Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Reasoning Principles

Posted on Apr 21, 2026 in English Studies. Language, Literature, and Culture

Language Fundamentals

• Morpheme: Smallest unit of meaning in language (e.g., “cat,” “un-“).
• Phonemes: Smallest sound units that change meaning (e.g., /p/ vs /b/).
• Semantic content: The meaning of each word.
• Prescriptive rules of grammar: Rules regarding how language should be used.
• Generativity: The ability to produce and understand unlimited new sentences from finite rules and words.
• Phrase-structure: Rules that specify how phrases and sentences are built.
• Categorical perception: Variations in a sound are perceived as a single category.
• Pragmatics: The assumptions and shared knowledge that govern how language is used.
• Phrases: Made up of multiple morphemes.
• Place of articulation: The physical position of speech organs (e.g., “p” is pronounced further forward than “t”).
• Phrase-structure rules: Explain how words are arranged into correct sentences.
• Language and thought: Language does not determine thought, but it influences attention and memory.
• Garden-path sentence: A sentence that initially leads to an incorrect interpretation.
• Prosody: Rhythm, stress, intonation, and pitch.
• Spreading activation: The activation of one word in our lexicon spreads to related words.
• Speech segmentation: Finding word boundaries in continuous speech.
• Children’s overregularization: When children apply a regular grammar rule to an irregular form.
• Extralinguistic cues: Factors outside of language (prosody, syntax, and morphology are linguistic, not extralinguistic).

Reasoning and Decision Making

• Utility theory: Assumes a formulaic calculation of the value of decisions.
• Illusory covariation: Often exacerbated by biased evidence seeking (confirmation bias).
• Orbitofrontal cortex damage: Patients are unable to anticipate outcomes.
• Utility calculations: Should be based on the calculated value of a future event, not how choices are framed.
• Deduction: Starting with a set of claims and determining what follows from them.
• Syllogism bias: People often reject valid conclusions if they dislike the outcome.
• Representativeness heuristic: A mental shortcut estimating probability by comparing an event to a prototype.
• Disconfirming evidence: People tend to disregard evidence that contradicts their beliefs.
• Category heterogeneity: People require more examples to draw conclusions about diverse categories (e.g., birds) than uniform ones (e.g., elements).
• Dual Process Theory:
  • Type 1 thinking: Fast, automatic, intuitive (heuristics).
  • Type 2 thinking: Slow, deliberate, analytical (effortful reasoning).
• Conditional reasoning: Errors are less common when problems are concrete rather than abstract.
• Affective forecasting: Perceived future dread is often larger than the actual feeling experienced later.
• Framing effects: Choices change depending on gain/loss wording even when outcomes are equivalent.
• Base rate: Overall probability/frequency in a population.
• Availability heuristic: Judgments are influenced by the ease of recalling examples.
• Kahneman and Tversky (1973): Demonstrated that heuristics cause systematic judgment biases.

Reading and Cognitive Models

• Meyer & Schvaneveldt (1971): Semantic priming: People recognize words faster when preceded by a related word.
• Dual Route Models of Reading:
  • Lexical route: Whole-word memory (effective for irregular words like “yacht”).
  • Sublexical route: Letter-to-sound rules (effective for new words like “blap”).
• Phonological Mediation Hypothesis: Meaning is accessed via speech sounds (phonology).
• Van Orden (1987): Evidence for phonological mediation via homophone errors (e.g., treating “ROSE” like “ROWS”).
• Reasoning Frameworks:
  • Natural logic: Abstract rules for building inferences.
  • Semantic memory-cueing: Drawing on previous experiences to form judgments.
  • Pragmatic reasoning schemas: Generalized rules defined by goals to predict outcomes.