Quizlet Psychology Ch. 10: Thinking and Language

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  1. algorithm: a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem
  2. availibility heuristic: estimating the likelihood of events based on their availibility in memory
  3. babbling stage: beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds
  4. belief bias: tendency for one's preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning
  5. belief perseverance: clinging to one's initial conceptions after the bias on which they were formed has been discredited
  6. cognition: mental activites associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating
  7. concept: mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people
  8. confirmation bias: tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions
  9. fixation: inability to see a problem from a new perspective
  10. framing: the way an issue is posed
  11. functional fixedness: tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions
  12. grammar: in a language, a system of rules tha enable us to communicate with and understand others
  13. heuristic: simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier and more error-prone
  14. insight: suddent and often novel realization of the solution to a problem
  15. language: our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning
  16. linguistic determinism: Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think
  17. mental set: tendency to approach a problem in a particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past
  18. morpheme: in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; like a prefix
  19. one-word stage: stage in speech development, from age 1 to 2, during which a child mostly speaks single words
  20. overconfidence: tendency to be more confident than correct- to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs and judgments
  21. phoneme: in a language, the smallest distinctive unit
  22. prototype: mental image or best example of a category
  23. representativeness heuristic: judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes
  24. semantics: set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language
  25. syntax: rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language
  26. telegraphic speech: early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram "go car"
  27. two-word stage: beginning at 2, stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two-word statements