COGNITION AND LANGUAGE

Summary

Thinking and Reasoning

There are known that only people have ability to analyze, recollect, plan and think. So thinking is the manipulation of mental representations of information. Thinking and reasoning are considered as a part of cognitive psychology. There are many closely related definitions: concepts and prototypes – they depends on culture and influence our behavior; an algorithm and a heuristic – they improve our decisions. When we have to solve a problem, we use syllogistic reasoning, which means we drive implications from a set of assumptions that we know to be true.

Problem Solving

Firstly, when we are confronted with difficulties, we must recognize a problem. There are three main kinds of problems: arrangement, transformation and problems inducing structure. To solve a problem, a person must do three steps: preparation, production of solutions, and evaluation of solution that have been generated. Now I can say that problem solving also depends on the way a problem is framed, mental set or functional fixedness. For different problems we have different methods to solve them: trial and error method – trying various solutions and learning from errors, means-ends analysis – repeated testing when each step brings you closer to a solution. There are many ways to solve your problem faster: be creative, which means to combine responses or ideas in novel ways; use analogies, heuristics, fractionation; think divergently; redefine problems or consider the oposite.

Language

Probably no one could communicate without language. As you know, language is the communication of information through symbols and rules for combining them. Our language develops since childhood. Firstly, children start with bubbling, then two-word combinations and finally, they start to talk like their adults. In addition, to have correct and rich language we need some rules: grammar – is the system of rules that determine how our thoughts can be expressed; syntax – ways in which words and phrases can be combined to form sentences and semantics – the rules governing the meaning of words and sentences. That is why phonology, syntax and semantics are the three major components of language. Nowadays we have a great ability to travel, so we must know at least two languages, which means to be bilingual speaker.