PSYC 100B Final Exam Notes (content from weeks 12-24) Week 12: Language Language can be defined as socially agreed upon, governed, system of symbolizes to communicate feelings about present times place etc. Primary use of language is interpersonal. To carry a conversation, people need to keep track of a common ground to keep conversation going. Information continues to add to common grounds at times. Common ground helps people coordinate their language use. audience design: speakers design their utterances for their audiences by taking into account the audiences' knowledge. Ex you could say my friend is getting married as the friend is close and is curious. no more than 4 people engaged in a convo at a time. We achieve conversational coordination by virtue of our ability to interactively align each other's actions at different levels of language use: lexicon (words and expressions). When someone uses a certain expression to refer to an object in a conversation, others tend to use the same expression. Ex: if someone says "the cowboy offered a banana to the robber," rather than "the cowboy offered the robber a banana," others are more likely to use the same syntactic structure (e.g., "the girl gave a book to the boy" rather than "the girl gave the boy a book") even if different words are involved. Also, when u hear an accent, you may want to use that accent or speak it to them. these interpersonal alignments at different levels of language use can activate similar situation models in the minds of those who are engaged in a conversation. Situation models are representations about the topic of a conversation. So, if you are talking about Gary and Mary with your friends, you might have a situation model of Gary giving Mary a ring in your mind. similar situation models begin to be built in everyone's mind through the mechanism known as priming. Priming occurs when your thinking about one concept (e.g., "ring") reminds you about other related concepts (e.g., "marriage", "wedding ceremony"). What Do We Talk About? a staggering 60%-70% of everyday conversation, for both men and women, turned out to be gossip-people talk about themselves and others whom they know. Just like Adam and Ben, more often than not, people use language to communicate about their social world. some have argued that gossip-activities to think and communicate about our social world-is one of the most critical uses to which language has been put. Gossip is like grooming to monkeys fur. Its more of an act of socialization. humans can communicate and share their representations about their social world. making more friends and enlarging one's own group (often called the ingroup, the group to which one
belongs) against other groups (outgroups) that are more likely to be one's enemies. these social effects that have given humans an evolutionary advantage and larger brains, which, in turn, help humans to think more complex and abstract thoughts. Social brain hypothesis: The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans