English psychology

• Grammar

  The system of rules that determine how our thoughts can be expressed. 
• babble

  Meaningless speechlike sounds made by children from around the age of 3 months through 1 year.
• cognitive psychology


  The branch of psychology that focuses on the study of higher mental processes, including thinking, language, memory, problem solving, knowing, reasoning, judging, and decision making.
• concepts

  Categorizations of objects, events, or people that share common properties.
• confirmation bias 


  The tendency to favor information that supports one's initial hypotheses and ignore contradictory information that supports alternative hypotheses or solutions.
• convergent thinking  


  The ability to produce responses that are based primarily on knowledge and logic.
• creativity 


  The ability to generate original ideas or solve problems in novel ways. 
• divergent thinking  

  The ability to generate unusual, yet nonetheless appropriate, responses to problems or questions. 
• functional fixedness  

  The tendency to think of an object only in terms of its typical use. 
• heuristic


  A cognitive shortcut that may lead to a solution
• insight

  A sudden awareness of the relationships among various elements that had previously appeared to be independent of one another.
• language-acquisition device  


  A neural system of the brain hypothesized by Noam Chomsky to permit understanding of language.
• language

  The communication of information through symbols arranged according to systematic rules.
• learning-theory approach to language development  


  The theory suggesting that language acquisition follows the principles of reinforcement and conditioning. 
•  

  linguistic-relativity hypothesis


  The notion that language shapes and may determine the way people in a particular culture perceive and understand the world. 
• means-ends analysis  


  Repeated testing for differences between the desired outcome and what currently exists. 
• mental images  


  Representations in the mind that resemble the object or event being represented.
• mental set  


  The tendency for old patterns of problem solving to persist. 
• overgeneralization


  The phenomenon by which children apply language rules even when the application results in an error.
• phonemes

  The smallest units of speech that affect meaning. 
• phonology

  The study of the smallest units of speech, called phonemes.
• prototypes


  Typical, highly representative samples of a concept. 
• semantics

  The rules governing the meaning of words and sentences.
• syllogistic reasoning 


  Formal reasoning in which a person draws a conclusion from a set of assumptions.
• syntax


  Ways in which words and phrases can be combined to form sentences. 
• telegraphic speech  


  Sentences in which words not critical to the message are left out. 
• thinking


  The manipulation of mental representations of information. 
• universal grammar  


  Noam Chomsky's theory that all the world's languages share a common underlying structure.