9 Cognition and Language · 9.1 Cognition and language
9.1.1 Concepts, thinking, reasoning and language
Thinking is the mental handling of information (images, concepts and words) to understand, reason, solve problems and decide; concepts are its building blocks, reasoning draws conclusions from them, and language, a rule-governed system of symbols, both carries and shapes thought.
- APPSC Paper I
- Standard level
- 16 min read
- Free
Core facts
- Cognition: all the mental processes of knowing: perceiving, remembering, thinking, reasoning, problem solving, using language.
- Thinking: a higher mental process; it works on representations (images, concepts, words), is goal-directed, relies on knowledge already possessed and is inferred from overt behaviour (we cannot see it directly).
- Building blocks of thought: mental images (picture-like representations of sensory experience), concepts (mental categories), and language / symbols (propositions: statements linking concepts).
- Concept: a mental category that groups objects, events, ideas or people sharing common features (e.g. "fruit", "democracy"). Concepts are the units of knowledge; once formed they are organised into categories and hierarchies and stored in long-term (semantic) memory.
- Concrete concepts are often coded as images; abstract concepts (justice, honesty) take a verbal, descriptive code.
- Kinds of concepts: artificial / formal (clearly defined by rules: a square, a triangle) vs natural (formed from everyday experience, with fuzzy boundaries: bird, game, furniture).
- By rule (Bruner, Goodnow and Austin, A Study of Thinking, 1956): conjunctive (must have all listed features: "a red square"), disjunctive (one feature or another: a "strike" in baseball is a missed swing or an unswung pitch in the zone or a foul hit before two strikes), relational (defined by a relation: "taller than", "brother").
- Prototype: the best, most typical example of a concept (robin or sparrow for "bird", not penguin). Prototype theory: Eleanor Rosch (1970s). Exemplar theory: we compare a new item with remembered examples.
- Levels of concepts (Rosch): superordinate (animal) → basic level (dog: learnt first and used most) → subordinate (Labrador).
- First experimental study of concept formation: Clark Hull, 1920 (Chinese characters sharing a common element).
- Bruner's strategies of concept attainment: focusing (conservative focusing, focus gambling) and scanning (simultaneous, successive).
- Reasoning: drawing conclusions from facts or premises.
- Deductive: general → particular; conclusion follows with certainty if the premises are true and the form is valid. Classic form: the syllogism (two premises + conclusion; Aristotle).
- Inductive: particular → general; conclusion is only probable (the method of science).
- Analogical: reasoning from a similarity between relations ("hand is to glove as foot is to sock").
- Piaget (Swiss): children build an internal representation of the world through their own thinking. Units: schema; processes: assimilation, accommodation, equilibration.
- Piaget's four stages: sensorimotor (0-2 years; object permanence), pre-operational (2-7; symbols, egocentrism, no conservation), concrete operational (7-11; conservation, reversibility, classification, seriation), formal operational (11+; abstract, hypothetico-deductive thinking).
- Bruner's modes of representation: enactive (action) → iconic (images) → symbolic (language).
- Vygotsky (Russian; Thought and Language, 1934): zone of proximal development (ZPD), help from a more knowledgeable other; private speech turns into inner speech. The word scaffolding was coined later by Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976).
- Language: a system of arbitrary symbols combined by rules to communicate meaning. Features: symbolic, rule-governed (structured), generative / productive (endless new sentences from finite words), displacement (we can talk of the past, the future, the absent).
- Units of language: phoneme (smallest unit of sound; English has about 40-45), morpheme (smallest unit of meaning; "unhappiness" = un + happy + ness), syntax (rules for ordering words into sentences), semantics (meaning), pragmatics (rules for use in social context).
- Stages of language development: crying (birth) → cooing (about 2 months, vowel-like sounds) → babbling (about 6 months, consonant-vowel strings "ba-ba") → one-word / holophrase stage (about 12 months; one word stands for a whole sentence) → two-word / telegraphic speech (about 18-24 months; "want milk", function words left out) → rapid growth of grammar (2-5 years).
- Overregularisation (overgeneralisation): "goed", "mouses": shows the child is applying rules, not just copying.
- B.F. Skinner (Verbal Behavior, 1957): language is learnt by imitation, reinforcement and shaping (a learning / behaviourist view).
- Noam Chomsky: children are born with a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) and a universal grammar; language is innate, a nativist view (Syntactic Structures, 1957; his critical review of Skinner, 1959). Deep structure (meaning) vs surface structure (the words said); transformational-generative grammar.
- Critical period hypothesis for language: Eric Lenneberg (1967): language is acquired most easily before puberty.
- Benjamin Lee Whorf (with Edward Sapir): linguistic relativity hypothesis: the language we speak shapes (strong form: determines) the way we think and perceive.
- Piaget: thought comes first; language reflects the level of thinking. Vygotsky: thought and language have separate roots and merge around age 2, after which language becomes a tool that shapes thought.
Explained
1. What thinking is, and what it is not. Thinking is a covert activity: a psychologist infers it from what a person says and does, from reaction times or from think-aloud reports. It is usually carried on in images or words, draws on what is already stored in memory, and is directed at a goal (understanding, deciding, solving). It ranges from autistic / associative thinking (daydreaming, free flow of ideas) to directed thinking (reasoning, problem solving). Concepts used in everyday thinking are often fuzzy, not sharply defined, which is why we argue about whether a tomato is a "vegetable".
2. How concepts are formed. A child meets several examples, notices the features they share (abstraction), separates them from irrelevant features (discrimination), and extends the label to new cases (generalisation). Early errors show the process: a child may call every four-legged animal "dog" (overextension) or only the family's own dog "dog" (underextension). Hull's 1920 experiment had people learn nonsense names for Chinese characters; they came to attach a name to the shared radical without being able to say what it was, showing that concepts can be formed without conscious rules.
3. Two views of how we hold natural concepts
| View | A concept is held as | Example | Strength |
|---|---|---|---|
| Defining features (classical) | a list of necessary features | triangle: 3 straight sides | fits artificial concepts |
| Prototype (Rosch) | a typical "best" member | sparrow for bird | explains typicality, fuzzy edges |
| Exemplar | many stored examples | all birds you have seen | explains variety within a category |
4. Reasoning compared
| Point | Deductive | Inductive |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | general → specific | specific → general |
| Conclusion | certain, if premises true and form valid | probable, can be overturned |
| Example | All men are mortal; Ram is a man; so Ram is mortal | Every crow I have seen is black; so all crows are black |
| Used in | logic, mathematics | science, everyday generalising |
A deductive argument can be valid but untrue (valid form, false premise). Common errors: belief bias (accepting a conclusion because we believe it, not because it follows), confirmation bias (looking only for supporting evidence), atmosphere effect (a negative or "some" premise pulling us toward a similar conclusion).
5. Development of thinking (Piaget in brief). In the sensorimotor stage the infant knows the world through senses and actions; object permanence develops in the second half of the first year, and by about 18-24 months the child begins mental representation (deferred imitation, pretend play). The pre-operational child uses symbols and language but is egocentric, shows animism and centration, and fails conservation tasks. The concrete operational child conserves and classifies but needs concrete objects. The formal operational adolescent can reason about hypotheses and abstractions ("what if"). (Detailed development is in the development unit.)
6. How language develops. Before speech, infants perceive all the speech sounds of the world's languages; by about 10-12 months they lose sensitivity to sounds their own language does not use. Babbling at first contains sounds of many languages and narrows to those of the home language. Comprehension runs ahead of production: a child understands many words before saying the first. After the vocabulary spurt (around 18 months) words are added very fast; telegraphic two-word sentences already follow the word order of the language. By about 5 the child has most of the basic grammar.
7. Skinner vs Chomsky
| Point | Skinner (learning) | Chomsky (nativist) |
|---|---|---|
| Source | environment | inborn capacity (LAD) |
| Mechanism | imitation, reinforcement, shaping | universal grammar set by the language heard |
| Explains well | accent, vocabulary, local words | speed, same stages everywhere, novel sentences, "goed" |
| Weakness | children say what they never heard; parents correct truth more than grammar | LAD is not directly observable; little role for social input |
Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus argument: the speech a child hears is too limited and error-filled to explain the grammar the child ends up with. Interactionists (Bruner's LASS, Language Acquisition Support System; Vygotsky) accept an inborn readiness but stress talk with caregivers ("motherese" / child-directed speech). Support for a critical period: children deprived of language until late (the case of "Genie", found in 1970) never fully mastered grammar.
8. Language and thought: three positions
| Position | Thinker | Claim |
|---|---|---|
| Language determines / shapes thought | Whorf (Sapir-Whorf) | speakers of different languages think differently |
| Thought comes first | Piaget | language reflects thinking already achieved |
| Separate roots, then interaction | Vygotsky | language becomes a tool of thought after about age 2 |
Evidence: the strong Whorfian claim (thought impossible without the word) is not supported; Eleanor Rosch (then Heider) found that the Dani of New Guinea, with only two colour words, still remembered focal colours well. The weak form, that language influences attention, memory and categories, has support.
Common traps
- ✗ "Concepts used in thinking are clear and unambiguous." ✓ Natural concepts are often fuzzy; only artificial (formal) concepts have sharp definitions.
- ✗ "The concept is the basic unit of knowledge in short-term memory." ✓ Concepts are units of knowledge held in long-term (semantic) memory.
- ✗ "Thinking can be observed directly." ✓ It is inferred from overt behaviour.
- ✗ "A prototype is the first example a child learns." ✓ A prototype is the most typical example of a concept.
- ✗ "Inductive reasoning gives a certain conclusion." ✓ Deductive can give certainty; inductive gives only probability.
- ✗ "Phoneme = smallest unit of meaning." ✓ Phoneme = smallest unit of sound; morpheme = smallest unit of meaning.
- ✗ "Syntax deals with meaning." ✓ Syntax = word order and sentence rules; meaning = semantics; social use = pragmatics.
- ✗ "Babbling comes before cooing." ✓ Cooing (~2 months) → babbling (~6 months) → first word (~12 months).
- ✗ "Universal grammar / LAD: Skinner or Piaget." ✓ Chomsky. Skinner = reinforcement and imitation (Verbal Behavior, 1957).
- ✗ "Internal representation of the world through thinking: Vygotsky." ✓ Piaget; Vygotsky stressed social interaction, ZPD and inner speech.
- ✗ "Linguistic relativity: Chomsky." ✓ Whorf (with Sapir).
- ✗ "Vygotsky coined 'scaffolding'." ✓ Scaffolding was coined by Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976), building on Vygotsky's ZPD.
Quick revision
- Thinking: higher mental process, goal-directed, uses images, concepts, words; inferred from behaviour.
- Concept = mental category; units of knowledge in long-term memory; abstract concepts take a verbal code.
- Natural (fuzzy) vs artificial (defined); conjunctive, disjunctive, relational (Bruner 1956); Hull 1920.
- Prototype = most typical example (Rosch); basic level learnt first.
- Deductive (general → particular, certain; syllogism) vs inductive (particular → general, probable).
- Piaget: schema, assimilation, accommodation; sensorimotor 0-2, pre-op 2-7, concrete 7-11, formal 11+.
- Vygotsky: ZPD, private → inner speech; scaffolding = Wood, Bruner, Ross 1976. Bruner: enactive, iconic, symbolic.
- Phoneme (sound), morpheme (meaning), syntax (order), semantics (meaning), pragmatics (use).
- Cooing 2 m → babbling 6 m → holophrase 12 m → telegraphic 18-24 m; "goed" = overregularisation.
- Skinner (reinforcement) vs Chomsky (LAD, universal grammar, deep/surface structure); Lenneberg critical period; Whorf linguistic relativity.
Go deeper: Deeper (beyond what APPSC Paper I usually asks)
Deeper Advanced
1. Thinking as information processing. Cognitive psychology (Ulric Neisser, Cognitive Psychology, 1967) treats thinking like a computer handling symbols: input, encoding, storage, retrieval, output. Propositions (the smallest units of knowledge that can be true or false, such as "the dog bit the man") link concepts; schemas and scripts (a script is a schema for an event, like eating at a restaurant) organise them.
2. Language structure in more depth. Phonemes combine into morphemes; morphemes can be free (stand alone: "book") or bound ("-s", "un-"). Chomsky's transformational grammar explains why "The boy hit the ball" and "The ball was hit by the boy" share a deep structure, and why "Visiting relatives can be boring" has one surface structure with two deep structures (ambiguity).
3. Biological basis. Broca's area (left frontal lobe) is linked to speech production; damage gives slow, effortful, telegraphic speech (Broca's / expressive aphasia). Wernicke's area (left temporal lobe) is linked to comprehension; damage gives fluent but meaningless speech (Wernicke's / receptive aphasia). In most right-handed people language is mainly a left-hemisphere function.
4. Bilingualism. Learning two languages from childhood (simultaneous) or one after another (sequential). Additive bilingualism (the second language adds to a valued first language) helps cognitive flexibility; subtractive bilingualism (the first language is lost) can harm. Relevant to Indian classrooms with a home language and a school language.
Practise this topic. Questions on Concepts, thinking, reasoning and language, with answers explained.
All Cognition and language notes · APPSC Paper I syllabus · APPSC Paper I Mock 1 with answers · Start free
Medha AI writes its own notes and checks them against the sources listed. Medha AI is an independent preparation service. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to APPSC, TSPSC, MPSC, UPSC or any other commission or government body.