grammatical categories and rules. They rst produce simple constructions (e.g., There is x, I x this) which they apply by analogy to new situations. Further on in the acquisition process they then combine the constructions to more complex utterances (There is the X that mummy Yed). The UBT offers a challenging alternative to the idea of innate grammar learning.
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There have been a lot of experiments to train chimpanzees. The most prominent case of alleged language acquisition in chimpanzees is reported by Gardner and Gardner (1969). They trained an infant female chimpanzee named "Washoe" to use the gestural language of the deaf, American Sign Language (ASL). After 22 months of training, Washoe could use 30 signs appropriately and spontaneously. Transfer to new referents as well as combinations and recombinations of signs have been observed. From other studies it is known that nonhuman primates can indeed learn to manipulate symbols to gain certain rewards (Snowdon, 1990). But in the end, there not only remains a quantitative difference between chimps and humans but also qualitative differences. An example is the level of meta-language (i.e., speaking about speaking) or gurative language including the understanding of irony which have not been found in animals at all.
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Typically developing individuals acquire a language by passing through a sequence of stages. In a rough sketch, it starts with the rst sounds, followed by babbling, then the rst words (milk), then a two-word stage (sit chair) up to full use of language. Acquisition of syntactic rules and a growing size of vocabulary is part of this sequence. An important fact is that there are sensitive periods for the different stages. An interesting question concerns the ability of primates such as chimpanzees to learn a language. 11.2 Biand Multilingualism Is there a price to pay if a child grows up, for example, with parents who speak two different languages, or if a child grows up in Germany (learning German as their rst language, L1) and then, say at the age of 3, moves to the US to learn English as a second language, L2? The case of bilingualism (two languages) or multilingualism (more than two Psychology of Human Thought Chapter 11 201
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